Stand Up for Ugliness

A great and easy way that you can help to better the planet is by signing the various petitions floating around which urge large grocery retailers like Walmart and Albertsons to retain and sell "ugly produce."

It's even better if you can make personal contact in the form of a phone call or (best) an email.

So much food is wasted and it's really criminal.

Anyway, this food is often so much more photogenic! You will want to Instagram that apple with two large butts. You know it's true.

Ugly food is better at starting conversations than fine literature. 

Toys for Nightmares

This might not be the greatest quality conversion, but it's still worth watching.

The automata featured are out of this world.

I really like the narration too. Great documentary.

Yashica, Kyocera, Contax

Yashica, Kyocera, Contax all went dark, began their journey towards extinction, in 2005. 

But millions of these cameras are still floating around. 

Kyocera took over Yashica back in the day and issued Contax cameras and used Contax lens in many of the other cameras. (Yay!)

I knew I really loved the glass in my one tiny Yashica Kyocera film camera. But it arrived with a seriously defective date function that could not be turned off. (Boo!) So I just sighed and put the camera aside.

But I recently realized I really want this camera back. And I found one on EBAY just now which is alleged to be fully functional.

This little camera is a surprisingly good grain grabber. I was really shocked how the photos held up to scrutiny and didn't really look like typical lomography.

This Song

came on the radio when I was in the car right before sunset, as if on spooky cue when I was thinking about Ren Hang's passing.

Grace knew the right words to sing the moment.

So I worked it up into a simple tribute video.

Sorry about image resolution on some of these. Obviously, online grabs aren't all going to be high-res. But it might encourage you to check out the artist's work further and pick up, say, his Taschen book.

Ren Hang Speaks about Repression

Repression and depression were two battles this young artist had to face.

It's amazing to see how simple his working process was.

My mind was blown that he was shooting in such a dark little room with the flash cranked up to heaven.

And these are the photos seen around the world.

Ren Hang Has Died

I wake up and learn from a friend that one of our greatest contemporary photographers has killed himself.

At twenty-nine.

Someone please tell The New York Times. They seem not to know

This is such a depressing period. I think about George Michael's genius and the loss every day and now this near-kid.

Michael, too, might have been a suicide. (He might have been murdered; we just don't know yet.)

Ren Hang's reputation is assured. He must have known that. I hope he knew that. Maybe he didn't care. Depression is awful. I wonder to what degree politics played a part in this tragedy. Chinese government officials consistently attacked and removed his work.

There's your next Francesca, world. Sadly.

I wonder if his Flickr account is still up. He was a cynosure on Flickr for years.

Artists who suffer from depression, please get help and choose life. We need you. Now more than ever.

Eulogy and memory at The British Journal of Photography.

It's Nice That

It's nice that you can order giclee prints of your work these days for such an affordable price.

That's really convenient, because you can do print editions in very small numbers for next to no money. Not to have deal with all the quiddities of printing is heaven. And the results these days are sort of impressive. You pick the dimensions, borders, quality paper. You benefit from all the competition in the printing field out there. It brings the prices right down. And you get a show-worthy or sellable product.

I Don't Think

I don't think George Michael ever recorded a bad song, but that's personal hagiography. Well, he's an angel now, so even songs that used to grate a tad on me (say "Monkey") are beloved.

Here's a great comprehensive list of Michael's recordings, which includes some real rarities.

The links might not all be profitable in the direct sense, but the citations can be searched on YouTube or other sites. I found many things that way.

There's a great YouTube playlist of George Michael that includes so many rarities and even some quality covers which I usually cast over to the t.v. while I'm blissing out painting or drawing. It will run for like eight hours and even includes things like obscure tracks from albums that were released only in certain countries (like Japan).

For what it's worth, here's my list of favorite songs by the master, and sorry, but no Wham tunes. I do love anything with his voice on it. Even saccharine or bippy Wham songs. It is wonderful to hear the treatment he gave Wham songs later in life, how he tenderized them and imbued them with a different soul altogether. Videos of these are floating around. This list is very heavy on songs from Patience, one of my favorite albums. I wish he had put out five more albums in that direction before he died. He was going so far past the idea of the three and a half minute pop song. He wanted long, complicated songs that could hold narrative and mature emotion. It makes sense he was covering artists like Joni Mitchell by then. It's criminal we were deprived of that future work. But why be ungrateful? There is such a well-provisioned trove. The man didn't waste much time at all, really. And it's the sort of voice that comes along only a few times in each generation.

(No order)

Mother's Pride
Faith
Jesus to a Child
Fastlove.
A Different Corner
Cars and Trains
Cowboys and Angels
Desafinado
Star People
John and Elvis are Dead
Kissing a Fool
Older
Precious Box
Praying for Time
Round Here
Strangest Thing
Something to Save
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face 
Through
Understand
You Have Been Loved

Gil Ott's Pact (2002)

I was reading in an old issue of the venerable, Philly-based TO magazine yesterday and today. This particular issue's focus was fiction, and featured almost exclusively non-normative narrative writing and hybrid forms of writing.

I remember being impressed with Gil Ott's fiction in this issue. This was way back in the nineties. I wondered how these pages would hold up, all these years later.

They held up admirably. The three short pieces by Ott included in this issue are stellar. Two of the stories are decidedly creepy. One is supernaturally skewed. All are rife with pathos.

I wondered if Ott's fiction had been published in book form and found these stories had been packaged as "prose poems" and included in Pact.

I suppose one could go with that designation. Labels are superfluous things.

In any case, I'll order this book in the near future. I'm happy that it exists.

Oh Goodness Gracious, Thank You

Funny thing.

I haven't been on the Cheezburger site in many years, but I received an email notification that one of my memes made the front page today.

Heh.

Thank you, Cheezburger peeps!

I do think that's one of the sweetest series of websites (they are legion, really) you'll ever encounter, and the people who power the site with so much creativity (it's ninety-nine percent user-generated material) are really some of the nicest and funniest people on earth. I have such fond memories of the time I spent there.

