Well, why not...?

50,000 words to go...

Let's just see how it goes, eh? This NaNoWriMo event is typically American, but that need not be an altogether bad thing. Most bloggers are American too and, as I've come to learn, they're not all depraved bastards hellbent on killing Muslims or blowing the world to Kingdom Come.

Well, AKMA isn't anyway. He'd like to lead them there. I'm not sure about the rest of you blood-soaked, gas-guzzling vultures, but I'm comfortable with uncertainty and take you all at your word.

This is beside the point... The point is this damned NaNoWriMo. I've signed up for it. It's not the novel thing, you know? It's the word thing. I've not written much over the past couple of years and need to get some flow going. So, as I ask myself above, why not? I've blogged long and short, tried the 100 words a day thing for a couple of months and, around three years ago, was driven to writing about 15,000 words in a few days for the Crazed Colonel.

Mmm... We had a hell of a party afterwards. Gretchen was there...

I've no idea what to write about, but I do have a couple of hours in which to come up with something. In fact, I've about a month. The book is entitled Father Christopher and the Temple of Time. I don't see it changing. It's a workable title and I'm sure we can flesh it out with the requisite word count. I would like it to be something worth reading but that, I think—and given the subject, is expecting a bit much.

Doesn't matter anyway. Somebody will publish it.

Besides, we'll always have Leslie's novel novel. I'm reading that. It's some of the best stuff I've read in yonks. I really can't make head or tail of this "I've had five kids" girl (well, yeah, I dunno) but, hell, I really get off on the way she writes. This, after feeding three starving Armenians...

Spent a little time this morning roaming the world wide web information highway. In sort of an indignation scavenger hunt mood. Nothing new here. Beats happiness apparently. Been spending copious time on Shill For Microsoft blogs. These asslickers surely have no shame whatsoever ass up offering at the BillyGoatsee shrine. Did you know my IQ is 158 and shit I shit you not. My middleclass index. I’ve been reading the transcripts of keynote speakers at certain blogging conferences. What a bunch of trite shit tripe. These Our Experts. God Help Us. These Our Search Chimps pounding for hours on the keyboards on the pavement of The MicroSoftCampus.

And so on and so forth... One day, maybe, who knows baby... but, no, I cannot say these things. I shall remain forever a gentleman, a serving officer in the army of Madame Levy.

Ah, fuck it, time to go... the Microsoft novelists are calling...

All Suck, All The Time

The flickering witness of the film is to not try to state this in so many words, other than via Murrow's famous speech. Instead, it makes a filmic allegory of television by offering us a vision of human faces, an anatomy of old, squat, dumb, feckless, neutral, indefinable, normal, indefinably uninteresting visages - a semiotician's dream of the now-only-other of television (and movie) faces. It opens with these faces, before you even know the film is there, it broods, lingers on face after face, 50's faces, poorly lit, blotchy, strangely unlike the faces the camera - any camera known to us - is supposed to be worshipping. Faces of the uncool, parents, teachers, functionaries who are now mostly dead. The hopelessly rebarbative generation in dull wardrobes before things got interesting, before color, before Kerouac, before Bobby Darin, before.

Before we get to what went wrong, where, how, why, with television, we get to see what people looked like before television made them look like Liberaces who, having flunked piano, turned to making a living and chattering...

Coupla years ago, Tom Matrullo reviewed a Dylan concert in around 150 words. I felt as though I'd been there. Last weekend, awaiting Wilma's arrival, he sat down to Good Night, Good Luck. The resulting 750-or-so words are way too good to miss. So, apparently, is the film.

Are Women Necessary?

New York Times all-round foxy chick and op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd's latest is garnering more attention for its cover than its content.

Pity. She's not a bad writer...for a girl.

But, yeah, in the light of her title, the question "Are women necessary?" does beg an answer.

To the rescue—bloodied, bowed, beaten, worn, bruised, tired and torn—rides the indefatigable Colonel Frank Paynter, a seasoned veteran of The Battle of the Sexes.

"So, whaddaya say Frankie, are the little wimmin necessary?"

"I guess we gotta give credit where it's due, Mike. I think we need 'em. Depends on your needs, of course, but one way or another..."

The colonel's eyes grew misty and I decided to leave it there. Heading over to the Happy Tutor's for a spliff and a spot of rumpty-tumpty later this evening, I found myself happily in agreement with the Colonel.

He'd knocked up a list of potential speakers who might have ignited Web 2.0—which looks like it probably turned into more of the same from the Old Farts Club, but weren't invited. Knowing the first three, I'd have to say that if it weren't for Jeneane Sessum, my first blog would never have flown; if it weren't for Shelley Powers, it would never have stayed up and, if it weren't for Leslie Winer, I'd not still get such a kick-ass thrill revelling in mind-blowing thought streams unavailable elsewhere.

Tech heads or not, these are among the hottest, most brilliant minds searing the Web into our global psyche. Gender has nothing to do with it. Take a stroll over to Madame Levy's and dip into her so-called novelnovel. It's drop-dead-shit-hot writing. You won't leave. Fuck... these bloggers are so far into the creative process I long ago stopped trying to cling to their shirttails, preferring instead to ride the magic of their slipstreams.

Were they to have addressed Web 2.0 on behalf of other women on my blogroll (and they've no need to—the likes of Meg, Kathryn, Tish, Yule, Olivia Meiring, etc. can speak for themselves), I'm pretty sure the others wouldn't have minded them doing so.

But for what?

