God-damn-it, I'm a member of that same human race...

The studios don't seem to foster good writing. They're not so interested in that, but they're more interested in what worked most recently. They're definitely very serious about making money, and that's not a wrong thing, but you don't have to make money the same way all the time. So, people that have different ways to entertain and make points are rare. Is it a new movement? God, let's hope it's a new movement, and let's hope it catches on. It probably won't. There are not are many films like this. How many films did you see this week? And how many of them were really special and different and touched you? How many were imitations of special films that had been done before - watered down versions? I think Sofia's movie puts a smile on your face. You walk out with self-respect - God-damn-it, I'm a member of that same human race.'
www.ivillage.co.uk

The Unspoken Truth...

The unthinkable is being normalised. The American essayist Edward Herman wrote: "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals ... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.'

The unspoken truth is that behind the bloody conquest of Iraq is the conquest of us all: of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect at the very least. If we say and do nothing, victory over us is assured.

It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it
www.john-pilger.com

I'm Looking for Auspicious Beginnings...

BOBBY:
I don't know if you'd be particularly interested in hearing anything about me.
My life, I mean... Most of it doesn't add up to much... that I could relate as a way of life that you'd approve of... He pauses briefly,

BOBBY (CONT'D) I'd like to be able to tell you why, but I don't really... I mean, I move around a lot because things tend to get bad when I stay. And I'm looking... for auspicious beginnings, I guess...
Five Easy Pieces, Carole Eastman

Right Livelihood...

http://www.schumachersociety.org

Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and "uneconomic." From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential difference between non-renewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does.
E.F. Schumacher

Mercy and the Cruelty of the Heart...

Justice is not truth. My mother believed , in her heart and soul, that mercy was truth.

Stupidity and cruelness of heart enter the door hand in hand.
Douglas Adam Richards

On Art...

He was an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishments but with the conviction of genius,
James Salter

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult but rather, because it wishes to be art.
Donald Bartheleme

The business of the writer as witness is to pass all the things he sees and knows through his soul.
Saul Bellow

A Good Man in Bad Times...

Do not, for any excuse, miss this film

“Because I see good and bad in all of us I can’t answer that question. I have to say a good-bad man.”
Al Pacino struggles to define the character Shylock that he plays in a new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

The worst trouble a man can be in...

The worst trouble a man can be in, I think, is to have one hope left, and that a hope of something so inherently improbable that he knows deep in his heart it won't happen.
A.J. Liebling

The clowns threw down their tools...

But there's one thing that I had to keep inside
Because I was shaking
Why don't you get some pride
There was a clown strike
And the clowns threw down their tools
But you don't have to play so hard
And I'm nobody's fool
You don't have to go so far
'Cause I love you as you are
Elvis Costello

Grace, she takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name

Grace, it's a name for a girl
It's also a thought that changed the world

And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything

Grace, she's got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She's got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma, karma
She travels outside of karma

When she goes to work
You can hear the strings
Grace finds beauty in everything

Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition
What once was hurt, what once was friction
What left a mark no longer stains
Because Grace makes beauty out of ugly things

Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace finds goodness in everything
U2

Sit Silently and Dream...

At night the bears would come down to the dump in search of food. My father and I would sit in his Fairlane and watch them in the glare of its headlights. The bear cubs would stare straight into the lights. Often they would make for the lights in a waddling gait, straight, transfixed.

My father would sit quietly, his cigarette smoke forming small clouds against the windshield. He knew the cubs were dangerous, walking into the lights, they knew no fear. They were always followed by the huge mother bears anxious to protect their cubs.

My father would sit silently and dream of shooting a she-bear. I dreamed of walking with the cubs into the diamond white light.

My father reached over and grasped by wrist with his huge hand, lined with veins, stained with tobacco.

"Son, this thing between your mother and I...", he grasped harder as he paused to inhale deeply.

"Dad," I said "Dad, you're hurting!"

The Function of the Press

www.jewishsports.net/ BioPages/AbbottJoseph.htm

I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
A.J. Liebling

A. J. Liebling was “a chronicler of the prize ring,” a media critic of extraordinary wit, and biographer of diverse individuals for New Yorker magazine from 1935 until his death. A collection of many of his New Yorker boxing stories, published in 1956 as a book, The Sweet Science, is considered the most critically admired and widely read book on prize fighting ever written. Liebling was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1992.

I Still Cry...

"Maybe they would have become philosophers, artists, great thinkers or perhaps skilled artisans or mothers of families," she said. "I still cry when I think of all of these children -- I will never forget them."

"Me and my fellow survivors have the right and the responsibility to tell you to beware and to ask that this should never happen again."
Former prisoner number 78651 Simone Veil

In China...

In China he heard there was a drink that was half coffee, half tea, half strong, half weak, named after two birds that remained together for life. But he had never been to China, he did not know where to get this drink or what it was called. Soon he began to doubt he had heard the story at all...