So it was a blast from the pleasant past hearing from them.

Single

1.

Julia had begun taking long walks in the evening. She would take a turn through a sprawling, attractive cemetery near the apartment complex where she had recently taken up temporary residence for work. The large acreage of this necropolis probably exceeded a mile square. There was no way to see the entirety of the burial grounds at once, since the terrain was so varied, unless one cheated and counted aerial views. A surprisingly large number of narrow roads crisscrossed the graveyard’s hills and dales. The little avenues and culs-de-sac all had their own names and weathered street signs. Julia found it a charming place to walk, this city of the quietest citizens.

She had once joked with a co-worker that cemeteries were her Prozac. She liked the way the wild birds serenaded the peaceful dead, even if they did, immediately afterwards, despoil the dignity of their monuments with those paint-bombs dropped from beneath their tail feathers.

One spring evening, Julia was out on one of her regular roundabouts, walking in that zone between the newer burials and the truly old parts of the cemetery that included some rough-hewn settler graves. She found herself drawn, for some indiscernible reason, to the grave of a dead youth. Julia would occasionally read some of the tombstones closest to the path. She realized how little could be gleaned of the lives of those that lay hidden beneath six feet of worm’s playground, a full fathom of earth. 

His was a low, brown stone. Nothing ornate or special. He had died just over a century ago. That was the period when the town had just begun finding its way, industrializing and coming to national prominence (a position which it had later lost through the vagaries of economy and history). This poor unfortunate had died at the age of fifteen or sixteen, depending on whether he had reached his birthday before his death day in that long ago year. The tombstone didn’t specify.

Julia felt a twinge for him. To have died without having known any of the major joys of life! Had he loved? Or, rather, had he thought he had loved? And why was his grave isolated? Usually, when a child dies, the parents later join him or her. Perhaps they had moved away to another city or another state? It just made the young man’s grave seem all the more forlorn.

Julia felt herself standing there beaming love at the poor waif. She stood there alone on a spring evening in a cemetery on the outskirts of a town largely new to her (she had relocated as a high-level trainer in the banking industry) and pined for a boy who had been dead for over a century. She giggled at herself. How could she not laugh at her own silly pathos. But she did try to speak to the dead boy. She did not speak aloud. She spoke in her mind the name she had read on the tombstone, asked Reginald if he could hear her. She “told” him a few facts about herself and wondered at what sort of person he might have been. What were his likes, dislikes? Would he care to tell her?

Then she shook her head at herself and moved on.

2.

Julia had not expected her initial attempt at “conversation” with the dead youth to turn into any sort of ritual.

But she surprised herself by making a regular stop at his tombstone every time she took a turn through the cemetery. And this was at least five times a week, sometimes six.

She found herself looking forward to telling the lost boy about her day at work, the particulars of her life and history. She didn’t spend long at his grave, maybe five or sometimes ten minutes. And she would still ask him questions about his own life. She had new questions every time.

“I have been single too long,” she said aloud one day as she walked away from the young man’s grave, after giving the stone a caress.

She had caressed the tombstone as if it had been a young man’s cheek.

3.

It was in the third week of Julia’s visits to Reginald’s grave that the young woman had her first shock.

As she sauntered towards his modest monument one unseasonably warm evening in mid-spring, she saw the flower. A purple iris! It was tall and perfectly formed. Right there on the boy’s grave. Alive as anything.

“I must be seeing things.” Julia found herself speaking aloud, although she was the only one in the cemetery, as far as she knew or could see.

She sped up and dropped to her knees on the young man’s grave. She wanted to examine the colorful flags of the gorgeous flower more closely. Such a display of purples! Tyrian and wine petals and some lighter lavendar blushes all composed a flower so splendid she thought of stealing it. She really wanted to take the thing home. But she would not harm its growing. You don’t rip magic out at the root.

“Surely someone planted this here?” she thought. But the weird thing about it was, she noted, that the ground had not been disturbed. The iris had not been transplanted. The flower had not been growing there the previous evening. About that shocking fact, Julia had no doubt.

Julia had seen no other irises blooming yet, purple or otherwise. And she walked for miles each evening. Don’t they not appear later in spring or, more properly, in early summer? She tried to remember.

But had she not told Reginald last week that it was her favorite flower?

The purple iris.

Yes.

A good partner listens.

3.

It was in the fourth week that Julia told Reginald the saddest stories of her life. It was their month anniversary, so she figured it was safe to broach those things now, the poisons of life which had made the flower wilt.

He seemed to take it well. Certainly, he did not run away.

As Julia was talking to him, sometimes in her mind, but more and more now aloud, she noticed a shape in the grass before the grave.

She could see there was the shape of a body that had lain there. On the bed of the grave. The grass, now long and luxuriant from the rampant growth of spring rains, appeared to have been pressed down. Julia stared and realized it looked like the figure of a young man.

Maybe the wind did this, she thought.

The wind must have done this, she reassured herself.

But she went to the form and lay down within it. Like an embrace.

It was so warm and comfortable that she wanted to fall asleep there.

4.

In the second month, Julia began to feel the first stirrings of fear.

She had begun seeing a figure in the distance when she was on her evening walks. It was clearly a young man who was stalking her. She changed the direction of her walks but he always appeared. He kept back many blocks when she was in the city and sometimes she would see him behind trees when she was walking in the suburbs. Julia carried mace and a screech alarm and often held her cell phone tightly in her hand, at the ready. She could never make out his features. But she knew it was no coincidence. It was always the same figure. He had to be stalking her.

All she knew is that he had dark hair and was not very tall. Maybe five feet six or seven at most. Slender. He always seemed to be dressed in grey clothing. She thought it appeared to be professional attire, perhaps even a suit. (So strange on a teenager! For he did appear to be a teenager.) But her shadower was always so far away and dodgy. He was always so quick to hide. She didn’t feel that he was physically all that intimidating, for she knew how to defend herself. And he seemed more of a boy than a man, her shadower. But it was disquieting and disturbing to her. One read and heard more and more of savage attacks on adults by children. 