Agh, never mind...I suppose, to those to whom this stuff matters, it's the thought that counts.

So what's Maureen Dowd's take on her question? I'd hoped it might be something along the lines of "No, but we'd sure miss them." But, opines the silver-tongued devil of the op-ed page, "My thesis is that feminism is dead" ... "That it's been trumped by narcissism and materialism, which are much more important 'isms' in the 21st century. I think it might be something that Rush Limbaugh would be interested in."

Or the chicks at Misbehaving.

I know that you're the queen, and I'm the slave, | And yet you will understand | That underneath it all | You're a maid, and I am only a man.

Maurice Chevalier | You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me

RB Welcomes the Rolling Stone

"We talked until 2am as if we were simply continuing some mad conversation neither of us at this point can remember starting, which is pretty much the case. Then, too few hours later, Marek is awake needing coffee for the road, so I brewed a gallon of 40-weight and we talked for another three hours nonstop while he transferred a metric tonne of music files to my computer via some wireless network shit I didn't even know existed. Whew. Polish hip-hop, Schubert liede, British mashups of Queen and Eminem, the Second Brandenburg played on period instruments at a tempo that would have given Liszt the bends. The guy has eclectic tastes."

RB

"Three days driving. 2272 Miles, three time zones, nine states, 32 miles per gallon, 37 hours behind the wheel ... Flat Flat Flat Flat Kansas, One Oversized Load passing etc... etc... And visiting Chris Locke and RageBoy. The three of us invented Web 62.0 build 0.73 alpha. Don't worry, we'll not leave you behind in this Web 2.1 world. We are forging the new frontier of blogging. It involves visiting people after midnight. It's a great interactive feature you will not want to miss."

Marek J

That this—one of the great meetings of our time—was not blogged, is a disgrace. I know RageBoy is busy arranging a shipment of suicide vests for use when SoupSack Opera trashes Boulder, and that Marek is reconciling his laughing-sad-song-poet-of-the-winelit-night soul to the world of work, but Locke has no excuse. In high dudgeon, I reported his neglect to Father Christopher who, with due speed, promised an official investigation into his stenographer's laxity.

It's good to know somebody's willing to get things done around here. Actually, I wonder if he has a copy of that electric violin solo from Zachariah...



Late last night, I received the above by courier. Stamped by a commisoner of oaths, it is a certified copy of a photograph of Chris Locke and constitutes his lame excuse for not blogging the above. "I was working," says he.

Yeah, right...blogging as work. There's this Forbes article you blue-cotton shirts who subscribe to the thing should read...

Searching for the heart of Friday night...

"...on this fantastic day."

"You rescue me, I rescue you | You rescue me, I rescue you, yes I do | And you'll be the song, ahh..."

Yeah, right... fuggedaboudit.

So look into my face Marie-Claire | And remember just who you are | Then go and forget me forever | But I know you still bear the scar, deep inside, yes you do...

I know where you go to my lovely | When you're alone in your bed | I know the thoughts that surround you | 'Cause I can look inside your head.

Peter Sarstedt | Where Do You Go To, My Lovely

Wonderchicken returns...

Wonderchicken returns, brethren and sistren! He returns! Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy!

Indeed. Though he never really left us, life just wasn't the same without him. Yeah, work that one out and you'll be ready for the return of Stavros, his interactive, multimedia poultrycast, and some of the best writing on the Web. His star-studded supporting cast includes the mysterious Bearman, Kovacs's (and, by extension, everbody's) favourite drinking companion. Thanks to Frank and Shelley for the link—their assiduous dedication to the honest reportage of breaking stories truly shows Judith Miller to be the fraud she pretends not to be. And Stavros, an especial welcome home, my friend. You and the myriad different takes you lend our fucked-up world have been sorely missed.

Meanwhile...

Tom Barnett and John Robb close The Gap

...much like a couple of senators discussing the future of the empire on their way to the forum, John Robb and Thomas P.M. Barnett are so enamored of their delusions they fail to see their passage being slowed by jostling throngs of barbarians, new to the city.

"Fuckall jobs. They said there'd be jobs in Rome."

"Nah. They've been outsourcing for years now. It all goes to England. Most of these assholes are there now."

"Let 'em stay there. The climate's shite. Let's trash this place and head for Sicily."

"Good idea."

Which, put simply, is why the English are probably more Romanesque than the Italians. The Sicilians, as we all know, are... well, Sicilian. Don't ever fuck with them.

Robb and Barnett, the fomer a onetime colleague of Dave Winer and the latter the author of the neocon bestseller, The Pentagon's New Map, are so far up each others' backsides they can't see the arrogance of their ignorance.

Some choice snippets from the bedroom which, sadly, I stumbled into by way of Doc Searls:

Tom, in The Pentagon's New Map: The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment. ... Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities.

John, in the The New York Times: Since the American military's objective is to gain a monopoly on violence in Iraq, these developments indicate that it has sustained the commercial equivalent of a rapid loss in market share. ... the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. ... This option will probably work in Iraq too. In fact, it appears the American military is embracing it.

Tom, on his blog: We will never win in Iraq. Globalization will. What we wage now in Iraq isn't war. It's a holding action for history, which isn't so much on our side as constantly on our ass.

John, on his blog: We have boxed ourselves into a very difficult situation that may end in a Pyrrhic result.

Tom, on his blog: In the end, we win as we always do: with stuff. Capitalism bribes off its enemies with wealth. Worked in 1848 in Europe and it's worked ever since.

