Autumnal meander

Nebraska, springtime

My own body makes its minor key announcements:  neck slipped out of alignment recently, nothing unusual in that for some decades; down a few vertebrae lower a slight wrong move results in a sharp stab of pinched-nerve pain.  In the right hip area a chronic grinding sound induces a general very low-key pain in the whole area.   As for the moment it’s cheap, I went to the university hospital to have it checked and confirmed nothing is really wrong,  just normal aging process, the cushioning cartilage and spinal disks shrinking and growing rigid, the youthful padding spent.  The doctor examined me a bit, pushed here and there, and then prescribed a few very mild anti-inflammatory pills, which despite a week of same level pain I failed to take any, but knowing I had an appointment in another week I finally took one just to see if they did anything significant.  Can’t say it did.

The last years – I can’t quite recall how many, but maybe 10 – with each season’s shift  I have often thought to myself that this might be the last spring or autumn I’d be seeing.  This wasn’t prompted by any evident medical symptom or problem, but merely the passage of time.  One’s number comes up.   I don’t imagine at all that I am singular in this thought, only that among those encroaching on life’s last little adventure it seems socially impolitic to speak of such things.   It seems most would prefer to blissfully ignore the matter until a funeral imposes it.

Age spots bloom, the muscle tissue grows slack, skin patterns show dried fractal ribbons, the mind plays games of forgetfulness and – as it runs in the family – the specter of Alzheimer’s looms.  My father lays on his bedsores deep into it at 96.  I have asked Marcella that should this come to me, long before I’d like a jaunt to a deep woods, and a long walk.  Let the animals feed on what muscle tissue’s left, clean the bones.   Unspoken of, it seems as with adolescence, some inward biologic clock goes “tick” and instead of a burst of pubic hair, rambunctious cells setting off acne, a hard-on that can’t stop, and a delirium of aimless energy, there comes with the other end of life another trigger, that sprouts other hair in ears and nose, leaves off that on head, desiccates the skin, droops the dick, slags the muscles, and if you succumb to these dim messages, surely starts to decimate the spirit.  What’s wrong with our culture in its youth-is-all flight from life is that it leaves you unprepared for this, and if you haven’t prepared yourself for it, it’s likely a rude awakening.  In my instance I’ve been in preparation since I was a teenager, so it comes as no surprise, but only as the natural and proper end-game, for which one’s life should have provided the experiences to accept that life is a transitory passage, very finite, and to accept as well that there’s nothing “after.”   As Michael Jackson was going to have it, in his inimitable spectacular way,

In the last months one friend got himself a new hip, and as seems common enough with such things, the rehab part is a bit more than anticipated or the doctor let on.  Invasive surgery on aged bodies is pretty hard.  He’ll probably be walking slower and less.  Another friend, having spent the summer doing hard labor making himself a new basement, sends a note to say he’s feeling every one of his 70 years, in eyes and ears and laboring functions, and admonishes me I better take that long, slow, cross-country shoot ‘n show trip soon, so he can see me again before he (or, I might add, I) slip into the terminal fist of dust.

The crumpled leaves scattered on the sidewalks pointedly remind us of these things, as do the every day realities of bodily degradation.  For myself I’ve been lucky (so far) and aside from a hernia, patched up some years ago with a little slip of some kind of plastic meshing (which, though, now and then bothers when bent tightly, as in my morning yoga), and the minor mangling of my spine incurred by two rear-enders in one year (1977-78), wherein I paid attention to stops signals and the souls behind me didn’t.  Otherwise despite a recent scare about pancreatic cancer (thanks to the wizardry of very high-tech medicine misreading a bit of info), and a very recent prescription for some pills to lower the slightly high blood pressure, I hit the floor every other day to do 80 (sometimes 90, once in a long while 100) push-ups, and the alternate day 80 deep-knee squats.  Plus the yoga, and going by the nice little exercise things that the Koreans smartly place around public places, and do some in-place running, and some waist back and forth thing that is very like skiing.  But each day one feels it.  And any day one of mother nature’s denouements could arrive,  with the probabilities getting higher with each passing autumn.