Oddly enough, she did not report her stalker to the police or anyone else. She felt she would sound like a madwoman. Surely, she would have to wait for some sort of true interaction. So she didn’t tell anyone. Who was there to tell, anyway? Julia led a solitary existence and had drifted away from virtually everyone who was not a professional contact. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. Her friends had married and moved on. She didn’t even have a pet. The apartment complex where she lived didn’t allow them. Her work kept her very busy. She was as disciplined as any general in an overseas war zone. And perhaps as lonely.

5.

One evening in early summer, Julia found herself trapped in a teaching seminar because some of the company’s newest employees had arrived a few hours late due to a missed connection on the East Coast.

She decided not to take her evening walk. Though the days were growing longer, she did not want to risk being outside when darkness fell. And by the time she reached her apartment, the sun was sinking fast.

After arriving home, she went into her bedroom to change out of her stiff business suit and saw immediately that her bedclothes had been disturbed. She fumbled for her phone and made the 911 call within seconds of the observation. The operator stayed on the line with her while Julia checked her entire dwelling, against the advice of the dispatcher actually, who had wanted her to vacate the apartment immediately and wait for police to arrive. But she searched her dwelling, mace in hand. And there was no intruder.

While she had been on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, she had  pulled back the covers of her bed and saw what appeared to be a retained impression, the outline of a body which had recently lain there. Julia reached out, almost reluctantly, and touched it. It was still warm. She said nothing of this to the dispatcher. She couldn't quite explain to herself in her head why she had remained silent on this discovery.

Nothing had been stolen or moved about. The windows and doors were locked. Still, Julia did not feel abashed. Her key had turned in the lock. She hadn’t left open any window or door, any means of entrance to the dwelling. Someone had been there. There was the distinct possibility an employee of the apartment complex who held a key had entered the dwelling. There could be a stalker in the employ of the complex, she thought. A maintenance man or someone who was showing the apartments to prospective renters. 

She called the apartment manager’s office, but it was after hours. Nevertheless, her alarmed voice mail resulted in a callback within the half hour. Mrs. Garrity assured Julia that she would check the surveillance system the next day, as soon as she got into the office, and let her know immediately whether anyone could be seen on the recording entering her apartment. The older woman was grave, respectful, and to the degree she could manage, reassuring.

Julia did not sleep well that night. She had a chair propped against the front door of the apartment and her cell phone lying under the palm of her hand below her pillow.

Mrs Garrity, true to her word, called Julia even before the worried young woman had left for work the next morning. The apartment manager had come into work early to review the surveillance recordings. She confirmed that no one could possibly have entered Julia’s apartment by the front door. While she didn’t have a camera watching Julia’s front door, she did have one trained on the stairwells which any intruder would have needed to access to reach Julia’s hallway. And a window breach was clearly impossible since all the windows were locked when Julia arrived home. Julia’s balcony faced the front of the building and a ridiculously tall ladder would have been required to enter the apartment in that manner, in plain sight of countless people. There was no other means of access to Julia’s apartment.

The only conclusion was that no one had entered Julia’s apartment.

She was perfectly safe.

“Thank you,” Julia had said.

And had stared at her bed.

6.

Julia was standing on an old iron truss bridge that dated to Reginald’s day.

The dark river below was so pretty. Was it always this pretty in the middle of the night?

“But why am I barefoot?” Julia wondered. She was staring at her naked feet. Where had her shoes gone?

She had started taking night walks. She realized, by now, that it was easier for him to follow her at night. In the daytime, it was only fleeting glimpses.

In the middle of the night, he would sometimes stand for a long time under a streetlight, letting her stare right at him. She could get close enough now to see that he had a beautiful face. Seraphic. Pale skin and the nobility of an aquiline nose. She thought his eyes might be blue or green, but that was pure fantasy at this point. She had never gotten close enough to know that. At least not yet.

She stood on the bridge and looked down into the moving blackness. She found the sound of the tiny river waves comforting. That odd sort of little chuckling they do.

Night river sounds. Darkness telling other darkness little jokes.

If she climbed over this little bit of barrier, so easy to do, she would have more choices. Once there, if she stepped forward only one foot more, into the unsupporting air, it might all be easier. The distance might close just like that.

It was possible, after all. Wasn’t it?

She looked back towards where the bridge met the land. He was standing there. Smiling now.

“But what about the age difference?” she beamed at him.

He smiled even brighter.

“We are all the same age here,” was the answer he had beamed back.

Stop Me, Oh Oh Oh Stop Me, Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Gary was driving home from a Friday night poker game with old friends which beer and b.s., mostly b.s. of the sports variety, had prolonged into the wee small hours.

He wasn’t drunk, but he was tired and tapped out and saw by his dash that it was after 2 a.m. This was just as he was driving along the seemingly endless expanse of the large Elysian Fields cemetery.

As he looked away from the digital clock and back to the road, a young woman in white came rushing out of the darkness of the cemetery and ran right in front of his car. Barefoot, no less. And in a long gown. Gary swerved and hollered the expletive-laced name of a messiah at her.

His car braked to a stop less than fifteen feet from the woman, whom he could see now was more of a girl. She was standing stock-still, facing directly away from Gary’s Hyundai. He thought about blowing his horn, but he figured something was wrong with the girl. Seriously wrong. Maybe something horrible had just happened to her. Maybe she was the victim of an assault or worse. She certainly appeared to be in an altered state. She was holding a small bouquet of flowers upside down in her right hand. He watched as she tossed it off towards the cemetery bushes without even looking that direction.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry, but you just came out of nowhere. You know?”

He was talking loudly out the driver’s side window, hoping she could hear him.

The night was very still, so she had.