These, rather than The Other they so ardently detest, are the minds and motives behind "...regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists." [Barnett, T.P.M., The Pentagon's New Map 2004].

As Tom might say, "Think I'll take a migraine pill and head over to the theater."

I kid you not. Are these words indicative of Barnett's tendency to see war as theater? Or do they echo Abe Lincoln's last insightful thoughts on his way to the theater? If the latter, then the leader of the soon-to-be-so-called Free World might have been told "I'm afraid it's likely to be slightly more than a migraine, Mr. President."

But hey, you also gotta love this: "...the American military's objective is to gain a monopoly on violence in Iraq." Yeah, John, we know. And it ain't just the military. Or Iraq, for that matter. I can think of three good reasons a line like that ending up on the Op-Ed pages. The New York Times either doesn't edit contributions, grammar enjoys different rules in the U.S., or Robb is being serious.

I'd bet on the last.

The following is an excellent analysis of Karen Hughes's rise to high office and presidential intimacy, as well as an incisive introduction to the power she wields over the minds of tens of millions of supposedly intelligent Americans—in whose minds her twisted ideologies are mirrored.

Profound unpopularity, as tyrants, bullies and senior spin doctors know to their advantage, can be a powerful weapon in warfare. In any army the hardest things to instill in a new recruit are not how to drive a tank, fire a gun or march in step, but how to summon the mental strength to kill. Engendering hatred through indoctrination is a necessary part of getting wars up and running: hatred gives everyone involved something black and white to focus on.

So in theory, because 'we' hate Saddam Hussein, and Saddam and his friends hate us, the US can continue its extended excursion to the Middle East. With every GI blown up by 'insurgents' and sent home in a box, there's sufficient hatred about, coupled with a knee-jerk desire for revenge, to overcome and neuter the more logical, human and civilised reaction of 'Whoa! Enough! Let's get OUT of here!' One of the strands of Orwell's 1984 was that in a dehumanised society hatred naturally becomes state-sponsored.

Mark Borkowski | God, Iraq and the power of the President's PR

Much as I loathe their thought and the consequences of it, there are things I admire about the Robbs and Barnetts of our benighted world. While others' moral, mental, physical and intellectual obesity renders them supine, effete, and ineffectual, our armchair generals are, at least, qualified and willing to kill. Would that their ideological enemies could stop sucking at the self-comforting nipple of consumerism long enough to equip themselves to feel and do the same.

It'd certainly speed what promises to be a long, painful and self-inflicted slide to irrelevance for the United States of America. Should something seriously funny happen on the way to the forum—or to our Miles Gloriosuses, the world would have far less an opportunity or inclination to indulge its propensity for sauve qui peut.

The Web to the Power of Anything?

Chris Locke and Mark Shuttleworth exchange business cards...

Touch, we touched the very soul | Of holding each and every life | We claimed the very source of joy ran through | It didn't, but it seemed that way | I kissed a lot of people that day.

While I continue to blog lightly, I thought I'd slip in a quick pointer to the latest shenanigans of Father Christopher's stenographer, aide de camp, psychic healer, public apologist and general skivvie, Chris Locke.

Father Christopher?

Never mind. All will be revealed in my forthcoming novel, Father Christopher and the Temple of Time. I will write it in November. Yes, a month. These things cannot be rushed.

Locke, as you all know, invented the Web. Well, if he didn't invent it, he's the one who's lived there longest and hardest (not welcome at polite gatherings everywhere, he's frequently had nowhere else to go). Arguably—and there's no shortage of that when it comes to opinions of the discerning blogger's BlogFather of choice, the man is an institution, the Web's First and Leading Citizen.

He has also been known to freelance as a beggar, but there you go. He is, when push comes to shove, a man of many skills, enjoying few illusions, currying no favors, and never recanting.

He also works for Father Christopher. Hence my singing his praises like a lowrent bumboy or demented imbongi. But this is all beside the point. While I've been away, Locke's been busy. Dispatched by Father Christopher to give us something to do with our lives during 2005, Chris has already authored and closed one of the Web's better corporate blogs, Chief Blogging Officer. Quite what those steering HighBeam Research were thinking when they hired an Associate of RageBoy to write in a suit, I don't know. Like his alter ego, the man is incapable of behaving himself and is not known for his facility with collar-and-tie prose.

Somehow, though, and without seeming to exert himself, RageBoy's quieter—some might say better—half got the thing to fly. HighBeam promptly shut it down, just when my organization was preparing to buy several thousand multi-user subscriptions. My Chairman (MC) was highly pissed off with CBO's closure and decided to give the money to an organization assisting single mothers instead, a cause to which he devotes himself almost entirely.

It is perhaps this interest, which seems to spur most of Locke's extra-curricular activities, that made him insist I track Chris's latest venture, i.e. his tenure as Web and televangelist for NetSquared (Net²), a heavy-hitting Halliburton front company operating out of Houston. Eh? Sorry, wrong notes. In clocke's words (his suit is now slightly rumpled), NetSquared "...is an invitation into the marvelous, messy world of the Internet as a participatory, interactive community: a community created by its users. This site, and the Net² conference, will help non-profit organizations move into that world — byte by byte, blog by blog, RSS feed by RSS feed."

You know...the usual Locke-ian New Age soft sell of nothing at all. I have to admit, he's damned good at it, and it probably explains why his latest book, Protect Yourself from the Mystic Bourgeoisie, continues to outsell the likes of Sixpack Chopra, Dr. Phil and the Da Vinci Code guy at Amazon. Anyway, it's either MC's predilection for nubile young girls or his interest in astrology that sees me sitting at my PC, patiently awaiting the latest post from NetSquared, a joint venture kicked off by TechSoup and CompuMentor.