From Dissonance, an installation work yet unpresented anywhere

My life-time habit of living here and there, moving from one place to another – New York, Berlin, Rome, Lisbon, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, Missoula, Butte, Port Hadlock, Paris, and now Seoul – has left me with a spider-web network of friends dispersed around the globe.  Their lives are largely focused on a long-time home, on their cluster of friends and family, work and play, which for most people is normal.   Their lives center around these places and activities, and I am most often a distant soul in their lives.   I write them more or less often, though long ago learning I’m not likely to get a response unless I pester.   When I do see them, it’s most often because I was on a trip, somewhere nearby, and came to visit.   Not often does it go the other way.  But recently, a few weeks ago, a friend dropped by here, from California via some South Pacific Island, New Zealand, Australia, Kathmandu, Kerala and here from whence he moved along to Estonia.   He and his lady friend are on a world peace march, due to wrap up in South America in January.   (They’ve asked Marcella to make of film of the collected material and if all goes well she’s off to Argentina for some weeks in January.)  We hadn’t seen one another in 4 or 5 or maybe 6 years.   Long enough that the incremental shifts that normally mask the changes in us were unmasked.  While we were both seemingly essentially “the same” – the same humor, the same interests, the same banter between us – and while it did seem as if it were only yesterday, the outward signs of time passed were bluntly visible.  We’d moved along on time’s conveyor belt.   Thus it may be that my sense of autumnal colors is heightened, as I seem to see most my friends only after long gaps, and the gentle fall of the flesh is not ironed out with familiarity.

Presently in last stages of the final editing of Swimming in Nebraska, something shot some 3 years ago in Lincoln.   It’s a work with a lot of technical stuff going on and hence the long editing process.   I suppose it is a kind of essay of some sort, with the vague aim to examine a certain kind of provincialism that comes from those large cultural capital cities I’ve listed earlier, places which usually think themselves the center of the universe, or at least their universe, and think places like Nebraska are to flyover or drive through.  There’s nothing there, they’d say.  Swimming is a gentle retort and a reminder that the same things happen everywhere.  I’ve sent it off to festivals and hope one will take it.

Swimming in Nebraska

We’re all where we always were – here.

American Pastoral #7

WTC steel elements for sale

Walden Pond

George Catlin, Buffalo Hunt

Aurora Borealis, Duluth, Minn.

Jack Kerouac keeping score

Warren Buffett in a bad year, takes a big loss in Omaha

So did Columbus, Nebraska

G7 meets in Pittsburgh

Galveston, Oct 2008

Detroit

Hummer in Afghanistan

Protesting Obama school talk

Let that which stood in front go behind, Let that which was behind
advance to the front. Let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new
propositions. Let the old propositions be postponed.

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) Reversals Written

Mala Italia

Of human-made landscapes few can compare with the beauties of Italy, from the dramatic lakes and mountains of Piedmont and Lombardy to the rich farmlands and cities of Emilia Romagna, the Marche, Tuscany, Lazio and Compagna.    In these places a mere 50 kilometers separates small cities of extravagant aesthetic qualities – Venezia, Bergamo, Firenze, Lucca, Sienna, Bologna, Ravenna, Pisa to mention but a few – and then the myriad smaller towns perched on mountain tops, their cubist clusters descending briefly down the slopes to be stopped at a once-defensive wall.  Farms flow neatly in an organic patchwork – olives trees, alfalfa, sunflowers, tomatoes, melons and squash, wheat and barley and corn – tumbling down the hillsides and filling the rich valleys.  In the north and central regions despite the dense pressures of the populations crowding it, there is a sense of civility in the architecture and the socially constructed infrastructure which seems to reflect the sublime orderliness of the cloisters which flank most churches, places of meditative quietude.

Accompanying this feast of deeply humanist urban design is a sumptuous cuisine, a true cornucopia of wine, meat and grains and greens the equal of anything on this earth, all extracted from the alluvial soils of these valleys and the slopes of the Appenine mountains.

Simple, rich, varied, and healthy, Italian food is one of the world’s wonders (if only one gets the real thing – the pastiche offered up in most non-Italian places is a pale echo of Italian cooking as found in Italy).