“I know,” the girl said. She still wouldn’t turn to face him. It unnerved him.

“Listen, I would normally offer to make a call for you, if you need a ride. You’re probably not going to believe this, but I don’t have my phone on me. I can offer you a ride if you need one, but I understand if that’s not something you’d be comfortable with. I mean with a stranger out here in the middle of nowhere…”

But before he could finish his sentence, she shocked him by turning and walking directly to his driver’s side window. She leaned her arm there, her slender white arm, and smiled with little trace of fear. A big smile on a small, pretty face.

“How about this? You move over and let me drive. I’d be much less afraid that way.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be missing your shoes. Where did you come from, anyway? Is that a prom dress? It seems an odd time of year for….”

“Do we have a deal?” She was still smiling.

Gary reluctantly slid over and she opened the door and took the wheel.

“I’ve never driven one like this. All these new-fangled doodads!”

But already she had them in motion, headlights picking out their way down that long street otherwise deserted. Everyone in the small town had found their beds already.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask: you haven’t been drinking, I hope?” Gary realized it was a slightly ironic question to pose.

“No, Buzz and Joey were the ones drinking. Drinking like hogs. I told them to slow down. That punch bowl stunk to high heaven. But they don’t listen to anyone but each other. Egging each other on like idiots!”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Why, of course, I’m going home.”

“It isn’t far?”

“No, not far at all. You’re very kind to help me out.”

By now, she had already taken some dozen turns and they were in a part of town with no streetlights. Gary was not familiar with these rural areas at all. He began to wonder if this might not be a set-up. Was there some guy waiting with a gun out in the countryside to roll him where no one would even hear his cries for help? And the one time he didn’t bring his phone. He slipped his wallet under his seat surreptitiously. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m gonna need to use my g.p.s. to get back out of here. I don’t know all these backroads. I can see we’re getting higher. Could you do me a favor and keep a few feet more to the right of that barrier? That looks like a hell of a drop off.”

“What the heck is g.p.s.?” she laughed. “You know, it was just terrible what happened to Joey and Buzz. Some say they deserved it. But did the others?”

“What happened to them?”

“They went off the cliff on River View Road. They were picking up pieces of them in the ravine for days. Them and all their passengers. That car was just crammed with kids who had come from the dance.”

She shook her head, crying then.

“I’m so sorry,” he commiserated. “Listen, you seem pretty upset. Why don’t you pull over and we can switch seats.”

She began to accelerate then. It really scared Gary.

“No point,” she said. “We’re almost home.”

“What do you mean we’re almost home?” Gary asked. “And you’ve gotta slow down, this road is getting narrower and narrower. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

And then the headlights picked out an old street sign that read “River View Road.”

The car was going about seventy at that point and he began to scream at her to stop the car, hit the brakes, this isn’t funny at all.

But she was laughing now through her tears.

As the car left the road and Gary felt his stomach, his ass, everything, try to float, the girl turned to him and said, “This is the part where you hope, but it doesn’t come true.”

My Analogica on Frizzifrizzi

I really love the company with whom I share the virtual page in this week's Frizzifrizzi photography feature.

I've spoken of my love for this Italian journal before.

Thanks to Simone Sbarbati. I always enjoy his curating.

You can go through and see previous weeks' selections there.

It's book-quality work throughout.

Add

There is too much ego in this painting
Add in bits of straw
broken bits of other things
that radiance has become
dog’s teeth
lost ball
the field where no one walks
windswept and alive, unsecret
but unknown
add wheat that is food
food which be darkness
darkness which is home
home a dream

For the Image-Makers

The stains on a wall
I mean the photographs come to mean so much
The fractions of being
An arm cut off……….but not a head
You understand the distinction
Don’t you, painter of the mind of algae
You green fraction of being you

The fly’s armor
Admittedly soft and ridiculous
Nevertheless is a sort of ecstasy
You can’t hold back
The stains on a wall might actually be edible
If you are a fly

If you are a half-lost photograph

(aspect ratio ish ish)

On Photography

I can’t explain why a photo isn’t a plot.

Because it is true and untrue.

Except that it is also a wheel.

It is the wheel of plots. Platelets spinning.

How is an image inside (us) different?

It cannot lie as effectively.

It must cast (mere) starry nets of words.

Here, crumble this clod of dirt:

Inside earth is more earth.

Inside a fist are many more fists, tinier ones.

The children of fists are fists.

The earth can’t be bothered being a fist.

Except that it is also a wheel.

I have deliberately misplaced my syllogism (my soilogism, my solilogism)

the way a man deliberately misplaces his lover

to lose him or her.

I can’t explain why a photo isn’t a plot.

Because it is.

The cast of a photo is illimitable.

You will never list all the players, dramatis personae.

That stark chair is a person.

That pleading window.

That river, surgeless, carrying away a flowering branch.

It is hopelessness I seek in photography.

The hopelessness of understanding.

And the conviction of being.

Cat

A cat listens to strong winds from inside a cave.

It has never known human hands.

The sun is setting outside of any screens.

The animal feels a sort of contentedness.

(The prey has been consumed.)

Sky is a conflagration and knows nothing.

Cat faces conflagration and knows.

(The face is a sort of conflagration.)

This knowing is a way of being.

Inhuman, as humans are inhuman.

Time is permutations and nothing more.

But there must be a matrix.

The cave serves the cat as a sort of second self.

There are extensions of mind, which is place.

No one in Europe has invented a door yet.

This is the closest thing to a door.

I mean this poem, this cipher.

Horrible Fact of the Day

There are now more human slaves on this planet than at any time in human history.

The current estimate is twenty-seven million subjugated human beings. That's close to the population of Saudi Arabia. (Some estimates place the number of the enslaved closer to thirty million people.)

Disturbing

I admire so much of what P.E.T.A. does.

I love to hear Ingrid Newkirk speak about the existential plight we share with animals.

