Two short poems for Not Us

Pulling the trigger of guns

loaded w/

fiction still fires facts







Suppose detonation affords leaving

life enters history succeeding reason

The Obesity Crisis

According to my health plan I'm obese. I'm about 30lbs over what I should be for my height which doesn't take into account my incredibly broad rib cage, shoulders or general bone density. This measurement is predicated on the simple fact, for my 6' (5' 11 3/4") I should be x number of lbs. According to this index that's based on a ratio which is derived from the number of health problems of subscribers of a certain age, heigh, weight and state of health, I should be charged an increased monthly premium to offset these 30 lbs as they will lead to greater incurred costs for the insurance company.

At the same time, a coalition in Washington has taken out a huge swath of advertising in numerous newspapers across the country to combat the hype surround obesity. I'm overweight I will offer that, am I obese? Not so certain. Is obesity a problem? Well lets do a very surface pole/test of this, when you think vintage clothing and fashion, how often do you see XXX-Large sizes in vintage stores? The trend would imply that the average american is taking up more space, in similar fashion to the expansion of the universe, our asses seem to have outgrown the alloweable space of the airline coach seat into double reservation prices. Yet, its all hype. The CDC reported that nearly 400K adults die of heart problems related to obesity, and nearly 435K die of smoking related ailments. Obesity is obviously not the problem.

The coalition that has taken out the ad space has said that they ar funded by casual dinning chains. What the hell is a casual dinning chain you ask? Think Applebees, sizzler, Lyon's, Olive Garden. These are the restaraunts most probably to be found in the halls and stalls of your average American strip mall. The notion of casual dinning exists as a marginal seperation between fast food and formal non chain restaurants. Casual dinning is a way to say that what we peddle is a cut above the average burger, but we have that too. The food is naturally rich, full of sugar and the portions are generally more than you might fight recommended by the FDA. When did the act of eating become casual? Was it ever formal? Is it not both at the same time? But Casual Dinning restaraunts... the idea of them tickles my sense of verbal apropriation.

Simultaneously, this morning, on NPR, I heard a report about sheep farmers, guest workers from Argentina that come over to tend flocks of sheep in the coastal foothills. The live in squalid conditions without running water or heat or viable toilets (a shovel suffices). Following a law to set minimum guidelines for the sheltering of these workers, a rancher/importer of immigrant labor said: "we have 70%-80% of workers who fulfilled their 3 year agreement requesting to return. as a matter of fact these men gain weight here." then we must be doing something right by feeding them enough for them to gain weight. Is this a sign that the barest means of subsistence have been met? The additional pounds are the hallmark that all's well and that the status quo has been met: the expansion of the body therefore no other action has to be taken to improve their lives, for they are reaping the rewards and inheritance of casual dinning and fast convenient food, if not for the bare necessities, then most deifnately: comfort.

Another Pokarney Gem

Greg's translation/film of XVI wasn't his first cinematic offering to our class: he started with a translation of Doug M.'s Totus Tuus: Entirely Thine Am I (Totally Yours.) Greg said he played off the Pope/Pop notion and all the news coverage that circled the passing of John Paul II and election of Benedict XVI (oh my, sixteen and sixteen), the result is this little movie here...

Please be patient, this file is 6 megs and takes a while to load.

XVI as done by Greg Pokarney

Ok, so I'm floored, a little would be an understatement, a lot would be closer to the truth. Greg did a translation of XVI from 'Not Us, Not Them'. He took the poem read it outloud, used some loops, modulated the voice, then popped in images he shot while travelling through Tennessee and packaged it all together using iMovie.

Its so damn cool I don't think I can ever read that poem in public, it just won't do it justice the way that Greg did. I posted it here... (Please be patient, its about 3 megs in size, speakers help too.)