In China young Tong women bite their lovers on the arm to show deep, festering love. Elsewhere young women leave their lovers to prove the same.

In Hangzhou there is a teahouse on a lake called "Reflections of the Moon's Impression on Three Profound Pools." It is built entirely of zig-zag corridors because evil spirits can only move in straight lines. If one leads their lives in a straight line, one path to one goal, does that mean that the evil spirits will inevitably catch up?

For the second time in my life I read the word Changsha. I see it on a map, a city in the Hunan province of China. I know nothing of it except that it has a hotel with red walls like cold chocolate and in it people do not sleep. I would like to go there some day but I am afraid I would fall asleep and it would not be the same. The deep, dark, wanting. If you do not sleep are you ever alone? If you do not sleep what is it you can dream of?

Changsha is the birthplace of Mao.

How easily we trick ourselves into thinking that what we feel somehow defines the lives of others. Memories we have of laughter in restaurants with yellowing walls are simply memories, after all. Where I remember laughter, perhaps she remembers only the shade of yellow, if anything at all...

The Guardians of Liberty...

"Che always smoked the cheapest Cigar's possible, called cazadores..."

It is the United States of America which intervenes. It has done so throughout the history of America. Since the end of the last century Cuba has known very well the truth of the matter; but it is known, too, by Venezuela, Nicaragua, Central America in general, Mexico, Haiti, and Santo Domingo. In recent years, besides our peoples, Panama has also known direct aggression, when the marines of the Canal opened fire against the defenseless people; Santo Domingo, whose coast was violated by the Yankee fleet to avoid an outbreak of the righteous fury of the people after the death of Trujillo; and Colombia, whose capital was taken by assault as a result of a rebellion provoked by the assassination of Gaitan.

There are masked interventions through military missions which participate in internal repression, organizing forces designed for that purpose in many countries, and also in coups d'etat which have been so frequently repeated on the American continent during the past few years. Specifically, United States forces took part in the repression of the peoples of Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala, who carry on an armed struggle for their freedom. In Venezuela not only do the Americans advise the army and the police, but they also direct acts of genocide from the air against the peasant population in vast rebel-held areas, and the United States companies established there exert pressures of every kind to increase direct interference.

The imperialists are preparing to repress the peoples of America and are setting up an "international" [network] of crime. The United States interfered in America while invoking the "defense of free institutions". The time will come when this assembly will acquire greater maturity and demand guarantees from the United States Government for the lives of the Negro and Latin American population who reside in that country, most of whom are native-born or naturalized United States citizens.

How can they presume to be the "guardians of liberty" when they kill their own children and discriminate daily against people because of the color of their skin; when they not only free the murderers of colored people, but even protect them, while punishing the colored population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men? We understand that today the assembly is not in a position to ask for explanations of these acts, but it must be clearly established that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression of the peoples of the world, and of a large part of its own population.
Che Guevara, Colonialism is Doomed, Speech delivered before the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 11, 1964

"There's absolutely no way the American people will support that."

Bush seeks $75-billion for Iraq

Washington — U.S. President George W. Bush will seek another $75-billion (U.S.) from Congress to pay the soaring costs of keeping 150,000 troops in Iraq, White House officials said yesterday.

The costs of battling the stubborn and violent insurgency will soon top $200-billion, more than four times the original price tag set by the White House.

The President will seek extra funding of more than $80-billion early next month, White House officials said, but a few billion of the extra money will be earmarked for training Iraqi and Afghan security forces.

Extra funds needed for military operations and humanitarian aid to the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunamis are not yet included.

To date, neither the spiralling death toll, the soaring costs nor the absence of banned weapons in Iraq (the weapons Mr. Bush used to justify the invasion) have seriously sapped U.S. support for the President, who won re-election to a second four-year-term in November.

Although the cost of the Iraq war is now approaching half the total that the United States spent in its decade-long (and ultimately failed and unpopular) war in Vietnam, U.S. military deaths of 1,300 remain tiny compared with the 58,000 killed in Southeast Asia.

But Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan predicted the costs, both in blood and bullion, would soon force the White House to redraft its Iraq policy.

"The American people will not support $2-billion a week in Iraq without an exit plan ..... for the next five years," he said. "There's absolutely no way the American people will support that."

Paul Koring, Globe and Mail

Not In Our Name...

graphics.jsonline.com

As George W. Bush is inaugurated for a second term, let it not be said that people in the United States silently acquiesced in the face of this shameful coronation of war, greed, and intolerance. He does not speak for us. He does not represent us. He does not act in our name.

No election, whether fair or fraudulent, can legitimize criminal wars on foreign countries, torture, the wholesale violation of human rights, and the end of science and reason.

In our name, the Bush government justifies the invasion and occupation of Iraq on false pretenses, raining down destruction, horror, and misery, bringing death to more than 100,000 Iraqis. It sends our youth to destroy entire cities for the sake of so-called democratic elections, while intimidating and disenfranchising thousands of African American and other voters at home.

