I called for Gehargehunk to come inside but he wouldn’t listen. This was in Bronxville, 1991. It was exasperating. Living there. Getting Gehargehunk to listen. He was used to a maritime climate. It’s what he was accustomed to. Rain. Salty wind. Total cloud cover 200 days a year. We had only some of that. We had the Sound, sort of, but where we were was closer to the Hudson. Inside was the problem. There there was none of that. There’s where I couldn’t get Gehargehunk to go.
I wondered why we brought him here. I blame it on tourism and trade. For centuries our lands lacked relations. Accredited anyway. That changed by virtue of the Air Services Bilateral Agreement of 13 July 1990. It established direct flights between our countries. Well we went.
We wanted to see what animals, people, the sky, and rocks looked like there. We were underwhelmed and unsurprised. Only things that gave us a good time were what we had in Bronxville. Yeast excretions, fermented fruit, bovine platters. The sameness got to us. Then we met Gehargehunk. We got attached. We suborned who we needed. Our leaving day was his. What problems.
I spent too much time walking after him in Bronxville. I wished he had something. Then the idea came. I don’t know from where. It isn’t my forte. But I thank whatever for it. I got him his pilot license. He became a new Gehargehunk. I’d say Capt. Gehargehunk was new. He got a run pronto. He flew seaplanes. He took them off the water and put them back there. In between was the sky. Isn’t that a nice story.
composite computer generated shots of a star being swallowed by a black hole.
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“My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis BuñuelFour days before Franco’s arrival, Lorca, who never got excited about politics, suddenly decided to leave for Granada, his native city.
‘Federico,’ I pleaded, trying to talk him out of it. ‘Horrendous things are happening. You can’t go down there now; it’s safer to stay right here.’
He paid no attention to any of us, and left, tense and frightened, the following day. The news of his death was a terrific shock. Of all the human beings I’ve ever known, Federico was the finest. I don’t mean his plays or his poetry; I mean him personally. He was his own masterpiece. Whether sitting at the piano imitating Chopin, improvising a pantomime, or acting out a scene from a play, he was irresistible. He read beautifully, and he had passion, youth, and joy. When I first met him, at the Residencia, I was an unpolished rustic, interested primarily in sports. He transformed me, introduced me to a wholly different world. He was like a flame.
His body was never found. Rumors about his death circulated freely, and Dali even made the ignoble suggestion that there’d been some homosexual foul play involved. The truth is that Lorca died because he was a poet. ‘Death to the intelligencia’ was a favorite wartime slogan. When he got to Granada, he apparently stayed with the poet Rosales, a Falangist whose family was friendly with Lorca’s. I guess he thought he was safe with Rosales, but a group of men (no one knows who they were, and it doesn’t really matter, anyway) led by someone called Alonso appeared one night, arrested him, and drove him away in a truck with some workers. Federico was terrified of suffering and death. I can imagine what he must have felt, in the middle of the night in a truck that was taking him to an olive grove to be shot. I think about it often.
”
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“My Last Sigh, The Autobiography of Luis BuñuelLorca was a superb reader, but something in the story about the old man and the young girl who find themselves together in a canopied bed at the end of Act One struck me as hopelessly contrived. As if that weren’t enough, an elf then emerges from the prompter’s box and addresses the audience.
‘Well, Eminent Spectators,’ he says. ‘Here are Don Perlimplín and Belisa…’
‘That’s enough, Federico,’ I interrupted, banging on the table. ‘It’s a piece of shit.’
Lorca blanched, closed the manuscript, and looked at Dalí.
‘Buñuel’s right,’ Dalí said in his deep voice. ‘Es una merda.’
”
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Shot over several days in England and France, I made this avant-garde short for auteurs and animals.
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Born in the 40s and died in the 70s. Age, the range will suffice. Cattle, one small herd wanted. Herbs, 12 large plants. Location, Cave-in-Rock, Illinois. Family, yes. Women and children all seen regularly. After his passing they were unable to find men and fathers for the long term. Home at the time of death, fortified. Murders committed, known but unprosecuted, one. The victim’s crime was criminal menace, they said, but impartial enforcement would’ve called it unintentional trespass to subsoil. Politics, libertarian. Icon, the man who invented a new part for the motorcycle engine, which improved something and was used across brands in all future designs. Interests, authority, the having of but non-compliance with, stretching out things’ use, gears, wheels, piles, sports not in the Olympics, drinking.