My Chairman's interest in astrology arises from his chance meeting aboard a Soyuz spacecraft with Mark Shuttleworth, a local boy with time on his hands, a yen to travel and a seat aboard the Russian spam can [1]. Shuttleworth had just sold his company Thawte to some American outfit for a fistful of dollars and some undisclosed favors for which he had to leave town.

He headed for deep space. A twenty-something Capetonian barely out of his bongs, the young South African was seated in the captain's chair smoking a white pipe and staring out of what passes for a window on the Russian craft, mumbling; "Fuuuck, look at those lights," when My Chairman bumped into him.

"Get a life, boy!" MC barked, cuffing him. Shuttleworth fell to the deck, blood trickling from a superficial cut above his right eye. This gave MC a chance to see the lights. He later suggested to Shuttleworth that he spread the jam. Returning to Earth and a Ukrainian potato patch with a bump—and an Elastoplast above his right eye, the young Mark did just that. Still as high as a kite, his imagination failed him only in naming his new outfit the Shuttleworth Foundation, an organization dedicated to turning the world, non-profits and schools on to the virtues of Open Source.

And, of course, nubile young girls. He has gone to extraordinary lengths pursuing both, but his lack of success at the latter has, unfortunately, garnered more press for the former. Through initiatives such as Go Open Source, with The Freedom Toaster operating out of places like the OpenCafe, and by offering The Open CD (Windows-based) to all, the Foundation has assisted in installing fully functional tuXlabs in 150 predominantly disadvantaged schools.

More than 100,000 learners are now making optimal use of Linux. And that's not the half of it. One of the more exciting products of Shuttleworth's vision has been HIP2B², a portal for young South Africans wired to the global mind and businesses everywhere.


"There's nothing in the refrigerator!"

Oh, to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon | To paint that love upon a white balloon | And fly it from the toppest top of all the tops | That man has pushed beyond his brain | Satori must be something just the same.

Yet, for all HIP2B²'s potential to bridge the Digital Divide, my visit left me feeling somewhat depressed. Given our national telecoms provider's unhealthy and frequently brutal strangehold on Net access, the Web remains predominantly white and underused. It's not what it could be and HIP2B² remains little more than an empty shopping mall. Through local companies such as Telepassport using the wealth of experience gained by the likes of TechSoup and Compumentor, there must be a way to close the gap separating those using refurbished, standalone Open Source PCs in our townships and rural areas from broadband Webheads shopping for trivia from leafy suburbia.

Ultimately, it boils down to connectivity and greedheads hogging both bandwidth and profit. Bar the president's blog, so much for the revolution. Apartheid, like so many ideologies, was economically expedient. Dressed as globalization, it remains so and township kids are effectively barred from any say in what constitutes our electronic 'now'. Or, to use Chris's words, to take part in that "...marvelous, messy world of the Internet as a participatory, interactive community: a community created by its users."

Problems and opportunities peculiar to specific countries or regions present solutions and further opportunities to others. We need to see the Shuttleworth Foundation working with outfits such as NetSquared. South Africans would benefit hugely from such international, collaborative partnerships and so would NetSquared. In fact, and at this late stage, I think that's the whole idea.

Yet, beyond a sense that such collaboration could result in the Web to the power of anything, I know little of what one facilitator has to offer the other. Certainly Locke (a sensitive soul dedicated to serving others) and Shuttleworth (a youngster with more money than I could manage) would serve our digital youth better as models than imperialist war criminal George W. Bush and the bejewelled thug, fraudster, and pretender to the blogging Mbeki's throne, Jacob Zuma. All I can do is hope for a meeting of networked minds and a long-term surge in local—and, by extension, global—Net use.

For myself, I couldn't care less. Time is short, the arrow is swift, and I have a novel to write.

"Will you publish it online?"

"What? Will I publish it online? Are you fucking crazy? This is a book. It's going to a publishing house and will be made available in hardback before going to softcover. Publish it online? What a joke. There's no bloody money there."

"Oh, okay. Sorry I asked."

"Don't worry. Thanks for your interest."

"Sure thing. G'bye."

"'Bye."

[1] I do not mean to denigrate Russian space vehicles—they've proved a damned side more spaceworthy and inexpensive than their American-origami counterparts.

We scanned the skies with rainbow eyes and saw machines of every shape and size | We talked with tall Venusians passing through | And Peter tried to climb aboard but the Captain shook his head | And away they soared | Climbing through the ivory vibrant cloud | Someone passed some bliss among the crowd | And We walked back to the road, unchained.

David Bowie | Memory of a Free Festival

Desktops

'In the pebbles of the holy streams...'

And the sabbath rang slowly | In the pebbles of the holy streams.


'...I sang in my chains like the sea.'

Time held me green and dying | Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas | Fern Hill

Cops and Robbers...

"I've arrested these boys..."

President Bush pressed the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Thursday to 'confront the threat that armed gangs pose to a genuinely democratic Palestine' but cautioned that a Palestinian state living peacefully with Israel might not be established before Mr. Bush leaves office in 2009.

New York Times | Bush Presses Abbas to Confront Armed Gangs

Land of the free...

Land of the free...

"This country is now hell — a disaster. You cannot imagine how bad it is. Nothing of the reporting I see generally, except The Guardian and Patrick Cockburn in The Independent, really conveys the absolute agony and distress of Iraq."