And once upon a time Italy was a volcano of creative energy of all sorts – from Galileo to Michelangelo to Uccello to Veronese to Fibonacci to Caravaggio to Dante to Bramante, Bernini, Brunelleschi, Rossini, Donezetti, Verdi, and…. the list seems endless.  But that time is not now.  Somewhere in the 20th century or before, the energies (with some exceptions, of course) burned out, the broad flame of creativity fluttered and for the most part ceased.   Since World War II, after an initial surge in the late 1940’s and into the 1960’s, Italian culture seemed to collapse with La Dolce Vita.

La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, L’Eclisse, Teorema, 8 1/2

A rushed modernity – as in many other places – did not mix well with the deep cultural origins of Italy, and these films seemed to hint of a premonition that the sureties of other times would not withstand the sudden shift from a dominantly tribal and agrarian life to the sudden mechanization of the industrial world.  A fashionable, and prescient, alienation marks these works.    In the confusion came severe reactions, though ones steeped in tradition:

Boccioni’s figure moves swiftly forward, though aesthetically it is essentially baroque and rococo, the flourish of form all too clearly expressive of a time several hundred years earlier but in 1913 advancing under the name of Futurism.

As did Il Duce, who sizing up his time, shifted from radical leftist to Fascist in the post World War I turmoil when all of Europe convulsed under the rapid transformations of industrialization, a process which uprooted not only the mechanical organization of society, but also its social order.  The beliefs of the past crumbled in the face of this assault, and in its stead, fertilized by the uncertainty of the time, arose the authoritarian regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Salazar, each utilizing the same appeal to historical verities while overturning the social organization of the past.  Italians love a hero, a strong man, a Caesar, and the spectacle which is the natural partner of the dictator.

In the wake of the convulsion of World War 2, Italy, economically prostrate, as with all of Europe, simply struggled to survive.  The late forties and early 50’s saw the neo-realism of Visconti, Di Sica, early Antonioni.  The fifties saw a big shift from bicycles to motorini, the Vespa becoming a symbol of success.  The 60’s saw the motorbike supplanted as status symbol by, of course, the car.   And with it came La Dolce Vita and the celebration of the good life, though in Antonioni’s hands, as Fellini’s, they came with a hang-over.  Something seemed amiss, something spiritual – all the nice things somehow didn’t add up to happiness.

…must confront her social environment. It’s too simplistic to say – as many people have done – that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention… was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable… The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can’t manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date.^{[2]  Antonioni}

So said the master, who himself got lost in the labyrinth of his new-found element of color, letting his film meander in a fog of ennui.  It was his last film with Monica Vitti as “a number.”  Breaking up is hard to do, as this maker of stripped down soaps knew well.   Lurking in the lush palette which he used were the signals of a nostalgia for an Italy for which he sensed a clear loss.  And despite the logic articulated above, Antonioni in his films demonstrated his own incapacity to adapt.  So much so that riding his fame he went abroad, to England for Blow Up, and America for Zabriskie Point – both misfired aesthetically, the latter terribly so.   His disorientation in the face of the new world reflected closely that of an Italy which could not face its future or its present.   Following the upheavals of the 60’s, Italy fell into the Anni di Piombo (The Years of Lead).

Bologna train station, Aug. 1980

Bombarded from left and right, Italy passed through the 70’s and 80’s in a kind of tormented state, a time riddled with mysterious deaths, oscillating politics and an economy, like much of the rest of the world, in an upward rush of frantic consumerism.  Its premiers – Andreotti, 7 times premier from the 1970’s to 90’s and well-known for Mafia connections, Fanfani, Craxi – were all indicted, tried, and most eluded conviction through technicalities – in the ever-glacial  and often corrupted judicial system of Italy the usual exemption would be that the statute of limitations had expired, and hence, whatever the mountains of evidence and proof, one was absolved.   The current head of state, Silvio Berlusconi follows in this tradition, a multiple indictee, now wallowing in sex scandals wherein his second younger wife left him, accusing him of having a taste for even younger morsels, one of whom is all of 17.  Silvio owns all the broadcast systems, and as head of state, controls (or tries to) the 3 major state-run channels.  He also owns a soccer team, newspapers, publishing houses, and in effect has a strangle-hold on the media in Italy.  He is Italy’s richest man as well.  According to the polls, and to friends of mine who live here, Silvio is popular despite (or perhaps because of) his vulgarity, his authoritarian inclinations, his evidently hot sex life, and his chronic evident illegality – whether screwing underage girls or screwing the justice system.  Of course he does run the media, so the country is told what he’d like it to hear, and little more.   I suspect the truth is less that Silvio is popular than that the broad populace long ago surrendered to pure cynicism when it comes to politics Italian style.  I know not a few people who are planning or hoping to leave bella Italia as soon as they can, along with quite a few who left some time ago.