In our name, the Bush government holds in contempt international law and world opinion. It carries out torture and detentions without trial around the world and proposes new assaults on our rights of privacy, speech and assembly at home. It strips the rights of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians in the U.S., denies them legal counsel, stigmatizes and holds them without cause. Thousands have been deported.

As new trial balloons are floated about invasions of Syria, or Iran, or North Korea, about leaving the United Nations, about new “lifetime detention” policies, we say not in our name will we allow further crimes to be committed against nations or individuals deemed to stand in the way of the goal of unquestioned world supremacy.

Could we have imagined a few years ago that core principles such as the separation of church and state, due process, presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, and habeas corpus would be discarded so easily? Now, anyone can be declared an “enemy combatant” without meaningful redress or independent review by a President who is concentrating power in the executive branch. His choice for Attorney General is the legal architect of the torture that has been carried out in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib.

The Bush government seeks to impose a narrow, intolerant, and political form of Christian fundamentalism as government policy. No longer on the margins of power, this extremist movement aims to strip women of their reproductive rights, to stoke hatred of gays and lesbians, and to drive a wedge between spiritual experience and scientific truth. We will not surrender to extremists our right to think. AIDS is not a punishment from God. Global warming is a real danger. Evolution happened. All people must be free to find meaning and sustenance in whatever form of religious or spiritual belief they choose. But religion can never be compulsory. These extremists may claim to make their own reality, but we will not allow them to make ours.

Millions of us worked, talked, marched, poll watched, contributed, voted, and did everything we could to defeat the Bush regime in the last election. This unprecedented effort brought forth new energy, organization, and commitment to struggle for justice. It would be a terrible mistake to let our failure to stop Bush in these ways lead to despair and inaction. On the contrary, this broad mobilization of people committed to a fairer, freer, more peaceful world must move forward. We cannot, we will not, wait until 2008. The fight against the second Bush regime has to start now.

The movement against the war in Vietnam never won a presidential election. But it blocked troop trains, closed induction centers, marched, spoke to people door to door -- and it helped to stop a war. The Civil Rights Movement never tied its star to a presidential candidate; it sat in, freedom rode, fought legal battles, filled jailhouses -- and changed the face of a nation.

We must change the political reality of this country by mobilizing the tens of millions who know in their heads and hearts that the Bush regime’s “reality” is nothing but a nightmare for humanity. This will require creativity, mass actions and individual moments of courage. We must come together whenever we can, and we must act alone whenever we have to.

We draw inspiration from the soldiers who have refused to fight in this immoral war. We applaud the librarians who have refused to turn over lists of our reading, the high school students who have demanded to be taught evolution, those who brought to light torture by the U.S. military, and the massive protests that voiced international opposition to the war on Iraq. We affirm ordinary people undertaking extraordinary acts. We pledge to create community to back courageous acts of resistance. We stand with the people throughout the world who fight every day for the right to create their own future.

It is our responsibility to stop the Bush regime from carrying out this disastrous course. We believe history will judge us sharply should we fail to act decisively.
www.nion.us

Rabbie Burns Day: Three Poets: Part One

Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

Rabbie Burns Day: Three Poets: Part Two

Leonard Cohen

Some women wait for Jesus, and some women wait for Cain
so I hang upon my altar
and I hoist my axe again.
And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began
when Jesus was the honeymoon
and Cain was just the man.
And we read from pleasant Bibles that are bound in blood and skin
that the wilderness is gathering
all its children back again.

The rain falls down on last year's man,
an hour has gone by
and he has not moved his hand.
But everything will happen if he only gives the word;
the lovers will rise up
and the mountains touch the ground.
But the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
and all the rain falls down amen
on the works of last year's man.
Leonard Cohen, Last Year's Man

Rabbie Burns Day: Three Poets: Part Three

Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Allen Ginsberg, America

Never Again, Part Three...

In the frenzied instant everything world of America 2000 the ability of people to discriminate between what is good and what is bad - between what is worthwhile and what is trash - has been swept aside in the onrushing drive not to miss out. In a world of promotional hype and mass market hype, momentum is everything.
Christopher Byron

Stan Winfield, one of the first Canadian soldiers to see Auschwitz survivors, said yesterday he could not find anyone interested in listening to his accounts of the horror when he returned to Canada after the war.

"I think people could not fathom the magnitude of what had gone on," he said in an interview. "They said, 'It cannot be true. It must be propaganda.' "

He was especially struck by the reaction of young Jewish people he met. "They were not the slightest bit interested in my stories," he said. "I was hurt; I never talked about those things again for a long time. Why would I, when I could see their eyes glaze over? "

Mr. Winfield said he was not critical of those who turned away from the horror. "People wanted the war to be over," he said. Outside of family members and other veterans, he did not find anyone interested in hearing about the camps until the mid-1980s.