Robert Fisk | 'Mouse journalism' is the only way we can report on Iraq

• Guardian journalist freed

Closer?

"...the righteous resemble their Creator."

And so it is | Just like you said it would be | Life goes easy on me | Most of the time | And so it is | The shorter story | No love, no glory | No hero in her sky…

I didn't enjoy the uncomfortably excellent Closer. A typically good Mike Nichols movie, its glossy production and the pointless nature of its protagonists' pursuits frequently detract from its relentless sordidity, reducing unpalatable truths to a miasma of something unbearably middle-class and almost acceptable.

Surprisingly, Nichols's use of Damien Rice's song, The Blowers Daughter, goes a long way to saving the film. The song's blunt, grieving honesty and Rice's rendition of it expose, more effectively than do the cast, the fundamental lie underpinning the tacky truisms of the movie and those fucking their way through it.

Never mind. How did we get here? Oh, yes...eyes. Dean Landsman pointed me to this picture, circulated shortly after Yom Kippur. It forms the centerpiece of a chain-mail letter in which the Helix Nebula is likened to the "Eye of God". Contrary to my post below, there's a gentle, subtle humor at work in this small coincidence of fundamentalist Christian apocrypha of the garden-gnome variety coinciding with millennia of Jewish culture, and it touches on aspects of us that are at once higher and deeper than most would care—or dare—to admit.

I know virtually nothing of Judaism, but I like this passage I've been reading:

For this reason, although at the outset, the Midrash compares the Jews to the hosts of heaven as a whole, the prooftext mentions the stars. For the stars possess an advantage over the sun and moon, about which it is written: "The moon will be humiliated and the sun ashamed." The stars — and the Jewish people for whom they serve as an analogy — will shine forever.

[...]

The Divine light which descends to bring the world into being can be considered as G-d's name. To clarify the analogy: A name is merely a glimmer of the entity which it identifies. For example, there is the saying, "The name of the king is called upon them," i.e., it is only the name, and not the essence of the king, by which his country is known.

A name does not relate to a person's essence. It merely serves as a medium through which one person can establish a relationship with another. Similarly, with regard to G-d, His name relates to the creation — a realm apart from Himself. For Himself, He has no need of a name; He is holy and separate. At this level, created beings have no commonality with Him.

Now, this piece, which goes further—into potentially divisive territory for overly religious types—speaks to all of us. And it gives those who read the above chain mail cause to smile in its light.

I guess that's why Nichols's movie is so damned good, if not enjoyable. Focusing on the politics of words, sex, lies, and videotape, he names names, omitting any hint of the essence, leaving his characters closer to nothing at all.

But, hey, ain't it good to know God's eyes are blue?

I can't take my eyes off of you | I can't take my eyes off you | I can't take my eyes off of you | I can't take my eyes off you | I can't take my eyes off you | I can't take my eyes...

Damien Rice | The Blower's Daughter

This has to be...

Madame Levy goes to the races...

...one of the funniest, most self-revelatory, in-your-face and thought-provoking Jewish jokes of all time. Whoever came up with it probably got the idea from the 2005 U.S. Grand Prix at Indianpolis (where German Michael Schumacher and team mate Rubens Barrichello—the only notables to take part—were booed and pelted with waterbombs while driving at over 300 kmh).

Either way, they got, and get, it. Self-effacing, it slams stereotypes to reach across cultures and the ages. This person has his or her finger firmly on the pulse of the global psyche (in the vicinity of GoogleEarth's default placemark), hints at a backlash against the Tim LaHaye mob / NASCAR mentality, and damn, has a bloody good sense of humor.

If you're wondering why, Bubba, hold that thought. I know I'm in good company.

Alternatively, if highbrow culture rags are beyond your means, i.e. you browse with graphics turned off, let this guy cheer you up. He might have had it tough, but he can change writing styles like most do underwear.

I never had a chance. When I was a kid I belonged to some outfit called the Boy’s Brigade. Kind of Boys Scouts for Free Presbyterians. We’d wear these dopey sailor outfits Thursdays and gather in the church basement. Do a bit of marching. Then some tumbling on mats. Then home to watch Dan August. (Or was that later? No that ws later in life. That was Thursdays, but later on, when I’d got to play floor hockey at the Y. Like you care.)

Anyway. Yeah. As a fundraiser for the BB we were once asked to sell light bulbs. Yeah, light bulbs. Just this minute struck me as odd. Light bulbs. What a great idea. Never mind the cookies and the chocolates and the raffle tickets, get your kids to raise money selling lightbulbs. And so somehow we ended up with about ten boxes of Sylvanania lightbulbs in our house. Meant to sell them.

I never sold a one. My parents had to bail me out. When they eventually sold the house I grew up in, there was still a few bulbs left. I was 38. Them was a lot of bulbs.

Then there was the paper route. The Toronto Star. 33 papers. Along Gerrard Street in Toronto. I never collected any money. Well, some that was offered. Hey you paperboy, we haven’t paid you in three months. They’d offer up the eighty-five cents for weekly delivery times twelve and I’d head off to the corner store for green leaf mints, shoelace licorice and Black Cat gum.

I never had a job in school. I never had any money. Best that way. If I had had money, I would never have had money anyway, so what was the point?

More often than not, I find Brian singing my song. But, hell, he has an infinitely better voice...