Italy has had a long history of criminality-as-government, back to the Caesars, Caligula, and to the warring city-states, the history of which is written in the grisly terms outlined by Macchiavelli.  Recently someone told us of a visit to a museum of torture in San Gimignano, where one of the choice items was a barrel in which the punished party sat in shit, head held high, to rot slowly in excrement.   Nearby in Siena, what appear to be basketball hoops adorning the corners of many buildings not so long ago sported human heads.   While such is no longer the fashion, the hanging torso of Mussolini makes clear the tendency is not so old nor really worn out.  It takes only the proper occasion to bring out this taste.   A glance at the Italian equivalent of tabloids shows that on lower levels, violence is a standard recourse.

Gomorrah, film by Matteo Garrone, from book by Roberto Saviano

While we marvel at the extraordinary beauties of the accumulated history of Italy: the massive structures of the Roman empire, the intricate twists and turns of medieval hills towns, the splendid piazzas, architecture and urban planning of the Renaissance, and all the arts which accompanied this long trajectory, we tend to dismiss the underlying  flip-side of a history of astounding violence.  Tourists mill around the statue which marks the place where Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy, thinking little of this event while sipping their wine.

We drive easily up to some hill-top town, its flanks graced with walls, a tall observation tower rising up from its center, and we think little of the logic which placed this town in such a difficult site.  The logic being fear and the need to find a defensible refuge from the marauding warfare below, not to mention the disembowelings, hangings, burnings, and exotic tortures in town, or on the outskirts, little civic lessons in how you (better) behave and whose ass you’d best kiss.   So much for romantic Tuscan hill towns.

In Pasolini’s Teorema the businessman played by Terrence Stamp is seen at the film’s conclusion running crazed through a lunar landscape (shot at the top of the volcano Mt. Aetna in Sicily), seemingly having lost his mind.

Teorema, Pier Paolo Pasolini

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.    PP Pasolini

In his writings and films, Pasolini pointed to where Italy was going.  He was murdered on Nov 2, 1975, on a patch of sand on the beach near Ostia.   Originally it was said to be a killing from rough trade, the handiwork of Giuseppe Pelosi, a Roman low-class rentboy.  Subsequently, a recantation by Pelosi renewed suspicions that other elements had been in play.  Political ones.  Or perhaps an extortion plot.  Or some thought Pasolini himself orchestrated his own death.

In Ostia there is a new little monument, not quite so awful as the earlier one in front of which I filmed a scene for Uno a te back in 1994.  That one was a squalid piece of  would-be “sculpture” falling apart in the salted acridness of the seaside, ostensibly to honor Italy’s lost poet.   It’s been replaced by this

“Pasolini was what can be termed a citizen-poet. He was concerned with his homeland and expressed his feelings in his work. Patriotic poetry usually comes out of a right-wing tradition and is nationalistic, but Pasolini’s great originality was to be a citizen-poet of the left… He wept over the ruins of Italy but without a hint of rhetoric. He was a modern who used the classical tradition. Rimbaud, the poet of the Paris Commune, the most revolutionary of poets, remained his greatest influence. In the years after the Mussolini dictatorship, he adhered, like many of his compatriots, to an unorthodox brand of communism, that was both Christian and utopian, and these feelings for the poor and underprivileged motivated his own poetry and films.”–Alberto Moravia

American Pastoral #6

Bernie Madoff

Marfa Motel, Texas

Camp Runamuck, Rhode Island

Harney (Squaw Killer) Lake, S.D.

Evangelical “Christian Wealth” Church

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband–I see the treacherous seducer
of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be
hid–I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny–I see martyrs and
prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea–I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these–All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look
out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.                             Walt Whitman

American Pastoral #5

Merrilville, Ind.