Papal Fascination

I find myself oddly fascinated by the Papal succession and I'm not entirely sure why that is. In general, I like the ability to touch history: to be close to it and almost intimate with something ancient or older than this rather young nation. The Apostolic Succession of Popes from Peter, all 265 of them, is an unbroken line of history. That to be has a certain fascination.

The Holy See's website only goes back about 10 popes to Leo XIII. I found myself looking up popes and reading a bit of thier history. I was especially fascinated by the ones that served less than a year, in some cases only a month: Damasus II (July - August 1048), dead from Malaria contracted at a retreat. He was an unwilling Pontiff to begin with, nominated and forced to serve by Henry III. I guess back in those days the preeminant rules, whoever was succesor to the Holy Roman Emperor, or heald the reigns of power, would nominate the Pope, or help the conclave make up its mind. Some great stories about Popes can be had here.

What I find of endless interest is this notion of Peter's See, or The Holy See and how that idea of divinity, or in this specific case, a divine institution, exists in the fluid construct of a Sea. There is a saying about Talmud that it is a Sea and one has to learn to swim in the waters of the Talmud. The concept that religion is vast and oceanic is both true and untrue. Literally, the Holy See is a noun for the samllest sovereign state in the world: The Vatican. Yet the concept of Holy explodes the notion of See into Sea there by giving it a mythical proportion of at once small and vast.

Barbara Bradley Haggerdy made the comment today that the modern battle is no longer sectarian, in the Christian world, but orthodox vs. progressive. Evangelical Christians have banded together with Orthodox Catholics, two groups that in the past seldom if ever saw eye to eye, to combat what they see is the threat of progressive movements and thinkins in religion, as in the nomination of the openly gay Bishop in the Episcopal church, the ordination of women, pro-life movements etc. etc. When you think of this struggle for the morality of the country, if not the world, it seems a little medieval, have we suddenly fallen back a few steps and are once again nailing a set of complaints to the church door in Wittenberg? The fractured sects that argued over worship practices, ritual and slight skews in terms of moral outlook have abandoned those petty squables in favor of a unified front. The middle has dissipated a bit. The landscape is terribly polarized and those with moderat perspectives had been forced to choose a side. You're either with us or against us pilgrim.

Edmond Jabes

“Silence always talks to him who surrenders his words.”

"It is not truth that is important, but how we use it."

“We cannot help turning divine truth into a human truth. Thus we deliver it unto death,”

"Creating does not mean affirming creation, but, rather, canceling it out with the created object, means opposing it to itself where it holds sway, means, as in enamel work, a second firing."

--The Book of Dialogue – Edmond Jabès

XVI - Reworked

XVI

Time
yet time
again
to war—
is war—
time
moonlight
serene
fragile barricade
sounds
still sweetly
the echo
time begins
this way
is war(or)
how it all
began
to state
on fallen
grass fields
barracks
bones
bushels of tin
brokered
real estate
word spells
location
in a locomotive
box car beautiful
the trees
and snowy
pines pinned
myth tongue
to this work
as work
or weather
owning signs
possibly
like a finger
crossing
throat.

The thing with Director's Cuts

So if this site ever gets out I'm sure I'll draw some heat about this but here goes: THE DIRECTOR'S CUT pro or con?!

They started like a small cult phenomenon. The buzz would get around that this director or that would be releasing his or her vision of the film. The original impetus, befor the producers and their audience tests changed the ending, cut out essential footage, slapped up a montage instead of letting the film run a forty five minute course of historical narative. Whatever the case, they are here now, in varried and unpredictable incarnations.

At first I was certain that they were the better of the two films. At first I was. I found myself defending such drastic changes as the removal of narration from Bladerunner and its darker ending. Everyone mostly agreed that the extra footage in The Abyss was amazing, but a bit didactic. Redux was long and hard to sit through, but when the original a Sunday morning cartoon? Still, the added scenes with Brando are well worth wading through the French Plantation scene and the playmates in the downed helicopter. The directors by and large have demonstrated their egos, their odd visions and their unabashed artistry by challenging the original release, the accepted offering of the producers and giving us, at times, a new work of art.