From Bullshit to Birdshit

All the late night bargains have been struck | Between the satin beaus and their belles ... And most of the taxis and the whores | Are only taking calls for cash

"So what's he gonna do? Bomb them or shoot them down?" my daughter asked, peering over my shoulder at the ABC News story, Bush wants right to use military if bird flu hits.

This one has to be a classic—using the calculated withholding of aid to New Orleans to enhance and exploit a natural disaster, further erode and usurp civil liberties (giving free rein within the United States to the mercenaries of Blackwater, Titan and myriad other death squads), and continuing—under adverse circumstances—to arrogate to himself executive powers likely to drive the world's most demented tinpot dictators into apoplectic rages of authoritarian jealousy.

It's not just Bush's war on those not rich, white and American that sees the United States ranked lower than shark shit the world over. Nor is it his assault on middle-class self-entitlement. Nor, for that matter, his rape of the poor. Or his obscene enrichment of odious fellow travelers. Or, if you want, his entrenchment of martial law. It's not even that the U.S. media reports such bilge without so much as hinting at the administration's bald usurpation of fundamental freedoms.

It's that, despite it being the stock-in-trade behavior of every evolving police state and wannabe global imperium, and coming hard on the heels of a latter-day Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, dirty bombs, anthrax, an imploding economy, wars lost in Afghanistan and Iraq and looming in Iran and Korea, Americans swallow it lock, stock and hot, smoking barrel.

Despite knowing, within, that as the power grab becomes more apparent and crackdowns on dissent grow harsher, they are increasingly likely to be included among those on the receiving end of inhumane actions carried out by a devastatingly brutal and callously indifferent leadership.

To which there is no opposition.


We've been down that road before...

• Military may have to help in pandemic
• Bush Considers Military Role in Flu Fight
• Bush proposes using military in bird flu pandemic
• US may use military quarantine to contain flu
• Bush Suggests Using Military In Bird Flu Quarantine
• Bush Suggests Army Controls Avian Flu Quarantines

You get the picture...

I take it...

I don't know how it happened | It all took place so quick | But all I can do is hand it to you | And your latest trick

Dire Straits | Your Latest Trick

Windows

Blue, blue windows behind the stars...

There is a town in north Ontario, | With dream comfort memory to spare, | And in my mind | I still need a place to go, | All my changes were there.

When I received this picture from Amé in Trondheim, Norway, I thought immediately of Mark Woods, who introduced me to Aragon and Desnos, hard at work in his Perth, Ontario garage gluation and scissorology scriptorium.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars, | Yellow moon on the rise, | Big birds flying across the sky, | Throwing shadows on our eyes.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young | Helpless

Teachers

At the edge of the lake...

I was handsome I was strong, | I knew the words of every song. | Did my singing please you? | No, the words you sang were wrong.

Born into a family living on the side of a mountain, my earliest memories are of being alone, suspended from a window far above the diamond sparkle of a sunlit sea.

Darkness is anathema to me. Yet it is always there.

Yesterday, I queried 'evasion, avoidance, escape'. Today, I ask myself why. I found the answer in my nine-to-five day.

It has to do with darkness.

Unknowingly, or subconsciously, I ducked a social function with colleagues, putting myself in a position where I was unable to attend. I know why. I detest social situations in which people, thrown together, pretend to have a good time over food and copious amounts of alcohol.

I am more than averse to alcohol. I recoil from it. It corresponds to an inner horror and indescribable fear only those whose lives have been marred by it will know.

My own, youthful predilection for the stuff, I can bear. Not drinking is easy. Watching people paying for their 'bottles' at checkout queues, I feel a certain superiority, a knowledge that they are, to some degree, losers like me. They can't keep away from the stuff.

I think most who do not drink feel that sense of superiority. Anybody denying it should imagine themselves crippled and confined to a wheelchair. We able-bodied people would probably deny feeling superior to the disabled, but if we imagine ourselves in that chair, it's easy to imagine how incapacitated, impotent or 'inferior' we'd feel.

The use of our limbs, as much as our mind, gives us much about which we can feel 'superior'. Legless, our lives become shadowy cycles of pain and shame. Alcohol had me sitting in that chair for years. I've seen the lies in others' eyes.

However, not drinking myself, I couldn't see the power it exerted on me through another's drinking. Alcohol and its resulting alcoholism are the darkness of a Black Hole. It swallows the alcoholic and all about it. It is ugly, violent and voracious beyond all measure and it destroys absolutely.

I flirted with it over the years, putting off the inevitable, trying to escape or, at least, avoid the end. I skirted its blood-soaked, imprecation-filled event horizon, trying to control it and hold my family together as it tore all substance and meaning from the words: 'family' and 'together'.

In the end, it exhausted me sucked us all into its anarchic vortex in which identity becomes as meaningless as an official document.


"Are my lessons done?"

Who is it whom I address, | Who takes down what I confess? | Are you the teachers of my heart? | We teach old hearts to rest.

Of no use to anybody, least of all the kids, I fell into therapy and learned another way. Walk away. Absolutely and irrevocably. Let the family disintegrate. Speed its collapse. I did so. I threw my wife from the house. Sober, she spent three to four months living in conditions describable only as indescribable.

There are few shelters for the homeless in Africa and those that do exist, are not places you'd wish on others, no matter how sick they might be.

Something changed for me over those months. Quite what, I don't know. Somehow, I got a life. The fear, for that's what it is, left. Although my wife quit several months ago and is still going strong, and although I continue to love her, she came home to divorce proceedings and the consequences of actions over which, I believe, she had little control.