David Ehrlich, a Hungarian-born Jew who was at Auschwitz from April, 1944, until it was liberated the following January, said most people just wanted to get on with their lives. Even the survivors kept quiet. They wanted to settle in secure places and raise their families.

Holocaust survivor Rudolf Vrba, one of only five who ever escaped from Auschwitz, said he could not offer any explanation for the world's silence during four decades.

"I do not know why. It's a puzzle," said Mr. Vrba, who escaped in April, 1943. "That is how it was. I do not understand it."
Robert Matas, Toronto Globe & Mail

Wrestling with an angel...

Emotional wisdom is characterized by an ability to accept people as they are, a capacity to approach things in terms of only the present, an ability to treat everyone, even close contacts, with courteous attention, an ability to trust others even when it seems risky and an ability to do without constant approval and recognition.
Warren Bennis

All reading begins in the revolt against narcissism, when a book stops reflecting your own prejudices, whether for or against what you "see in it" and begins to say something closer to what it does say; the core of the reality in the "objective" aspect of it takes shape and you start wrestling with an angel.
Northrop Frye

Management Vs Creativity, Part one...

Jack Warner

Jack Warner insisted his writers start work at 9:00 just as bank managers and brokers did. Julius Epstein, the writer of Casablanca handed in a half finished script and told him to get a bank manager to finish it.

Johnny, has left the building...

"And so it has come to this. I am one of the lucky people in the world. I found something that I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it."
Johnny Carson

Never Again, Part Two...

This kind of scene can also be found at Abu Ghraib: ''An 18 November 2003 photograph depicts a detainee dressed in a shirt or blanket lying on the floor with a banana inserted into his anus. This as well as several others show the same detainee covered in feces, with his hands encased in sandbags, or tied in foam and between two stretchers.'' This, apparently, was a result of self-inflicted mania, although where the mentally ill man procured a banana is not elaborated upon.

Also notable in Abu Ghraib was the despicable use of religion to humiliate. One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted in broken English:

''They stripped me naked, they asked me, 'Do you pray to Allah?' I said, 'Yes.' They said 'F - - - you' and 'F - - - him.' '' Later, this inmate recounts: ''Someone else asked me, 'Do you believe in anything?' I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.' ''

...And the damage done was intensified by President Bush's refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president's response to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to say, ''Get off his back.'' In fact, those with real responsibility for the disaster were rewarded. Rumsfeld was kept on for the second term, while the man who warned against ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Colin Powell, was seemingly nudged out. The man who wrote a legal opinion maximizing the kind of brutal treatment that the United States could legally defend, Jay S. Bybee, was subsequently rewarded with a nomination to a federal Court of Appeals. General Sanchez and Gen. John P. Abizaid remain in their posts. Alberto R. Gonzales, who wrote memos that validated the decision to grant Geneva status to inmates solely at the president's discretion, is now nominated to the highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney general. The man who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to be entrusted with safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing he has been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost certainly be confirmed.

But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ''evil'' might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.

American political polarization also contributed. Most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents - like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh - were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas. Advocates of the war, especially those allied with the administration, kept relatively quiet, or attempted to belittle what had gone on, or made facile arguments that such things always occur in wartime. But it seems to me that those of us who are most committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential to winning this war.

I'm not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results are this horrifying, it's worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ''heroic'' protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.
Andrew Sullivan, New York Times Book Review

Never Again, Part One

Auschwitz I is where the Nazis opened the first Auschwitz camps for men and women, where they carried out the first experiments at using Zyklon B to put people to death, where they murdered the first mass transports of Jews, where they conducted the first criminal experiments on prisoners, where they carried out most of the executions by shooting, where the central jail for prisoners from all over the camp complex was located in Block No. 11, and where the camp commandant's office and most of the SS offices were located. From here, the camp administration directed the further expansion of the camp complex.

In the Birkenau camp, everything happened on a magnified scale. This is where the Nazis erected most of the machinery of mass extermination in which they murdered approximately one million European Jews. At the same time, Birkenau was the largest concentration camp (with nearly 300 primitive barracks, most of them wooden). Over a hundred thousand prisoners at a time were here: Jews, Poles, Roma, and others. The site of this camp contains places that are still full of human ashes; the greatest portion of what remains of the Auschwitz complex is here. The vastness of the space, the primitive barracks for the prisoners, the ruins or remains of other structures, and the miles of camp fence and roads give a full sense of what cannot be conveyed in words: infinite baseness, cruelty, and human criminality, and the specific camp architecture that served one purpose alone: the destruction of human beings.

Beginning in 1942, Jews whom the SS physicians classified as fit for labor were also registered in the camp. From among all the people deported to Auschwitz, approximately 400,000 people were registered and placed in the camp and its sub-camps (200,000 Jews, more than 140,000 Poles, approximately 20,000 Gypsies from various countries, more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and more than 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities). Over 50% of the registered prisoners died as a result of starvation, labor that exceeded their physical capacity, the terror that raged in the camp, executions, the inhuman living conditions, disease and epidemics, punishment, torture, and criminal medical experiments.
www.auschwitz-muzeum.oswiecim.pl

You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain't no friend of mine...