But the totally unnecessary animal killing P.E.T.A. does boggles my mind and horrifies me.

Nathan J. Winograd explains.

Now, why on earth would you choose murder over sterilization for stray cats, which has demonstrated success? I'm very proud of my community for the truly successful program we have here that has drastically limited our wild cat population in an ethical manner. Other communities even look to ours when setting up their own programs along these lines. They have seen that it works and that it saves the community money. It's actually much more cost-effective than euthanasia.

This isn't the first time I read horror stories like this about P.E.T.A.. I remember reading about volunteers driving around and rounding up wild cats and killing them. I can't see any defense for this and I see it as a total repudiation of life itself.

I thought it had to be misinformation, part of a smear campaign against the organization.

And then I read the chilling words scrawled on a postcard by Ms. Newkirk, speaking ex cathedra as founder of P.E.T.A.. She emphatically states that the organization does not believe that animals hold any intrinsic right to life. And I recoiled. Maybe she feels the same way about humanity. One would definitely have to broach such a philosophical argument to even examine the proposition vis-a-vis animals. One would need to cross-check any human right to life in the same disquisition.

If you think wild cats can't handle wild living, then how the hell do you think they managed to survive down the ages? If you're helping terminal cats, animals which could not be saved by veterinary intervention, that's a different matter. But again and again we see P.E.T.A. killing healthy cats and even kittens.

It's just more proof that there is no safe harbor in this world. It's just more proof that the world is insane. Even those of whom you expect the highest, the greatest compassion, turn out to be totally mad. Everybody wants to rule the world. You can see this "euthanasia" is really just another manifestation of that. The will to power. It's not loving compassion. It's a power trip. 

Life belongs to life, not to us.

The existential state of wild animals is indeed, quite often, horrible. But do we have a right to end it for no reason? In this pointless killing, P.E.TA. cannot even avail itself of any utilitarian arguments or "game management" arguments as hunters eating the animals they kill may do.

How can P.E.T.A. call itself a shelter (legally)?

"According to PETA, animals want to die (because they 'might suffer' in the future) and killing them is, in Newkirk’s own words, a 'gift.'"

This is not how we honor existence, Ms. Newkirk. WE GIVE LIFE A CHANCE.

I had once called this woman a hero of mine. This side of her personality just makes me realize the world is, indeed, mad.

One can be a nihilist. That's a personal choice. But one should keep it to oneself. One's nihilism should not accrue a body count of thousands of living, sentient creatures. If you follow Newkirk's logic, there's absolutely no problem with killing humans born into poorer countries who will most likely "suffer."

The Death Cult of P.E.T.A.

So, I'm revoking hero status for Newkirk and conferring it instead on "no kill" Nathan J. Winograd.

If you hear someone saying lawyers are no-goodniks, please refer them to Nathan's bio notes.

New Career

a blue yet to be violated


that is what I focus on this afternoon/incarnation


It could be supporting those distant trees


or they could be either side


holding the color aloft from nothingness


This raises the question:


what is the sky’s actual job?

Psalm

I came into the darkness.


Your dark body, asleep,


listening to the darkness mine.


The register of a dream shifted,


to be known by breathing tides.


The valleys to the mesas and vice versa

constantly the rivers. Continuously

the rivers purely themselves and never

punctuation, human.


But the door’s was a lighter shade of darkness.

No Matter What

No matter what you achieved later, probably the most empowering and significant moment in your entire life was the one in which you realized that your hands were operable, that they actually unbelievably obeyed commands you could beam at them.

On a Day So Cold

On a day so cold, the neighborhood hawk uncharacteristically cries out as he flies overhead, advertising his services to freezing birds who might have had enough. Surprisingly, no takers. Winter's game of freeze tag continues, with most of the players already in stoic tableau.

People Generally

People (even artists, even good ones) generally don't know how to photograph animals yet. I don't either. It's because of our spiritual sickness. It's because we are not evolved. We stand before these beings the way we stand before the ocean, pretending we understand what is happening before us.

Miss Swan

Rita saw the girls were playing in the park again. Virtually every young girl in town must be in there, she thought, as she watched the youngsters across the street gallop about, playing some sort of game which involved one child running up to another and whispering something in her ear. It was such a gift of a day. Summer had indeed delivered on spring’s verdant promises and The Lawn (as the park was known to the townspeople) was almost green enough to shock the eyes, top to bottom, from grass blades to treetops.


Rita smiled and waved now at the children through the picture window at the front of her small house. Ether none could see her from that distance, or none cared to wave back. The woman’s features darkened as she realized the summer day would be so much more beautiful were the country not at war. It would truly be a wonderful day then. If only the town’s husbands and sons were here and not in Europe and all those other theaters of the nearly unimaginable global conflict. How could all that be happening over there when a heavenly day was right outside her front door?


Before she knew what she was doing, the young woman had shot out the front door of her house, crossed the street and was now entering the open iron gate of The Lawn. Though she had not been fortunate enough to have any children yet with Randy, who was now writing her cheering letters from The Philippines, she certainly hoped that darling little beings would grace their home in the near future. If only the dreadful war would end.


She was surprised that her arrival in the park seemed to throw the girls into a tizzy. They had stopped playing their unidentifiable game. Though they were scattered throughout the park, they all stopped at once, as if they were mechanical figures in a clock that had run down. And they all stared intently at her. Their chatter died.


Rita smiled and called out, “Hello, children!” She felt silly. It was an awkward moment. Children, too, value their privacy. Why had she come, she wondered.


But here was Suzie Mills taking her right hand, walking her down the path towards the pond, smiling brightly up at her. Here was the welcome she supposed now she had expected all along.


“Why, hello Suzie! Are you children having fun in the park today?”


“Oh yes, Miss Figgis! Father is overseas and mother is working in a factory. The one where my brother Paulie worked last year. Imagine that! Thank Goodness we have Miss Swan!”


“Miss Swan?” Rita asked with puzzlement.