Late July, dog days of summer.   On the news the doldrums arrive, lazy waves on a calm sea.  Beneath this the usual commotion proceeds:  more troops to Afghanistan under cover of new words for old thoughts.  We’ll pacify them, bring them the glories of democracy, build schools.  30 US dead this past month, we aren’t told how many others we killed in this pursuit, and whatever the numbers they’d be false.  Meantime JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs celebrate, having converted the financial panic of autumn into a fiscal killing a mere 8 months later.  Capitalizing on panic, like a gang war, they rubbed out, with some help from Washington, some major competitors.   Now these two sit on the peak of Wall Street, raking in the money and shelling out billions in reward to those inside the game.  Unemployment rises each month, the funny figures jiggled by the statisticians so the official number is 10% for the US, though the real one is likely far closer to more than 20%.   The jobs vanish, and politicians promise renewal, but the work is gone and there’s little real reason to think it’ll be replaced any time soon.   The celebrated shift to a “service economy” has tanked, the 70% of GDP generated by “consumption” suddenly shrivelled with diminished plastic and heightened extortionary interest rates.  Meanwhile Michael is dead, after much distracting hooplah, and now Walter Cronkite, and new news rolls in.   On Washington’s C Street, an alleged Christian retreat for hardpressed politicians turns out to have been a love-nest for errant hypocritical Republican “family values” Senators and Representatives.   Elmer Gantry is America.

Obama slowly tarnishes, as it becomes clear this Knight in burnished bronze is only the best the political system could offer, but it is still inside the system, and the system is gamed by those of the military-industrial complex intent on keeping and expanding America’s imperium, 700 bases – and building – scattered across the globe.  The whiff of Roman decadence becomes a stench. The prison at Bagram in Afghanistan is a political embarassment so the PR machine cranks about the “bad image” and not the actual substance of the matter: that America, in pursuit of its ugly interests, hesitates not to imprison, torture and kill in the most casual of manners.   Caesar would be proud.  The Romans poisoned themselves with lead linings to their aquaducts; we follow suit with plastic water bottles leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) into us, dicking with our hormones.  Our domestic economy wilts as we pour more and more into armaments and money-shufflers, and Obama orates with a silver tongue speaking as his masters dictate.  Were he to actually attempt to take on his commanders in the Pentagon, CIA or Wall Street, he’d be gone as a lynching victim in August.

Marion, Indiana, 1930

On August 6th, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb in combat on Hiroshima, Japan

Death and delusions

“If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.”

John Updike, following on the heels of Norman Mailer, died recently, leaving a blank space in the New York Review of Books, where until quite recently he ran lovely articles covering art exhibitions and museum visits.  His was an acute eye, and I’ll miss his observations which I always found intelligent and eloquently written.  Rabbit runs no more.

Speaking of the NYRB, while I seldom read books (really – though I’m presently picking slowly through John McPhee’s massive collection Annals of the Former World ) I have been addicted to this journal for now 40 years or so, reading it cover to cover, regardless of my interest in any given article.  And the “personals” which  seem to demonstrate that its readership began back then and has sat firmly still since, so that the median age of those posting  has shifted from the late 20’s back then, to something around 60-70 now.  Though the sales spiels have remained pretty much the same – literary, often pretentious, “cultured”, generally well-off “left.”   For sure most of them would assert they are into ecology and whatnot, though their travels and second homes make clear it’s a certain kind of wealthy pathology.

The kind of salad an NYRB person might eat (this one is from Brazil)

Travis B. Gay and his wife Stephanie, from Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, all of 26 years old, proud owners of the above house, or at least its mortgage, pickup, SUV, and so it was said, big new plasma screen TV, are miffed that a program which they signed onto which would “forgive” the $100,000 hole they bought into in order to go to college is no longer functioning.  The State borrowed the money for the program to cover its own holes.   What ever happened to the American dream?  What - at 26 I don’t deserve a large house, couple of gas guzzlers, big TV to watch, and I have to pay my education bills?  WTF!   I would bet 10 to 1 Travis and his wife are Republicans too, staunch believers in The Market Economy model of how to structure a society, and think public medical programs are Socialist !   But if the lining goes in their wallet, that’s another story.  Just ask the subsidised farmers, arms makers and others who also think social welfare is a communist plot.

Thunder-thighs of Wichita

The young women above are praying at the site of the murdered doctor in Kansas who performed legal surgeries to which some of our citizenry object.  Statistically it seems most of those objecting, who label themselves “pro-life,” also support the death penalty.   Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in the church he attended, provoking much radio talk-show heavy-breathing.