Dune illustrates the concept of director's cut in reverse. The original offering is the director's cut. There's a second edit of the film that made its premiere on network television with added footage. The eyes of the fremen in these additional scenes were never colorized. David Lynch had his name removed from this version of the film to demonstrate his unhappiness with it. The famous non existant "John Doe" director Alan Smithee takes credit for this one.

Not every film branded as a director's cut is a new film. Some of them have small clips, or perhaps a slightly elongated or curtailed beginning or end. However, sometimes, just sometimes, the producers get it right the first time out and the Director is off his rocker!

Lets examine the case of The Big Blue by Luc Besson. A film full of wonderful silence, long shots of inky blakness with a single figure descending to inhuman depths on a single breath of air; the sport is known as free diving. The original US release was cut down from the 138 minutes of the European release to 119. The thought was that there were too many silences and abstract imagery (we aren't given much credit as a cinema going audience). The soundtrack, Eric Serra's synth heavy brainchild, was replaced by Conti's more ehtereal synth murmers. I'm a fan of Serra's work, his previous and later colaborations have yielded wonderful sound scapes, however, here, I think Conti wins out, as his music is less invasive, less overpowering, it allows the film to breathe and the audience to smell the ocean. In the only available DVD version of this film, the director's cut, the film has been dragged out to 168 minutes and Serra's original soundtrack has been revived, yet it feels out of synch with the movie. Its so disconnected from the total film that it clashes, clobbering wonderful silences that Conti's soundtrack was keenly aware of. All in all, this is perhaps the worst director's cut I've ever seen. The American release was brilliant as it was a very quiet film that left you with puzzling questions that didn't take away from the plot. The new version is heavy handed, over written, over shot and over scored. This is one of those cases where the producers completely should've won out, and for fans of the producer's cut, the American release, sad days people, you can't even buy the VHS anymore... eBay is your only recourse. So good hunting...

-L

A humorous quote & story from NPR

Someone once said (probably a Frenchman), that the British empire was built by Gentlemen traveling abroad in search of a good meal.

14 of the top 50 restaurants in the world, today, are in the U.K. The number 1 restaurant in the world, as voted by some organization or other, is in the U.K. "The Fat Duck" in the south east, beating out two time champ, The French Laundry in Napa, California. Who would have ever thought? I wonder what Zach has to say about this.

NPR

My morning commute: rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt rUt

Remembering now the words of Brian C. (speed freak lawyer supreme) "You know you're getting older by how much talk radio you listen to." The station on my little Honda stock sterio seldom jiggles away from NPR, 98.5, it oscilates between that and KFOG (old foggie rock according to my ex), but still, lots of NPR. I pleasing political corectness that seldom deviates from Yahoo's iterations of Off Beat News or "Strange" from the AP newswire. Its like news, just not as effective. Maybe the left lacks the punch of the Fox. I don't know, its a sedative that feels like PBS, oh wait, it is PBS. Then again, its better than the alternatives. This much we know to be true.

I'm looking forward to my evenning commute, I will be sedated, a little, before class.

Of Often—

last night i stopped believing Sartre, hell and other people, that way laid shit from before, hell is not other than other people other hell for sod, hell is other people according, other hell—he’s wrong is something i kept repeating around dawn waiting to make love to the fog—i’ve a hell in my pants just hell bent on heading out into the west—

still back to thinking short shrift supper time now—its hell to find a meal in this town, deftly anyone can’t pour soup like my fish—i find the most sentient being between the hours of two and six in the morning—i still don’t believe him—

sitting with the rifle across my lap i light the cigarette and place it squarely in the pearl tipped eight inch cigarette holder i bought at the thrift store—hunter used one of these i think to myself taking a bead on the owner of the pawn shop who sold it to me, he used one,--something like bang now breaks the traffic and rudiment of so many foam lattes whipped into importance—so many broken something or others might i be thanked for taking matters into my own hands —