“Oh yes, Miss Swan is wonderful,” Angela Lucarno chimed in, as she grabbed Rita’s available hand and jointly walked her down the path with Suzie.


“I don’t recall anyone named ‘Miss Swan’ in town. Is she a visitor?”


Both girls laughed at once.


“Oh yes, she is a visitor!” It was Angela. It had sounded fresh, that reply. She always had been a take-charge type of little girl, Rita remembered. Takes after her mother, she smiled inwardly. She realized all of the girls had been overly rambunctious lately. They had much less guidance these days. Though the adults had tried their best, clearly there was some neglect. Wild strains of children might be emerging.


Rita noticed that all of the girls were wearing white. Pristine whites. The effect was a bit uncanny.


“Girls, is there to be a photograph taken today? Here in the park?”


“What a queer thing to say!” Suzie sniped.


“Suzie! Your manners! Miss Swan would not approve,” Angela chided.


“Sorry. No, Miss Figgis. We’re not having our picture taken today.”


Rita noticed that many of the girls were wearing not merely Sunday whites but what appeared to be their communion dresses. How odd. As if Angela had read the woman’s mind, she suddenly offered an unbidden explanation.


“Miss Swan likes us to wear white. Well, certain days. Like today. She receives gifts and she gives them. We always wear white on gift days. Doesn’t that sound nice, Miss Figgis?”


Rita had no idea what the child was talking about. Was there a new church group active in the park?


“How do I meet this Miss Swan?” Rita asked Angela.


“We’re taking you to her now,” the girls said in singsong unison.


The trio had just reached the pond behind the kitchen garden.. This outbuilding was all that remained of the mill superintendent’s mansion whose property this had once been. Indeed, the iron gate through which Rita had just passed had been, many years ago, his perimeter fence. The land had simply been deeded back to the town several generations back. The pond was behind the kitchen garden. It was spiritedly reflecting light. Angela noticed this radiated light before she saw the water itself. A tallness of wild, orange lilies shielded much of the pond from view.


Rita noticed then that all the other girls in white were standing stock-still, and that they were all staring intently at her.


“Where are the boys?” Rita thought to ask then. “I know you don’t play with them, but aren’t they usually in the park, playing one of their games, over there?”


She pointed to where she had seen the boys playing football on so many past days. She realized suddenly it had been quite some time since she had seen the boys there. Perhaps they had started a club somewhere or were off following the railroad tracks. Boys like to do things like that.


“Boys aren’t allowed in the park, anymore. Miss Swan’s rules.”


This voice came from behind her, causing Rita to spin around. It was Julie, her neighbor’s girl. Maybe eight years old. Maybe nine. She had forgotten.


“Hello, Julie. I haven’t seen your mother since she took that new job. She’s working quite a bit, isn’t she?”


“Yes,” Julie replied dryly. “Father is fighting in the war. Mother is working very hard. It’s a good thing Miss Swan is here. That’s for sure.”


Rita laughed then. It wasn’t really funny, was it? But she couldn’t help herself. Was it a practical joke the children had conceived. The little devils couldn’t be that clever, could they? And they were all so young.


“But come and meet Miss Swan,” Maureen said now, shooting in and replacing Suzie’s hand with her own. She had done it effortlessly, the way older children always do with younger children.


By now, a large group of girls of diverse ages (but none older than twelve in her estimation) in white had gathered about Rita and shepherded her behind the old, disused summer kitchen with the milky windows and wild vines groping it all over.


Here was the dark pond with the secret warm spring hidden in its center, feeding its life. So much algae floated in there and duckweed was scattered across the top like green living confetti. Here were the tall sedgy plants that surrounded it, the dragonflies skirting the water and the wildflowers savagely blooming without cultivation.


And here was a large black swan turning circles in the center of the pond.


Rita laughed loudly this time, unable to restrain herself.


“Why, this is ‘Miss Swan?’” she chortled in disbelief.


Wherever had it come from? Such an exotic specimen was certainly not native! Had it escaped from a zoo?


The children looked at Rita with expressions of stern disapprobation.


“What’s so funny?” Maureen asked.


“Well, I thought when you said ‘Miss Swan,’ that I would be meeting a….”


And that’s when she saw it. Before she could even finish her sentence, she saw the small arm floating there in the center of the pond. It was a child! Her senses all sounded their alarms at once. The swan was swimming with peaceful aplomb around the body in wide concentric circles.


Rita screamed, “Go get help!” as she charged into the pond, first running and then trudging through the water, through thick sludge that lay at the bottom, to reach the child. The water was not very deep and she only lost her footing once when she stepped into a hole or unevenness.


“Miss Swan” removed herself from this focus of furious activity. She shook her great wings and retreated to one corner of the pond, where she glared with seeming disapproval at the rescue underway. The fire opals of her eyes dartled at the children. The children began to mimic Miss Swan, pretending they had wings and flapping them. All of them did it. Rita never saw.


As soon as she had pulled the child to her, Rita felt a second shiv of horror go through her. She knew him. The drowned boy. It was Clyde Geary. She knew his entire family.


She was shaking and crying now, and when she turned back to the bank, holding little Clyde to her breast, she saw the girls simply stood there, a wall of white,staring blankly at her.


“Who went for help?” she screamed as she pulled the boy up onto the grass. She listened for his heartbeat. There was nothing. But she had already begun the physical efforts to revive him.


“No one did,” Sally said coolly.


“I told you to go get help!” She was furious now. Clearly these girls had been running wild all summer. They had no respect for adult authority and no understanding of the gravity of this situation.


But she knew it was pointless. He was so cold. Even on a hot summer day, he was cold. Even floating in the jets from the warm spring under the pond, the secret at its heart, he was cold. She gave herself a pointless little hope that the boy would somehow come around. Her efforts were futile. She could feel he was sodden. The body was sodden. She knew his lungs were full of pond water and, probably, duckweed. Why had that image come to her?