Willie Mae Thornton

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog
Cryin’ all the time.
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog
Cryin’ all the time.
Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit
And you ain’t no friend of mine.

When they said you was high classed,
Well, that was just a lie.
When they said you was high classed,
Well, that was just a lie.
You ain’t never caught a rabbit
And you ain’t no friend of mine.

Treat it Gentle

www.redhotjazz.com

One time I remember I was going to do something with Jelly Roll Morton who was going to make a show, and some fellow who handled the money for it said to Jelly, "Sidney? Why him, he's an old man! We don't want anyone as old as he is. Just look at him!" But Jelly, he just told that man that if he didn't take me there wouldn't be any outfit. That's the way it happened to Jazz back there. What a man's got in his soul, that's got to be dressed up to meet the public. If he's got white hair you don't allow him a soul.
Sidney Bechet, Treat it Gentle.

Some Tricks, Part Three...

The important thing is to do the things you believe you can do, and want to do, and will do.
James Salter

We were put on earth to make things.
WH Auden

I am coming to believe that nothing except a life work can be considered.
Gertrude Stein

Standing Shoulder to Shoulder

http://www.jazzfuneralfordemocracy.com

In the days after the election, my Dad noticed I was a bit depressed. He asked me how I was doing and I said, "You know, when I think about all the things that I care about so much, like the injustice of this war, and then I see that a majority of America doesn't see what I see... well, it's just hard to feel at home."

The most overwhelming feeling I had standing shoulder to shoulder with a thousand brothers and sisters today was, "Yeah, I am at home after all."

Thank you, everyone who came out with us. Thank you for letting me be a part of it. Michael, jazzfuneralfordemocracy.com

Egg or Chicken? Egg.

Arnold Newman, WOODY ALLEN, New York, 1996 - Photo Arnold Newman ©

I thought of that old joke, a guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken!"
And the doctor says, "Why don't you turn him in?"
And the guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."

Well, I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd but I guess we keep going through it because most of need the eggs.
Woody Allen

The Bible & Peace Part's One & Two

MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES

The Bible & Peace Part One

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace.
Deuteronomy 20:10

The Bible & Peace Part Two

If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city.
Deuteronomy 20:12

Riding With The Bad Boys

Getty Images

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

...The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”
Seymour Hersh, The Coming Wars, The New Yorker, January 20 2005

On the 1960's...

www.hlswilliwaw.com

I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.
Joan Didion

The Agonizing Struggle Between Past and Future...

For every man there are things that he can and things that he cannot endure. Whether or not he will encounter, before he dies, the thing that will break him depends as much on chance as merit.

Courage is needed to persist and endure, to withstand the tension within us, the agonizing struggle between past and future, between memory and will that is life itself and the effort of living.

Being faithful to our ideas means not just remembering that we had them once, but also wanting to keep them alive; remembering not just that we had them once, but that we have them still.
Andre Conte-Sponville

E=Hair-brained

Everything we know about this world was once a hair-brained scheme that panned out.

Ben Katchor

Once Full of Hopeful Possibilities...

"I am more and more pessimistic. I used to be much more hopeful. I grew up in the 60's and 70's, full of hopeful possibilities, involved in the civil rights and feminist movements. I used to belief that, in my lifetime, we'd think about the world in a different way, but now I don't think so. Especially with the consolidation of US imperialism in such a profound way."

She wonders whether the current obsession with make-overs on television and in magazines, be it to the body, face or home, doesn't betray our deep dissatisfaction with the world, and the realization that we can't fix it.

"So," she says, "we fix our face instead. Or we fix our house."

Gerald Hannon on Poet, Novelist Dionne Brand

The Most Delightful People

Bob:
It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids.

Charlotte:
It's scary.

Bob:
The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born.

Charlotte:
Nobody ever tells you that.

Bob:
Your life, as you know it... is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk... and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.


Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation

Only If You Want To...

over the phone
pauses

Lydia Harris:
The burgundy carpet is out of stock: it's going to take twelve weeks. Did you like any of the other colors?

Bob:
Whatever you like - I'm just completely lost.

Lydia Harris:
It's just carpet.

Bob:
That's not what I'm talking about.

Lydia Harris:
What are you talking about?

Bob:
I don't know. I just want to... get healthy. I would like to start taking better care of myself. I'd like to start eating healthier - I don't want all that pasta. I would like to start eating like Japanese food.

icily, biting his tongue, pause

Lydia Harris:
Do I need to worry about you, Bob?

Bob:
Only if you want to.