The murder, the victim was an amateur geologist and loved to hike. He did not know the area well because he lived in another state. It had recently rained and the soil on the trail was dark and dank. He took a break to eat a handful of gorp and poke around where it was eroded. Botryoidal crystals in a pale yellow rock caught his eye. Excited he uncovered a chunk of witherite.
At the sporting goods store in town he bought a pick, a sifter, and a knapsack. It was his nature to answer queries forthrightly. It had little monetary value, he made sure to explain, as the stone was only semi-precious. Its joy was in its scarcity. Reporting this, the shopkeep emphasized the words monetary, precious, and scarce.
Thus it was that our subject surveilled from his camouflaged deer blind the part of the trail that crossed his land. The geologist appeared early but seemed content to mine the original site, which wasn’t on the subject’s land, and did so much of the day. Though he could see his little rat face light up with each new discovery, the subject could do nothing. He passed the time cleaning, oiling, and wiping down his rifle and becoming infuriated.
Past dinnertime the geologist seemed from the distance to get the idea to scout the area before evening came. He moved down the trail. At the first strike of his pick into the soil there was a reverberating pop. The subject did not disturb the body except to put his gloves on and filch most of the witherite, one piece of which he stuffed into the broken earth there by the point of the pick.
The subject had served with the local constabulary, who marched up and dutifully trampled both the footprints in the wet soil and what else was unseen. They noted the lack of safety orange among the victim’s garments and the statement of the county surveyor regarding what the subject owned. It did not go to trial.
Classification of fractures (source: Merck Manual)
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Gordon Morgan scampered up and down the White Main, selling tumor detector kits. “Guten morgen, Gordon Morgan,” the townsfolk would say, all friendly, until he went into his spiel. Then it was “Verpiss dich,” which is even less polite than it sounds in English.
He became lonely and took up with an international sportswoman, one predisposed to his way of thought within boundaries. Helga traveled to competitions every year. As they approached he never said anything, just ceased responding. She left without guilt. She’d explained the way she lived her life early on. In her absence he removed the clothes in her closet and bullied them, stretching them on standing lamps and giving them a cruel menacing.
On her return if his behavior carried over she’d take her new medal and strike him on the temple. When he came to he was off on something else. “Leftwich!” he went around screaming. “Leftwich! Leftwich!” as though his brain had been extirpated. She never got to know what that was all about.
A relationship with incumbent violence wasn’t what she’d dreamed of, but she adapted. She liked to win. In Germany nobody’s perfect, she told herself. And they’d already spent dozens of infuriating days waiting in lines, the bureaucratic hassle of smooshing their last names into one conjoined eponym. She liked the idea of forcing the record-keepers to have to update the books, the prissy schwein.
On her retirement from sport his attacks grew, as did their source of income, thanks to corporate sponsors. Now her smile traveled for her. Meanwhile neurologists discovered Gordon Morgan’s brain had lesions, tumors, and lesions sprouting tumors, in some profane fractal neoplasm. He was nonplussed. “The detector kits work on everyone but me,” he voice-activated.
Rat glia, the support structure of the brain, at 400x magnification.
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The 1992 Winter Olympics were to be held in Albertville, France, but in Asia hundreds of athletes were spiritually unfed, all wilderness-encircled and howling. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it sent its Olympic squad to Roman Pluto. Its member states had not yet reorganized into independent nations, or if they had, they didn’t rate their athletes among initiating government, tampering with the tax code, giving all the oil to three dudes, lineage, and the porting over of secret police.
It was a quandry to match the word Olympic. How could athletes, some the favored in their event, enter a competition whose core component was to rep the hood? How to shine the lusterless red of the lonely dwarf star? To hammer with dough? To have not moved but find the concrete apartment block under one’s feet has transmuted to nowhere? Whither, communist?
These hormonally inflated men and dubious women were the heroes of Marx, raised in the brotherhood of workers, who had all the power to be cold and hide what they were reading. And it was a brotherhood that availed them.