I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
          but not afraid
                    to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
                    because not only my lonesomeness
                                it’s Ours, all over America,
                                                     O tender fellows–
                                & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
                                in the moon 100 years ago or in
                                          the middle of Kansas now.
It’s not the vast plains mute our mouths
                                that fill at midnite with ecstatic language
                     when our trembling bodies hold each other
                                breast to breast on a matress–
            Not the empty sky that hides
                                           the feeling from our faces
            nor our skirts and trousers that conceal
                     the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,
                                white smooth abdomen down to the hair
                                                                between our legs,
            It’s not a God that bore us that forbid
                     our Being, like a sunny rose
                                          all red with naked joy
                     between our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
                     we call Love, want and lack–
            fear that we aren’t the one whose body could be
                     beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
                     kissed all over by every boy of Wichita–
            O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me–
                     On the bridge over the Republican River
                                almost in tears to know
                                           how to speak the right language–
                     on the frosty broad road
                                uphill between highway embankments
                     I search for the language
                                          that is also yours–
                                almost all our language has been taxed by war.
Radio antennae high tension
           wires ranging from Junction City across the plains–
           highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow
                                lanes curving past Abilene
                                          to Denver filled with old
                                                               heroes of love–
                                to Wichita where McClure’s mind
                                          burst into animal beauty
                                          drunk, getting laid in a car
                                                     in a neon misted street
                                                               15 years ago–
           to Independence where the old man’s still alive
           who loosed the bomb that’s slaved all human consciousness
                             and made the body universe a place of fear–
Now, speeding along the empty plain,
                      no giant demon machine
                                visible on the horizon
           but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky’s edge
                      I claim my birthright!
                                reborn forever as long as Man
                                          in Kansas or other universe–Joy
                      reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!
A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,
                      imaging the throng of Selves
                                 that make this nation one body of Prophecy
                                          languaged by Declaration as
                                                     Happiness!
I call all Powers of imagination
           to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
all Lords
                      of human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash
                      Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
           Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands
                                                       give up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquility
           Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void
                       Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru
           William Blake the invisible father of English visions
            Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes
                       half closed who only cries for his mother
Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise
            merciful Chango judging our bodies
                       Durga-Ma covered with blood
                                    destroyer of battlefield illusions
                       million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering
            Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
                       Allah the Compassionate One
                                           Jahweh Righteous One
                                     all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
            ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
                                     & holymen I chant to–
                                            Come to my lone presence
                                                    into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
            make Mantra of American language now,
                             I here declare the end of the War!
                                         Ancient days’ Illusion!
                     and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
            let the Nation weep,
                       let Congress legislate it own delight
                                  let the President execute his own desire–
this Act done by my own voice,
                                          nameless Mystery–
published to my own senses,
                               blissfully received by my own form
            approved with pleasure by my sensations
                       manifestation of my very thought
                       accomplished in my own imagination
                               all realms within my consciousness fulfilled
            60 miles from Wichita
                                          near El Dorado,
                                                     The Golden One,
in chill earthly mist
            houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward
                                                                        in every direction
one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord–
            Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower
                                  where Florence is
                                                        set on a hill,
                                  stop for tea & gas

Wichita Vortex Sutra, Allen Ginsberg, 1966

Scott Roeder, killer of Dr. Tiller

Father and son of Sgt. John M. Russell, who after 3 tours of duty, killed 4 fellow GI’s in Iraq

To wrap up, Errol Morris has a very nice, long and interesting essay piece in the NY Times, springing from an examination of the dubious forgeries of Van Meegeren of Vermeer.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Cy Twombly at Chicago Art Institute new Renzo Piano wing

The average American household is saddled with nearly $8,400 of credit card and other revolving debt, according to Economy.com analysis of government data.

Espresso maker for campers

Near Montecito, Ca.

Maya Lin “Waves” installation, Storm King, NY

Model of Ground Zero train station by Calatrava

Robert Capa  rolls discovered in Mexico

Explorer Scouts Play Terrorist Killers

Harmony Korine sells Liberty Mutual Insurance to red-necks

Obama Moves to Bar Release of Detainee Abuse Photos

Roubini: Dollar’s Demise

Pension Inquiry Reveals a Power Broker’s Web

Obama Urges Rules on Investments Tied to Crisis

And Tex Avery goes self-referential

American Pastoral #4

Oregon, Stephen Shore

James Castle, Idaho

Josemite, Alvin Langdon Coburn

Platos Retreat, Annie Sprinkle

US Soldiers in Afghanistan

[look at the eyes of the boys and man -we're so welcome as Mr Brooks would have it?]