Soffia Coppola, Lost in Translation

An endless horizon of new possibility...

www.beansprout.net

Each one is different. That's what I'm told. How is it they know that? Is there an archive of the infinite number of snowflakes that have ever fallen? Can you Google it to match the one on the end of your tongue? How is it that we recognize each and every one as distinctly a snowflake if they are not the same?

And each of these snowflakes clearly only have a very short life indeed, as something we recognize as a snowflake. What are they while they are forming - small beads of ice; water; baby snowflakes? What are they becoming when they have reached their peak and begin to melt, or are smashed together to form a weapon or something to live in?

When each of these unique individuals hold hands to form a blanket of freshly fallen snow they make the world seem an endless horizon of new possibility.

They arrive as a gift from above, falling freely and free to delight our tongues, to age our eyelashes, to bury our wondrous dogs, to cover our footsteps...

Some Tricks, Part Two...

You must decide just exactly what you want to do.

You must decide just exactly where you want to do it, through your own research and personal survey.

You must research the organizations that interest you at great length, and then approach that one individual in each organization who has the power to hire you for the job that you have decided you want to do.

Richard Bolles, What Colour is Your Parachute?

Getting Jigme Wit It...Bhutan Style

In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, deeply concerned about the effects of globalization on his country's unique culture, was determined to protect it. He wanted to safeguard the social and cultural values by converting them into quantifiable terms so that the wider world might understand and respect them. This led eventually to the Gross Happiness Index to gauge properly the country's social, cultural and environmental assets as well as its economic development.

In 1998 the Prime Minister, Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, formalized the vision into the government's new master plan, the Four Pillars of Happiness. These pillars - sustainable economic development, conservation of the environment, the promotion of the national culture and good governance - create conditions in which every individual will be able to pursue happiness with reasonable success.

Marylin Tam

Maybe All Revolvers are Kryptonite...

Why do we press harder on a remote control when we know the batteries are getting weak?

Why do banks charge a fee on "insufficient funds" when they know there is not enough?

Why does someone believe you when you say there are four billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?

Why doesn't glue stick to the bottle?

Why do they use sterilized needles for death by lethal injection?

Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard?

Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but ducks when you throw a revolver at him?

Why do Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

Whose idea was it to put an "S" in the word "lisp"?

If people evolved from apes, why are there still apes?

Does a clean house indicate that there is a broken computer in it?

Why is it that no matter what colour bubble bath you use the bubbles are always white?

Is there ever a day that mattresses are not on sale?

Why do people constantly return to the refrigerator with hopes that something new to eat will have materialized?

Why do people keep running over a string a dozen times with their vacuum cleaner, then reach down, pick it up, examine it, then put it down to give the vacuum one more chance?

Why is it that no plastic bag will open from the end you first try?

How do those dead bugs get into those closed light fixtures?

When we are in the supermarket and someone rams our ankle with a shopping cart then apologizes for doing so, why do we say, "It's all right ?" Well, it isn't all right so why don't we say, "That hurt, you stupid idiot?"

Why is it that whenever you attempt to catch something that's falling off the table you always manage to knock something else over?

In winter why do we try to keep the house as warm as it was in summer when we complained about the heat?

How come you never hear father-in-law jokes?

If at first you don't succeed, shouldn't you try doing it like your wife told you to do it? And obviously if at first you don't succeed, then don't take up sky diving!

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four persons is suffering from some sort of mental illness. Think of your three best friends, if they're okay, then it's you.

The Internet, Everywhere, January 2005

I'm Fallin' Apart Here

Dustin Hoffman & Jon Voight

Ratso Rizzo:
Here I am, goin' to Florida, my leg hurts, my butt hurts, my chest hurts, my face hurts, and like that ain't enough, I gotta pee all over myself.

[Joe Buck laughs]

Ratso Rizzo:
That's funny? I'm fallin' apart here!

Joe Buck:
It's just - Know what happened? You just took a little rest stop that wasn't on the schedule!

Midnight Cowbay, James Herlily, Waldo Salt

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Manhattan, www.woodyallenmovies.com

Allen disliked his work in this film so much he offered to direct another film for United Artists for free if they kept Manhattan on the shelf for good.

Body-Slamming Canucks

www.garywill.com/wrestling

"Whip Ends Nine-year Reign of Lou Thesz as Ruler of NWA Matmen
...The end of that long reign came after 30 minutes and 33 seconds before about 15,000 folks at the Gardens last night, with the most important modus operandi being a corkscrew hold. Clutching on to Thesz' left hand and bending it back so there appeared to be grave danger it would break off at the wrist, the Whipper was pulled to the ropes by Thesz, who sure knows the ropes (yipe). Thesz fell out of same with the Whipper still clinging to ruddy hand. On the ramp Thesz busted loose but the Whipper grabbed him and body-slammed him to the hard, resounding boards. Thesz seemed to land on his elbow, which is hardly any way to land at all, and was still there nursing his wounds when the Whipper leaped back into the ring and special referee Jack Dempsey arrived at the fatal number -- 10."