Life is complicated enough. Living it blows the mind. We're still together. In fact, more so than before. The courts move slowly and our divorce has yet to go through. It's a piece of paper absolving me of legal liability for my wife's possible actions and it makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to say, "Get the fuck out of here."

It enables us to live, as a family and as the much-abused saying goes, "One Day At A Time." Being, as you know, a good Catholic boy, I believe we'll be together till the end. Today, this makes me happy.

The river moves to the sea. But, as Hesse pointed out in Siddhartha, it remains both at its source and at its mouth. This blog has been a curious adventure to now. Through it, I've been able to tell my story, sans detail, in depth. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, allegory and silence have allowed me, as I journeyed upstream, deep into the darkness, to relate my own meeting with Kurtz, and my affinity for him.

I've been to the source. Now I'm back, gazing on a shining sea.

As mentioned, it's been a costly trip. I've hurt and offended, through action and inaction, as many people as I might have done had I drunk the stuff myself.

I'm deeply sorry for that.

If life were an acid trip, social situations at which people scarf free food and guzzle alcohol would be flashbacks, terrifying instants in which time past is indistinguishable from time present. For me, and since I decided to bring down the pillars of the temple, it's early days. I frequently get flashbacks. I know, intellectually, it's not alcohol or other people I dislike. It's the shame and the pain they—in concert—evoke.

So, as is my custom, I evade and avoid such situations. I do flee.

It's easy when you know how. And have a good skateboard.

Yeah, light and dark, dark and light. Presently, I remain a George ''You're either with us or against us..." Bush man at heart. Life's pretty much black and white, but I'm beginning to see the shades, hues and colors, bright and dark, hard and soft, melding, merging, changing...

They're somewhere in here.

Oh teachers are my lessons done? | I cannot do another one. | They laughed and laughed and said, Well | Child, are your lessons done? | Are your lessons done? | Are your lessons done?

Leonard Cohen | Teachers

Three Degrees of Being

A deceptively dynamic universe

"We are very very small. But we are profoundly capable of very very big things."

Stephen Hawking

This evening, I watched Hawking, a dramatized story of the disabled cosmologist's early life. It is an exquisitely rendered movie, redolent of A Beautiful Mind, the filmic biography of mathematician John Nash. The movie, i.e. Hawking, although complete on its own, is held together by flashes to a 1960s interview with Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias who, in 1965 and using a powerful microwave antenna, stumbled on an inexplicable radio noise emanating from 'out there'.

Through this simple dramatic device, the increasing import of Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the strange static hiss, too strong to originate in our galaxy, gives Hawking added edge. It plays, on an old tape recorder, throughout their interview. Much like Stephen Hawking's search for a thesis, Penzias and Wilson's mystery searches an answer.

The film's content and direction outshine any small flaws it might have and, with the credits rolling, I snuck onto the balcony for a smoke.

Over the past year, I've been deep into therapy. Driven to the edge of insanity, by nature and choices made, I found myself a space where I could start putting myself back together again. So far, it's been a wonderful, if often painful and confusing trip. It's given me insight into why I admire Nash and Hawking and relate so strongly to other, perhaps more 'ordinary', people like them.

I've been exploring my constant struggle to find my own equilibrium, my accommodation of a universe marrying contentment and chaos. The battle continues but, over the year, I've come to appreciate the enormity, savagery and depth of the conflict. It's cost me friends and relationships, which I regret, but it's been worth it.

"How frequently have you experienced psychosis?" asked my therapist.

Let it be noted I am not clinically psychotic.

"Only when drinking," I replied.

And here, let it be noted I'm proud to have stumbled into AA at around the same time as Chris Locke, some 21 years ago.

"Why'd you say that?" she asked. "Why 'only when drinking'?"

And we went into it. I had, of course, experienced psychosis of sorts when tripping on acid. But that was different.

When psychotically drunk, I felt unbound but not all there. I was aware of my immediate actions, but I was not aware of me. I was, while sowing chaos, comfortably numb. By contrast, I felt myself present during experiments with LSD, and the Black Hole I knew lurked at the back of my consciousness was a frightening presence I'd have fled had I the opportunity or capacity to do so.

My acid highs were boundless and frequently fun, but always—and like life—paradoxically fear filled.

Today, addicted to respectable drugs dispensed by drug lords in suits, I still live too intensely. Sleep is a dreamless black hole into which I fall, exhausted, late at night. It relinquishes only fleeting images and scattered symbols of fragmentary dreams but, heeding Donald Rumsfeld, I work with them.


"Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"

As Hawking unfolds, Penzias and Wilson relate how they had had to eliminate 'clutter' from their antenna, including nesting pigeons, that might have caused the static they were receiving. They ruled out the possibility it was caused by the bright lights and noise of the big city, New York. Meanwhile, around the same time, Hawking, a friend of Roger Penrose—a man who lends new meaning to 'inversion', finds himself increasingly at odds with cosmologists holding to the Steady State Theory, and tries to unseat them. Friend and supervisor Dennis Sciama advises him to do something original.

Somehow, and most of the time, I live in the spaces between memories. I think it's called the present. But it leaves little room for recall and I remember little of things I might have done an hour or two ago or, indeed, of the details of the film I saw earlier this evening.

I'd be concerned about pre-senile dementia or early Alzheimer's were this 'forgetfulness' of day-to-day mundanities a recent development. But I've always had it. I cannot remember lyrics, books, films, songs, names... fuck, virtually everything. But I do remember the obscure, those things of little interest to people concerned with keeping the world spinning in an orderly fashion.