These reverse-Soviets were permitted to compete. Their banner was the Olympic flag. They received their spotless gold medals to the accompaniment of the Olympic Hymn. They fought for Magique, the fleshy eunuch who mascotted those games. They triumphed for a collective. That much was the same. The Unified Team, the world would forever briefly know them as.
Salt and pepper under a microscope.
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Gymn was a spy. Used to be. The other day he burned out in Afghanistan. He had a compulsion, throwing firecrackers. It stuck with him. It was childish. Lots of things were. From the cruiser he watched the adults, their anger at what’s inanimate, their attention swayed by what’s pretty, the emotions they had at everything. Life, how boring it could be. How easy it was to get rid of being bored. The rules are in place. Everyone knows them. Gymn’d been waiting in a cafe. For his contact. Where he was there are no cafes on the street. It was at the hotel. One would think the rates would be better, Afghan hotel. Ah the magnates knew. Anyone who didn’t see past a hotel could afford it. Same person’d have the sense not to set off bangs on the patio, but that’s boredom. It’s very big and it’s very dense. Its gravity acted on Gymn. Put him in its orbit. Despite the spy game he stayed there, caught. Only thing that helped was acting outside the rules. Lessens that mass. Get it small enough and pop he’d escape. Savor this, he said out loud. His wrists hurt but he enjoyed the ride. The agency would cut him loose, they said they would before. It was important, this ride to the station. The brain was someplace new. The sensory apparatus amplified. No job. Animal senses. The street was on Titan and the people could fly. The food was free and it was amniotic. Gymn wished they’d crack the window. Soon he’d have a new job, in the kitchen or the laundry. The ultimate in crushing routines was coming.
Green algae mounted on sugar at 60x magnification.
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Living in the Material World
is Martin Scorsese’s documentary about George Harrison. It approaches three and a half hours in length and could comfortably be an hour more. It’s terrific. What is getting the most press, and most appreciation from fans, is the amount of never-before-seen footage, along with further outtakes from the Beatles Anthology. It’s terrific. Scorsese does such a quality job assembling the clips and interviews into a motion picture with a strong story that he is himself invisible within it, and this is the only possible choice, it is correct, and it demonstrates on his part masterful skill and taste.
Dhani, his son, talking about growing up, says as a teenager in school he joined the British equivalent of ROTC. He walked around the house in his military uniform, and his dad hated that. That’s how you rebelled in my house, he said smiling.
His wife Olivia comes off as a thoughtful, spiritual person. She brings up his infidelity in general terms. One incident she refers to without describing it, and says that their reconciliation afterwards made them realize they were a stronger couple and more deeply in love. Certainly her great love for him comes through as she talks about caring for him when he was sick. But everything seems to show he kept doing it, being unfaithful, throughout their marriage. When asked the secret of a long marriage, Olivia leans forward to say, You don’t get divorced.
Scorsese interviews Patti Boyd. This is one of those necessities we hope for but usually don’t get. They go over her leaving George for Clapton. She says one of them wrote the most beautiful song she’d ever heard. Oddly, it was Clapton, meaning Layla. This calls her taste into question. Layla is not that good. It can hardly be called beautiful, until the piano coda. However Clapton didn’t write the coda, one of his session players did. Clapton heard the guy playing it and asked him to let him tack it onto the end of his song. The Beatles aside, there are six or seven songs on All Things Must Pass plainly better than anything Clapton ever did. Perhaps love clouded her judgment. As they tell it, George didn’t mind her leaving him for Clapton. He goes so far as to tell a journalist, I’d rather she was with him than some dope. But there comes a night at a party when he gets angry and confronts them. Ultimately, little hay is made of all this. One commenter, I think Dhani, smiles and shrugs and says it was a time of hippie free love. Another commenter puts the infidelities in the context of George’s religious beliefs, saying that because everything in the waking world is maya, or an illusion, that nothing that happens truly matters.
This can be useful to help someone overcome the pinnacle of mindfucks that was his level of fame. But as far as copouts go, it’s pretty handy. The man had clear moral failings. The participants acknowledge as much. Everyone remarks that he had two sides to him, one loving and one angry.