(From the TORONTO STAR, May 16, 1956)

Compassionate Conservatism

In his autobiography, Bush claimed that the pending execution of Karla Faye Tucker "felt like a huge piece of concrete...crushing me." But in an unguarded moment in 1999 while traveling during the presidential campaign, Bush revealed his true feelings to the journalist Tucker Carlson.

Bush mentioned Karla Faye Tucker, who had been executed the previous year, and told Carlson that in the weeks immediately before the execution, Bianca Jagger and other protesters had come to Austin to plead for clemency for her. Carlson asked Bush if he had met with any of the petitioners and was surprised when Bush whipped around, stared at him, and snapped, "No, I didn't meet with any of them." Carlson, who until that moment had admired Bush, said that Bush's curt response made him feel as if he had just asked "the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed."

Bush went on to tell him that he had also refused to meet Larry King when he came to Texas to interview Tucker but had watched the interview on television. King, Bush said, asked Tucker difficult questions, such as "What would you say to Governor Bush?"

What did Tucker answer? Carlson asked.

"Please," Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "please, don't kill me."

Carlson was shocked.[4] He couldn't believe Bush's callousness and reasoned that his cruel mimicry of the woman whose death he had authorized must have been sparked by anger over Karla Faye Tucker's remarks during the King interviews. When King had asked her what she planned to ask Governor Bush, Karla Faye had said she thought that if Bush approved her execution, he would be succumbing to election-year pressure from pro–death penalty voters.

Sister Helen Prejean, New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005

Even So...

If I say I'll always stay by your side
stupid things I say some nights
can you tell me I'm wrong till I cry
tell me do you have the right
if I say the seas could never sweep me
overboard and far away
do you still say you wouldn't try to keep me
if I lost the will to stay

you won't promise this will last much longer
than the time it takes to stray
your excuse is that my heart's much stronger
and some of your love has been drained away

I can't bear it when the tears fill your eyes
and I've said too much once more
don't be angry now you must realize
my only fear's of losing something I adore

everything but the girl

Reasons for Living, Part Two...

David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
Algonquin, Pog Lake
Van Morrison, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart
Tom Thomson, Red Sumac
Elvis Costello, I Want You
Elvis Presley, In The Ghetto
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Venice, Caffè Florian
Willem de Kooning, …Whose Name Was Writ in Water,

...and the equivalent of death is demolition.

www.katchor.com

"I don't see my work as being satirical," he says. "I see it as being tragicomedy. It's not like a political cartoon that wants to expose someone's silly behaviour. I don't talk about particularly despicable people. They're all people in various predicaments. I sympathize with most of my characters."

"The size of comics is smaller. When people did comics as broadsheets in the 1800s, they were as full of information as any painting. Now comics have been reduced to this sign language, and all these little concrete details get thrown out--one building is as good as another. The particulars of the visible world get reduced to signs and symbols."

"Neighbourhoods and buildings go through these cycles of life, and the equivalent of death is demolition. You just hope something better springs up in its place. I don't advocate turning cities into museums of architecture. Sometimes, in the act of preserving a building, you ruin it, turning it into a museum-quality falsification. It's literally the building, but the culture it came out of is gone. The best moment in the life of a building is when it's in a state of neglect, but that happens when there's no reason to do anything. It's past its heyday, and yet it's not in the way of new schemes."
Ben Katchor

Irony Part II

Wal-Mart, the US retail colossus that sells more stuff than any other company on the planet, is a paradox to even its most loyal customers.

"I hate Wal-Mart more than anything in the world," said Stephanie, a 52 year old housewife as she emerged from a store outside Washington DC yesterday, "They're just too big!"
An yet clutching a Wal-Mart shopping bag, she acknowledged that she's a regular customer and a shareholder.

"I come here because the prices are so good."

Wal-Mart has faced sex discrimination lawsuits, community protests, allegations of hiring illegal workers and a hefty dose of scorn in its 42-year history.
Barrie McKenna, Globe & Mail, January 14 2005

June 2004:
A US Federal judge in California approves a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit filed by six Wal-Mart employees who say they were denied promotions. The class now covers 1.6 million women who have worked at Wal-Mart since 1998, making it the largest civil rights suit in US history.


Factory Owners Cut, Run in Lesotho
JOHANNESBURG -- Six foreign factory owners have fled Lesotho this month, leaving thousands of people out of work after the tiny southern African kingdom and other developing countries lost a quota system that helped them get access to richer markets.

What changed over the holidays was the World Trade Organization's Multi-Fibre Agreement, which expired Jan. 1. It gave poor countries preferential access for garment production and limited the amount that larger, cheaper labour markets such as China and India were able to export to markets such as the United States and the European Union.

Without the quotas, garment makers in countries such as China, which pay workers less because prisoners do much of the work and there is no overhead cost of importing raw materials, have unrestricted access to the markets. Companies can now buy entirely from them.