I have traveled rather extensively throughout the US, and as well elsewhere in the world.  In America, in almost every small town and city, along with the Elks, the Rotary, Moose Lodge, and others, there are also the VFW and American Legion.  Usually these are run-down places, a bar and dance floor, an assembly room, some offering their parking lots as trailer parking spaces for members.  They are ubiquitous, and glide by nestled in the landscape almost unremarked, except during elections when they invariably support Republican candidates and on national holidays when they’ll be festooned with flags.  You’ll find their members out on July 4th and other patriotic day parades.   While it may be that my cultural antennae aren’t good enough to read it, when I have been in other countries I don’t recall ever having seen similar such places announcing themselves.

So embedded into our culture are these that we scarcely notice their meaning, or give them a thought.  Veterans of Foreign Wars.  American Legion. Though were we to give it a thought we’d have to admit that indeed America is rather often “over there” warring away.  The list of American military actions abroad is far too long to list here, but a check at Wikipedia will glaze over your eyes, and prompt an understanding of just why all those VFW and Foreign Legion halls bedeck our landscape.  And today’s news announces that as we wind down the “war”  in Iraq (never declared by Congress, the Constitutional prerogative and duty of which it is to so declare),  Obama is cranking up the other undeclared war in Afghanistan, however much he seems to dress it up with extra rhetorical flourishes.     Foreign wars are as American as, well, apple pie.  Yesterday, along this line, in response to a column by David Brooks in the New York Times, I wrote this (surely not to be published)

Sirs:

After cautioning about his doubts (The Winnable War), Mr Brooks concludes with bright optimism about American actions in Afghanistan, and comes to this line,

“Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.”

I could go Google 100 statements from Mr Brooks about another quite recent war, of which he burbled with similar enthusiasm for American military adventures; however he might succinctly summarize his conclusions about our national DNA by simply saying:

Wars R Us.

Sincerely

Jon Jost

“Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.”

Quoted by Woodward and Bernstein, allegedly said by Henry Kissinger to General Al Haig

I grew up in the military, my father being an officer in the Army.  Ft Benning, occupation troops in Hokaido Japan, Ft Leavenworth, post-war occupation in Trieste Italy and then Augsburg Germany, and then a final family stint in the suburbs of Washington DC while Col. Jost was a desk jockey in the Pentagon, a Chief Personnel Officer for the Army in Vietnam, if what I was told is correct.   Like other Army brats I got full exposure to the military mentality – an exposure that seems to produce two quite different reactions.  For some the medicine takes, with the sons following in the footprints of the father, taking up the military tradition and its behaviors.  But for others – and I have met a fair amount of these in my travels, and found many creative sorts among them – it makes for a forceful foundation against which to rebel, as I did.  In my case it was perhaps a bit more extreme as I refused to cooperate with the Selective Service and landed, much to my father’s surprise and consternation, in prison rather than in uniform.    While I could hardly say we ever had a meaningful conversation prior to that act, we certainly never had one since.  While I differ profoundly with Mr Kissinger on most things, I sadly concur on his judgment on those in the military, though there are of course many who are not, except in that fundamental first point, stupid.   It is only their acceptance of the “sign up” gambit which is stupid, though given the social pressures, it is understandable.  Like most cultures I am familiar with, America is a place where “boys and their balls” (my phrase for the accumulated matter of guys and gonads) is a celebrated locus for our social constructs.  Boys are taught from the beginning that certain masculine things, like guns, and killing, or swinging bats, or tossing footballs, are of paramount value.   This is perhaps more exaggerated in rural towns where a certain kind of “patriotism” is a given – even if it contradicts other values in the same people, like “small government,” low taxes, and the rest.   And it is clear that those at the top of the power structure, the Kissinger-type people, know only too well how to play those sentiments like a Wurlitzer.   And thus our landscape is dotted with the VFW and American Legion halls, and monuments to the fallen.   Most come from towns like these:

Beacon NY

[This must be from a movie, so fake does it look.]