The girls in white began to scatter. They ran home to their empty, furnished houses. Because that is what Rita had shouted at them to do. She wanted them to stop staring. Above everything else, that is what she wanted.


When she looked back over her shoulder, the pond was empty.


Rita thought about Randy She wished he were there at that moment. Now more than ever she had wished it before. She cried when she realized she didn’t have the strength to carry the boy. It was all so pitiful. So she left the park. She left the boy lying there, fully clothed, on the sunny summer grass. Next to the pond. The pond that was radiant with afternoon light. She went for useless help. She forced herself to run, though she knew it was a joke.


                                 * * * * * * * *


As the years passed, Rita talked of that day less and less.


She had tried to explain it to herself. She had tried to have others explain it to her. It all came to naught. She had even tried to talk to some of the girls who had been there that day, but they all seemed terribly embarrassed and confused by what had happened. They had all insisted that they were blameless. They had no idea how Clyde had come to drown in the pond wearing all his clothes, even his shoes. There had been no bathing suit on the boy. When she asked the children about “Miss Swan,” they had either forgotten her altogether or else they were all perfect little liars. One of them had told her with a straight face, “I vaguely remember that name as a game we once played, but I can’t really remember the rules.”


Occasionally, she would spy one of the girls, years later, on the street or while out shopping somewhere, and try to corner her. But she got no further in her understanding of that day. All of the girls were blank or innocent or the most deceitful creatures on earth.


And so that was how the matter darkened in Rita’s memory and in the memory of the town.


The black swan had been the subject of a search undertaken shortly after the drowning, but it came to nothing. Some had even the audacity to suggest that Rita had hallucinated the bird or had mistaken one species (“perhaps an egret?”) for another.


Much later, the pond was filled in for a new development project and the park became a shopping mall. Rita was sauntering through there one afternoon. By then, she was an octogenarian. She found herself staring at the fountain in the center of the mall, unable to look away.


By then her memory was going, and before she could explain what had occurred that immemorial day to another generation, her grandchild took her by the hand to lead her away from it. She wanted to lead her away from the mall’s artificial pond and whatever fascination it was that it held. Whatever it was which had darkened the poor old woman’s features for a few moments.

"The Jolly Corner" (1908)

“The Jolly Corner” by Henry James is an examination of the poetics of personalized space, a meditation on how our old haunts can be so psychologically charged that they possess a sort of daemonic force. Maybe you can’t go home again, but even if you can, this tale warns, you probably should not. This short story also muses on the misgivings we all feel about whether or not we are the person we were “meant to be.” What about the better version of ourself that didn’t make it through, that fell through the metaphysical cracks? Is “The Jolly Corner” actually a ghost story, as it is often described? Well, it’s a sideways ghost story. That is, if we can count the tale of a doppelganger’s emergence as a bona fide ectoplasmic thriller, then yes, it is.


The theme, the crux of the tale, is the contingency of identity itself. The narrator of “The Jolly Corner” is haunted not by any “ordinary ghost” but rather a version of himself that he comes to believe exists in some parallel universe. [SPOILER ALERT] The protagonist ultimately experiences a strong sense of depersonalization which may or may not be attributable to a supernatural occurrence. Perhaps this is actually what brings his doppelganger into “existence.” I use scare quotes because one is ultimately unsure of the reality of the double’s manifestation in the old house. The story leaves open the question of whether or not anything supernatural has actually occurred. Readers familiar with James’ The Turn of the Screw will remember the author used the same approach in that novella. Nothing which is related to us is certain veracity, since the narrator of “The Jolly Corner” is demonstrably unreliable. He admits as much, and even tells us that he is deliberately cultivating an alternate sort of perceptual schema by spending nearly half his earthly hours wandering nocturnally through the expanse of a vacant mansion. He goes on a strange diet of the liminal, teaching himself to see shadows within shadows in the darkened house. He is, one senses, on a ghost diet.


Spencer Brydon has retained his family home while living abroad, an ersatz European for decades, but has not rented it. Indeed, it is wholly empty, sans furnishings, a shell of a mansion. Now that he has returned to New York, he starts to haunt this former home, visiting it alone, preferring the twilight hours and late nights. All of the members of his immediate family, including his siblings, are dead and long buried. He is a solitary figure who doesn’t seem to overmuch mind his solitariness. He spends long hours moving through the darkness of his familial estate, its fertile emptiness. He carries a small source of light. Brydon has begun to be haunted by an image of a man he might have been, had he lived a different sort of life. This alter ego begins to take on the force of a possession. He searches constantly for this other man throughout the house. Many nights he walks his rounds like a security guard, hoping to catch a glimpse of this doppelganger he is sure will materialize. An inner obsession is projected into an outer haunting. The house lying in abeyance seems to be complicit in this fantasy, a weird abettor.

This work of fiction is yet another example of a tale wherein James successfully redefines the very concept of the ghost. He was after the quintessence. The flower is nice, but how much more so is the attar. James was fascinated by how we manufacture ghosts, how we give them substance and how we texturize them. What sort of nourishment are they, really? His methodology is not that far afield of phenomenological analysis. Henry James, William James. They really are two sides of a coin.

Here the protagonist enters the empty mansion on one of his many nocturnal visits:

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where? — in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner — feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at least they weren’t as he had hitherto felt them — before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.

One has to wonder to what degree this particular ghost story is autobiographical excoriation. Here, the facts of the author’s life roughly correlate with those of the expatriate protagonist. One wonders whether or not this is the punctilious Mr. James questioning his lifelong vocation as author.

Jamesian Ekphrasis Dept.: A really beautiful series of etchings-engravings by American artist Peter Milton, inspired by this short story, was released in a very limited edition in 1971. You can see Milton’s stunning portfolio here: https://www.davidsongalleries.com/art...