Dhani, recalling a time George got the police off his back, says he realized for the first time that his dad was not just some scary man, he was on his side. This gives us pause. Scary man? We wonder what stories he held back, or what Scorsese cut out. He can portray in George what McCartney called his red-blooded tastes, but his possible misdeeds as parent, no.
It seems that even in this documentary, which goes farther than the Anthology in making George more rounded, more human, that even here the Beatle myth must be protected. John comes off more rounded as well, in footage that was cut from the Anthology. In one scene, we see a performance familiar to us from the Anthology, but in Scorsese’s doc, we see what was cut out of its predecessor: John on stage, between songs, trying to banter with a screaming crowd, saying low away from the mic, Shut up or I will kill you. For a fan it’s like holy shit.
But to the point of the necessary reverence that must be kept, Paul and Ringo are almost as cardboard as ever. And that may be fine. The more we learn about the men, the more likely it seems that in the end, when the sad day comes that Paul leaves us, he will emerge as the driving force in the group, the most talented musician, and the best husband and father. What gives him a little rounding, in this doc, is George’s story of how he’d be hanging out with John and the phone would ring and they would groan, knowing it was Paul calling to get them back to work. George admits Paul’s the reason why the Beatles made as many albums as they did. All respect and thanks to him for it.
Ringo, if anything, receives another layer of the warmth and caring he’s well known for. There’s a wonderful clip, available on youtube, of George and Ringo on a chat show, and Ringo blurts out, The last time I spoke to George, he told me he was suing me. The look on George’s face is embarrassment and shock, cascading into a release of incredulous mirth, and he turns his head from the camera to hide his laughter. Ringo says, so sue me George, that’s okay, I’ll always love you.
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Don’t talk to me about True Crime. I don’t want to hear it anymore. There are good articles out there, is my hypothesis. I want to read them. I don’t care about the content, I want good prose. There are lots of lists around, of those purportedly good articles. Lots of aggregators too. I’m subscribed to them. I thank the editors. Most of the articles aren’t bad but aren’t so great though a few are. Why I should do my own list. It would be of the highest quality because these articles made the cut from the cut, naturally. I’m just a guy on my haunches in the green Roman algae bath, casting my reflection on the air-sodden non-wavy world. Light hits it without bending. It has something I don’t have down here, True Crime.
It is a subject most beleaguered. Deconstructing it wearies. There is phenomenal injustice in the world. This is a core truth teenagers recognize and hold to. I remember at that age in this I was the same as today: I want information, I like reading, I like learning, I love art. If there’s a link it’s likely I’ll read it. I’ve got two tabs open right this minute, and this is after I read say 20-25 articles this morning (my job is slow now). It feels like madness. Wait, I even read Cracked this afternoon, probably 10 on there. Even something that stupid, occasionally there’s some good information. If never good writing, and nothing close to art. All these articles I’m putting in my brain. It feels like madness but I’m hooked. There’s precious little else left in life to obsess over. I’m married. It’s only in the evenings that the articles stop.
I haven’t written since April Fifth. Will this stream of conscious unedited right-in-the-caption-box get things going again: there are only two short sections left in my novel. I know what happens in both, and I know that the fact that I can hear up ahead the ribbon strung and flapping in the wind is the reason why I’ve stopped.
Just, no more True Crime. I can’t take it. We are depraved. Full of murderous lust. Greedible. Self-centery. Anima. And yes some of us rise above it, refusing to remain victims, playing strains of inspiration on their Casios. It’s wonderful. But their personal tale of redemption made me feel the same as I have done with a hundred others’. Gently, I get it. And I don’t want to be (don’t mention this) titilated by the wide-mouth intros in the hourglass construction. Nor (guiltily) do I care about their lives before the tragedy. Get to the (stop, not that metaphor). And they, the articles, if they don’t inspire, try to provoke me to outrage or go bleak and try to top-up on my 20’s depression. But I don’t feel that way anymore. Morris got exactly one man released from prison. Herzog may get a couple more, maybe. The DNA Project has got 100, 200, something, I don’t know, but I know it’s exponential, those hearts crying. There are more women than DNA Project successes who don’t want to go home tonight in my city alone, I am sure.