Cottage Grove, Oregon

And given training and discipline, they become men.

Of course, honoring the dead of war has a long lineage for us.

American Pastoral #3

Mending Wall

SOMETHING there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Robert Frost

Buy Low Sell High

Foreclosure sale, NYC

Profiting from another’s misery is, of course, an old story.  Read the spam you get sent.   In the news of late have been some interesting stories on how America ” works.”  One of them is about Penny Mac, a new company which has arisen out of the ashes of an older one, Countrywide.   The latter did mortgages, and was one of the instigators of the present housing bubble crash.  Executives from it have managed to borrow a mess of money and are now buying up defaults cheap, refinancing, and, well, making more money based on the mess they produced and from which they profited earlier, though leaving others to hold the empty bag.  Now that is capitalism!!

“In an insane world, the person who is rational has the problem. Money is as addictive as cocaine.” — Andrew Lo, a professor of financial engineering.

For some decades now, in the economics departments across the academic landscape, it has been the “Chicago School,” (Milton Friedman, most famously) which has ridden high in the saddle, espousing the kind of economics that has landed us in this mess.  These are those of “the short sharp shock” of  Thatcherism.  Leave it to Ivory Tower “thinkers” to get very detached from reality and in due time have their theories, brought into practice in the big real world, bring ruin to all.   Back in the 60’s it was the Best and Brightest (aka Robert McNamara et al) who ushered in the Viet Nam war, sure they knew better than everyone how to manage with up to date methods the nasty matter of war.  More recently Mr. “Stuff Happens” Rumsfeld followed precisely in the same footprints.  So now, as the unfolding economic debacle reveals the hollowness of theory, and these economists (Greenspan, Paulson, etc.) scamper to lay blame anywhere but at their own feet, doubtless we will be treated to arcane new theories and numbers which won’t, of course, do a damn thing for those recently booted from their houses thanks to the glories of plain old fashioned socially and politically encouraged greed in the form of con-men high and low issuing sucker loans and mortgages, and credit card issuers jacking up their %, all to a deliberately dumbed-down and now numbed-out unterclass, which bought into the slick promotions that promised everything for nothing down and a little tiny print about something later.

Economists seem in general not to be into morals.  And their practitioners – businessmen – seem not to be into ethics.  Every man for himself.  Darwinian blah blah.   He who dies with the most toys wins, says the bumper sticker.

Calvin Coolidge

“The business of America is business.”

And you can trust assured that for Republicans, this statement is the god-almighty truth, and they make sure they practice it as a religion.  In fact, as many recent mega-church pastors have said, sort of following in the statement of a recent Chinese communist premier (Deng Xiaoping) who said “To get rich is glorious,”  being filthy rich is a sign that God loves you and you are doing right.  Indeed.

Robert Schuyler’s Crystal Cathedral, Orange County Ca.

Meantime back in the numbers racket, this:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Freddie Mac, one of the two main U.S. mortgage companies that the U.S. government is depending on to help stabilize the housing market, said on Wednesday it needs $30.8 billion from the Treasury to survive after a massive fourth-quarter loss.

Interestingly, in the NYT article saying this they fail to actually mention how much money old Freddie Mac has already gobbled up in US taxpayer largesse:  $284 billion to 150 billion, split between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (don’t you love these folksy names) – I can’t find an actual figure for Freddie in a quick Google search.  So Joe Public coughs up another 30.8 billion or Freddie goes under.  Where, to whom, why, how all this money goes remains a matter of opaqueness, along with the other estimated 3-9 trillion bucks being used to prop up our glorious system, pride of the nation, or at least of the 1% of the filthy rich part.   The rest are being played, as usual, for suckers.

Ah, but Mr. Schuyler will be happy to pray for you up there on his television monitor while you sit in the sun-splashed SoCal pews, and, deep in Orange County, surely vote Republican.

The national news meme for our two permitted slightly different political parties is that Republicans, The Grand Old Party, are the guardian of thrift, of small government, of national security, etc.  Re the matter of national security – on just whose watch, and given ample forewarning of imminent threat, did the 9/11 attack occur?  And of the former items, see the below.

Thanx to Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

For more on this, see cinemaelectronica.