this is a all a form of disbelief—this is all a form of disbelief—this is all a form of disbelief—this is all formed to disbelieve—this disbelieving forms all—this belief frames us---all forms of disbelief entertain—this isn’t believing the same as disbelief---this different belief is disturbing---this is not what i believe---this isn’t about believing—form me a statement on belief(500wordsorso)—forget about belief---they believed that wife beaters went well with pastel sport coats in the 80s—i’ve never played a lawyer on TV—do you believe in forgetting?—phallic beliefs get me good—first things first lets crack open his belief---what we’ve found true in most case are support structures surrounding the art of disbelief—and then Bob sings about his beliefs: you can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time and now i see the light—you’ll die if you stand up for your beliefs—different thing making people feel guilty for believing this and that and this or that—not really a matter of choosing between this and that when there’s still this matter of other—there’s still this salty taste in my mouth---you silly rabbit, beliefs are for kids—the monsignor tried to make me believe it was pretend—tra la-la-la-la la-la—hit ‘em where they hurt if they don’t believe—i believe the children are the future, entrenched and well and without choice—i’ve decided that the new black this winter will be all white beliefs—withered now and soon to crumble—where’s the belief?—people are a strange lot, is there commission for this sale?—intangibles generate countless human cycles—where you don’t need proof, you’ll find a kind of resilience—Darwin didn’t disprove himself by admitting he believed just before he died—

hand’s own matters taking and thanked might i be other to something broken—so many times at the corner store being whipped by less than one foam rudiment and traffic breaks bang like something—one used him, sold it to me, one pawn shop owner (7 dinners for 7 boys for 7 meals and 7 bottles of wine seven’d out), the bead takes me to these things i think hunter once said—i smoked out the older and replaced the ash that had fallen from my burning cigarette tipped with mother-of-perl’d homesickness, i gather smoke to myself—

quotes revolve and door way— quotes and door

not to make this thing complicated—not to use the same bag of tricks—she reaches for me against my best concerns—grabs a hold of that thing she’s been eyeballing from across the bed through a cloud of smoke we shared before we got down to sharing—i ask her why she grabs it and hold it and if she really likes hand holding this way—she says she doesn’t know but squeezes just a little bit tighter all the time asking me if i like pressure—sure i do—can you say you’ve ever seen such a fine specimen—i conceded to never having often seen such things as attached to her—and then it hits me that she’s not there for the hell of it—this sort of being there—she’s never been there—and i’m not there—and what is more—maybe my dick fell off somewhere between here and there—gone limp thinking about other people—makes me want to make you more than me baby—makes me want you—more than—other—me—you—more often—you—

Moontop Myths

Let’s swim to the moon, (ah-ha)
Let’s climb through the tide

pretend for a moment that this maze
of rooftop quadrants cradles me

your head a pillow book somewhere
near my breast beating hymns

to smoke; shorter than signal flares
siren wails and red carpets’ glare.

I’ve a thorn in my side
the same in English as in Spanish

it’s the rub of dirt still drinking water
now latched onto my lips

we’re the severed garden
wishing away the boneyard’s gravity

west of the sun, in the cut of evening
shameless grammar in filching flirts

with someone begging ever yet more.
Unhook my skin from the night

so that it might drape us over with yellow
stars the color of el camino headlights,

pushing wheal barrows of dust into wind
seems possible when we’re left to

Penetrate the evenin’ that
the city sleeps to hide

I don't blog.

I can't remember the exact moment when the need to have my own blog arose; as a matter of fact, I don't know that such a need even exists. To be perfectly frank, I don't need to blog. Yet here I am, "figure of outward" (Olson about Creeley), figuring things outside, in the open, the inner agora has ceased to stock readily accessable answers. So we move into the open air, outside, figures in mass.