It makes life interesting.

My internal points of reference are perhaps more widely spaced than those of most I've met. I understand an all-consuming passion for the infinitely small or the immeasurably large. I appreciate what it is to live a mix of the two at the cost of taking care of in-the-world details important to the bureaucratic minds of so-called balanced people.

My life and the enormity of the world cannot possibly fit a nine-to-five regimen. As far as I'm concerned, most should lose their blinkers and live in awe.

While yes, I do take choice seriously, I also believe people genetically predisposed to their peculiar world views and I have mine. While not a lazy person, I'd forgive others for thinking me so. It's just that blogging this is perhaps more important to and for me than filing my tax return, renewing my license on the car, or standing in a queue to apply for a new ID book.

I'm able to appreciate the link between global and local, but I'm unable to feed myself.

There is always a bigger picture and I like to see it.


Residual memories...

For the most part, Penzias and Wilson's interviewer remains a disembodied voice, unseen behind the camera. He takes an unnatural interest in Penzias's past, probing his German origin. One suspects he suspects something. Penzias, while sticking to his subject, introduces autobiography and relates how his family was separated when forced to flee—via Kindertransport—Germany at the outbreak of WWII. Back at the movies, Hawking finds his focus in a quest to provide support for the Big Bang Theory. All he needs is residual evidence of it, about three degrees Kelvin.

Recently, dissatisfied with nothing in particular, I've been exploring deep-seated feelings of entrapment. One of the things to come out of this exploration was an image, as if seen through a camera lens shooting skywards, of myself in the wilderness. I become smaller and smaller and, as I finally disappear into the vastness of the wastes, I realize myself to be behind the lens.

I am nowhere present but, in a strangely peaceful and together way, am everywhere at once.

My friends, weirdoes all, are wonderful, sainted people. Freed of life's day-to-day entanglements, they too seem to seek the big picture and soar the wide spaces of their and others' beings. Of the conventional world, they remain true to their idiosyncrasies and passions and find themselves in nature. That's what these pictures are of, a weekend spent at Uilenkraalsmond, blogged a week ago. Amé took them, and sent them to from Trondheim.

We are ourselves through each other and feed, in each other, a curious spontaneity. As we learn ourselves, we learn our friends.

Does all this smack of avoidance, evasion, or escape? I find the notion of avoiding life through an escape to nature somewhat ludicrous. No. Avoidance arises from depression. I know it well. What I'm speaking about is different—a view of the world with which I feel comfortable.

Stephen Hawking dealt with his disabilities in order to live his life, not to escape it. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all Hawkings. We seek life in the spaces between words and worlds, memories and measures, people and paradigms, facts and faces, feelings and formulae. We do not escape; we journey. Often, we pay mere lip service to the inanities of the ordinary. We tip our caps to convention, barely acknowledge its existence, and immediately forget its passing.


'...we are profoundly capable of very very big things.'

Turning the camera, we realize Penzias and Wilson's interviewer is no Nazi hunter. He's a German trying to lay unspoken claim to Penzias's good fortune. Life's not always as it seems. Either way, the two physicists had stumbled on the residual microwave activity, measuring around three degrees Kelvin, Hawking needed to complete his thesis.

He did so in 1974. As for that hissing, unintelligible static from deep space that so intrigued Penzias and Wilson? Agreeing with Leslie, I like to think they were listening to Bob Dylan.

On the balcony, I stubbed out my smoke and came in to write this.

"Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"

Stephen Hawking

Some time ago, my youngest daughter walked in as I was listening to Where Did You Sleep Last Night? [mp3]. "Hey, that's not Nirvana!" she exclaimed. "Nah, it's Leadbelly," I answered, cranking it up.

And that's it about Bob Dylan. You listen to that guy, you're listening to Leadbelly, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, T-Bone Walker, Woody Guthrie, Memphis Slim, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee... hell, you know the names better than I do.

In fact, you listen to Dylan you're as close to listening to American music as it gets. Yeah, I know I'm virulently anti-American, but I have to admit it — that's about as close as you'll get to listening to yourself breathe.

An' dat's jus' de blues, bro'. Myriad other styles, genres and influences seep from the Dylan sound. In fact, it's downright weird and unnatural. Now, appreciating this as a South African, I frequently wonder why so many Americans and other so-called civilized people just don't get it.

This note was a time a'postin' [ehem]. I found a site offering a load of free, predominantly blues, mp3s.

Witnesses on the shore, quoted by CNN, said the accident had occurred as the boat turned to shore and listed to one side, causing some of the passengers to fall into the water. The boat was said to have capsized and "bobbed like a cork" in the water for about 10 minutes. Some of the passengers had apparently managed to clamber on to its hull before it sank.

Reporters at the scene said they had seen bodies being dragged out of the lake and left on the shore. There were chaotic scenes as police, fire departments and ambulance workers helped survivors. A temporary morgue was set up at a nearby campsite.

Guardian Online | 21 die as wake capsizes US tour boat on lake outing

Well, I soon lost track of m' kids 'n' wife, | So many people there I never saw in m' life | That old ship sinkin' down in the water, | Six thousand people tryin' t' kill each other, | Dogs a-barkin', cats a-meowin', | Women screamin', fists a-flyin', babies cryin', | Cops a-comin', me a-runnin'. | Maybe we just better call off the picnic.

Bob Dylan | Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

Ermm... sorry about that. It was irresistible.