I am in the bath and of the water. I ask you, art, to move me here, where I am. I cannot think of the others, the real people walking on the stones of the world. What they give off, let my reflection feel.
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Stonehenge is budding with lichen and moss. Their sideways ground is shrinking. The waterfall wind of Salisbury Plain erode erode erodes it. The mind has the thought the rocks have been stacked. Balancing there, perhaps. In person this is false. The rocks give off attentive mass. The ones on top not laid nor joined have grown in those beneath. The standing ones go deep in the ground. Uneroded, the buried bit is of the rock’s original size. A blackbird with a stick in its beak breaks these icebergs’ pall. The land is ringed around them, scaped by human hands. They were of another time but were the same as us. Our addition is a cable wire bounda-ring the path.
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“The first light which shined in my infancy in its primitive and innocent clarity was totally eclipsed: insomuch that I was fain to learn all again. If you ask me how it was eclipsed? Truly by the customs and manners of men, which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude vulgar and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it; by the impetuous torrent of wrong desires in all others whom I saw or knew that carried me away and alienated me from it: finally by the evil influence of a bad education that did not foster and cherish it. All men’s thoughts and words were about other matters. They all prized new things which I did not dream of. I was a stranger and unacquainted with them; I was little and reverenced their authority; I was weak, and easily guided by their example; ambitious also, and desirous to approve myself unto them. And finding no one syllable in any man’s mouth of those things, by degrees they vanished, my thoughts (as indeed what is more fleeting than a thought?) were blotted out; and at last all the celestial, great, and stable treasures to which I was born, as wholly forgotten as if they had never been.”Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, c.1670
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“Surviving—I know that that’s not the point, and that it’s not an argument. But perhaps being able to go on shouting is, for those who cannot keep silent.”Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956
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Uninhibited, Michael ran down the slope and threw the casserole in the lake. Dish, too. The sound of the splash was preposterously low like the belch of an opera singer. A woman was sitting on a blanket by the shore.
That’s it for fishing today, the woman said.
There were three poles stood up and cast into the water, each well spaced and resting in a forked branch in the dirt, the point of their lines’ entry marked by a red and white striped bob. It was these the woman kept in the corner of her eye as she ate. There was orange rind on the ground beside her, she picked it up and flung it in the lake.
It’s a day of endings, Michael said.
The woman, Naomi, looked at him. He was one of those people who didn’t realize he caused things, she decided.
Not for these nightcrawlers, she said.
Naomi tipped over the styrofoam bait bucket and shook it out. Black soil fell on the grass. There were earthworms moving in it and Michael was repulsed.
Rats and snakes are one thing, he said, but anything without a bone structure is nauseating.
I can’t make them compete with your stew.
Green bean casserole.
Hmm, Naomi said.
They watched the water. Naomi was waiting for him to leave but he didn’t seem like he was going to. She took the nearest pole and reeled it in, unhooking the worm and pushing it into the black soil, maybe it would regenerate and live, shaking off its bath and unsolicited gut piercing. She opened the tackle box and tied a spinner to the line.
Trying anyway? Michael asked.
There’s panfish, she said. They like shiny things, it gets their attention. Things forget what they were doing when they see something shiny in the water. It knocks them right out of their heads, I’m sure you know.
Michael didn’t catch on.
Can I cast it? he asked.
Naomi sighed, she hoped unnoticeably. She couldn’t make him leave. She could reel in the other poles, collect the blanket and containers, and move down the lake. But he could follow. The lake attracted chatty, oblivious people, they didn’t know why, and not how to act when they got there. The appeal of solitude wasn’t in them and they didn’t recognize it in others. They didn’t recognize others, actually. She could go home but this was her spot.
Do you know how? she asked.
No. Basically yes. I haven’t done it before but I can.
Naomi held the grip and flicked her wrist a few times, loose and easy. But Michael wasn’t watching her, he was watching the sunlight reflecting off the spinner. She wished she had the arm strength to cast it clear across the lake, that he would jump in and go after it.
If I show you, you have to sit quietly, she said, and try to enjoy the landscape.
http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Common-Herbicide-Induces-Physical-Changes-in-Vertebrates-040312.aspx
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