"China is cheaper and there are now no limits on them," Ms. Chen said, noting that the factories that skipped the country without paying their workers were unable to do so because their businesses failed completely.

"The companies have responsibilities too -- and not only the Chinese or Malaysian firms fleeing Lesotho, but the brands like Zellers for whom they produce," Ms. Smiaroski said. "Ruthless brand-name purchasing practices discourage long-term investments and force local manufacturers to follow the lure of ever-lower labour costs. When the brand-names drive down the price they'll pay, and garment companies cut and run to the latest low-wage haven, they choke off a route for women to improve their lives."
Stephanie Nolen, Globe & Mail, January 15 2005

A fine cigar is just like a woman!

Blessed be the man who invented smoking, the soother and comforter of a troubled spirit, allayer of angry passions, a comfort under loss of breakfast, and to the roamer of desolate places, the solitary wayfarer through life, serving for wife, children, and friends.

A fine cigar is just like a woman. If you don't light it up just right and suck on it with a certain frequency, it will go out on you.
Anonymous

Some Tricks

The trick is to learn to believe that it's a disconnected world, a lunatic world where what is true now was not true then.
Sloan Wilson

The trick is to care, but not too much. Give a shit - but not really!
Larry King to Tucker Carlson on how to succeed in broadcasting

You can only make the world from what you know...build it up piece by piece from the things that you believe to be true.
Mary Swann

You go where the accident started, because they never end up where they start.
NASCAR driver Steve Parks on how to avoid a crash

"Our home & native land..."

"Oh Canada..."

Ron Sexsmith, Secret Heart
Leonard Cohen, Heart With No Companion
Neil Young, Helpless
Murray Mclaughlin, The Farmer's Song
Paul Bley, Touching
Oscar Peterson, Hymn to Freedom
Guess Who, Sour Suite
Eve Egoyan, The Art of Touching
Gil Evans, Miles Ahead
Joni Mitchell, A Case of You

...blue, blue windows...

Insects Win! Who Knew?

Xestobium rufovillosum

If insects disappeared tomorrow it would take about 6 weeks for all life on land and freshwater to die! Insects are the earth's caretakers. Without insects, all the animals that ate insects would die. Then all the animals that ate those animals would die too and so on…

Then without insects there wouldn’'t be anyone to eat all those decomposing dead animals and on top of that there would be no one to bury and recycle those dead things into the ground and make fertilizer for plants.

That also means there would be no one to turn the soil which supplies plant roots with air and then all the plants would die too and all the animals that ate those plants would die and the animals that ate those animals which ate those plants would also die and eventually between the smell of all the decomposing dead things and eventually running out of canned goods we, yes we would also parish.
www.creepycrawlyzoo.com

Limited government and the Bible. Who knew?

www.4religious-right.info

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America - though she doesn't deserve it - a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate...Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ...
Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech and limited government. You have four years - a brief time only - to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almightly God...
If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them.
Reverand Bob Jones III

Antidote

www.npg.si.edu/exh/ namuth/hnintro2.htm

Art is an agent of civilization.
Castagenay

Stupid is as Stupid Does...

www.eleganthairstyles.com

Fame is the result of matching a personality with the national stupidity.
Baudelaire

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein

A Day in Which Nothing Happens is a Miracle

Our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability. The moment we're able, we insulate ourselves from random acts of hate and destruction, It's always been there - in the neighbourhoods we build, the walls between our houses, the wariness with which we treat the unknown. One person in six million will be struck by lightening. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be the victim of a violent crime. A day in which nothing happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn't. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit - and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.
Douglas Coupland

Reasons for Living, Part One...

Woody Allen, Manhattan

Hilary smiling...
Hannah laughing...
Milton Avery's Spring Orchard
James Salter, A Sport and a Past-time
Craigie Aitchison, Butterflies and Lemon Still-life
Daryl Sittler, February 7th, 1976
Coney Island, Northern Ireland
King Cole Bar, St Regis, Manhattan
Shoot Me. Shoot Me!, Al Pacino, Dog Day Afternoon
1968 Alfa Romeo Spyder
Saint Luis Rey Regios

He Could Not Picture it Now

...the car raced across the wooden bridge...

"Are you in love?", he said.
"I thought I was. I thought I loved someone", she said, "But he wasn't worth loving".
"I'm so sorry", he said.
He remembered the last time they had met, the sound the tires made as the car raced across the wooden bridge. He remembered looking into the glare of the approaching lights and thinking for a moment that he saw the curve of her naked back. He could not picture it now.
"I'm so sorry!" he said, thinking he too, may not have been worth loving.
"It's not important", she said.
What is, what is, what is? he thought.

I am thinking of all those wonderful men and women, the people among whom I grew up...

http://www.shoalhaven.nsw.gov.au

Nothing in life is so beautiful as the night before what is yet to be.
Halldor Laxness