It is heartening to see the surreal liberties Milton took with his elaborations of James’ prose into new imagery. The fantastic scenes in the etchings are often wild exaggerations of quite pedestrian metaphors employed by James. I wish the house in the tale had been haunted to the degree that Milton’s etchings are. Or do I? I appreciate the subtle things James has done with this meditative tale. Maybe I mean I like the tale Milton’s work suggests and wish someone would write that one too. But there is a concinnity to Milton’s ekphrasis. His artwork is true to the feeling of the baleful house and the disorienting influence it exerts over the narrator (and the reader).

You can read “The Jolly Corner” in its entirety at Gutenberg.org: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1190/1...

Can We Even

Can we even distinguish between blank surfaces and blank feelings?

(This is a question for visual artists....and maybe others.)

Peter Milton's Engravings for Henry James' "The Jolly Corner"

Twenty-one etchings by Peter Milton illustrate "The Jolly Corner" by Henry James.

This "Preferred Portfolio Edition" came out in 1971.

"The Jolly Corner" is a short story by Henry James published first in the magazine The English Review of December, 1908. One of James' most noted ghost stories, "The Jolly Corner" describes the adventures of Spencer Brydon as he prowls the now-empty New York house where he grew up. He encounters a "sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity."

Der Spiegel Cover Says It All

This BBC Documentary

is nonpareil.

I really missed so many of the nuances of the complicated, indeed torturous, relationship which developed between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. The history books generally gloss over this one. They get straight to the (head cutting) point. Usually, it is painted in simple terms, as a religious struggle or a simple struggle for dominance. And it was these things, but it was so much more. The 2016 BBC documentary reveals that it was rather like a long marriage with many identifiable stages. There was courtship, a wooing in poetry. There was love. There was deceit and disaffection. There were recriminations and self-delusion.

It is so strange that in this relationship of decades which ended in the murder of one woman by the other (who denied responsibility the remainder of her life) the two principals never physically met. Not once. Bizarre!

I had not known that Elizabeth had been raped (by a husband and wife, no less!) at a very young age. This might explain her reticence towards suitors and her reluctance to give up power to any man. The actual particulars of the murder of her lover almost strain credulity. That wild story I had known, as it had been widely fictionalized and depicted in film. But I can see why many history books of the past might have been loath to go into details of Elizabeth's rape. Well, in primary education texts, anyway.

I think this documentary was so well-done. It seems factually impeccable.

The Missing

We've taken in a cat who appears to have been dumped or left to her own devices this winter. She had been living under a neighbor's house.

So I was checking the listings for lost pets and came across this moving post.

Animals are so often our touchstones to the spiritual.

Desperately seeking (Perry County) 

I'm heart broken beyond words. I've lost what was my one of my most valuable things in my life. My neighbors either don't notice that it isn't there, or they just aren't saying anything. 
If you know where our moral compass is please let us know. We are so much better with it than without. Everyone is just so angry, this isn't good for anyone. Please return it.

Why Isn't the Media Ripping Trump over Dodd-Frank?

Is it because it takes a minute or two to explain how this will adversely affect "ordinary people?"

Elizabeth Warren has got it exactly right: "Whose Side is He On, Anyway?"

But why should anyone be surprised?

I'm So Over The Affair

It's sad, because at one point I really looked forward to the show.

Now I think they should just end it. It's too late to end it "with dignity," but it's not too late to end it before the utter implosion of pointlessness.

It's probably ungrateful of me to speak ill of a show which once gave me so much pleasure. But it is what it is.

No problem with the cast. They're wonderful actors, every last one of them.

It's just the writers kept juggling those balls of impossible narrative, sure that way would lead on to way, endlessly. And then they knew they had to make certain narrative decisions, even on a show based around the endless multiplication of parallel narrative realities. They had to make a few things stick sooner or later to give the viewers some sort of dramatic high. And there was the rub. The dramatic high was disappointing and false. Noah's psychic disintegration, his split, his suicide attempt. Bleh. Every narrative crisis now just feels like a bleb in a mess of narrative swill. It's become a soup. Talk soup.

I hate that I feel this negative about the show now when I really enjoyed those first few seasons.

There are just too many minor plotlines and no serious major ones. That's my definition of a soap opera, which is what I feel the show has become now.

It had so much potential, so much promise.

Can we go back and erase most of a season and take different narrative tacks? Can't the show allow that, by following its own rules of parallel realities?

Because, if it can, I'm so on board again.

The Burning Trump Hat

A Trump hot appeared briefly in images of Berkeley burning tonight on CNN and the flames had taken half of the hat so it now read:

EAT AMERICA AGAIN.






E     AMERICA
AT   AGAIN

What a Trumpian Coincidence

What a coincidence. Trump stressed he would go after the civilian family members of terrorists. In his first overseas operation in Yemen, women and children related to the same were slaughtered. I'm sure this will be passed off as "collateral damage." But with his previous statements, there is a strong possibility this is deliberate. 

Trump Has Already Killed Children in Yemen

This is so depressing.

Once again, we are going to end up shameful in the eyes of the world.

And now the administration is posturing to start a war in Iran.

Future Headlines: "Gas Leak in the Supreme Court"

Trump is delivering the news of the tragedy in the most solemn voice he can manage, but the barely disguised smile threatens to collapse into full, joyous laughter.

Trump: "It pains me more than you will ever know to announce the grievous loss of several members of the United States Supreme Court today. Justices Ruth Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, John Roberts and Samuel Alito were gathered together in a room in their place of work and enjoying an "MLK cake" (an absolutely wonderful cake in the shape of Martin Luther King's head which I had personally sent to them) when an insidious gas leak took their lives. They will be greatly missed. R.I.P. and my condolences to all family members. Announcement of their replacements will be made at 8 p.m. tomorrow. All candidates are already in Washington and prepared to take up their posts following swift confirmation. Thank you, God Bless, and may I say the First Amendment is highly overrated. HIGHLY overrated. Along with many other Amendments. But more about that tomorrow."

Revisitation