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[05 Dec 2001|12:21pm] |
This is a quote to live by:
"....genius is childhood rediscovered." --Baudelaire
Today is my last day of classes. . Yester day i did a whole buncha research on Anne Waldman (she wrote "fast speaking woman" and Co-foiunded teh Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in boulder). She's really cool.
for my assignment I had to write a poem in her style, and I really didn't have her typical emotions running through me but neverthless it turned out to be a really cool poem. I'll put it up here later. I sort of took her cue in that, FAst Speaking Woman was sort of based on this Shamaness's all night chanting mushroom ritual, so I based my poem on ideas, realizations and experiences I had when I first did mushrooms over thanksgiving break.
Do you ever forget that you have a body? It's one of my favorite things to remember, i think that's why i always forget it.
OOOH! goodie we have the internet at home now! OOOOOH boy!
These are from a newsletter I get (SF gate's Morning fix) First one is funny, the second is just good.
Lesbians Ate My Homework
Two girls will be listed in their New Hampshire high school
yearbook as "class sweethearts" after the superintendent overruled
the school principal and said same-sex couples were eligible for
the title. Dover High School seniors overwhelmingly named Nicole
Salisbury and Ashley Lagasse as "class sweethearts" when the
yearbook staff conducted its annual survey to name students to
categories such as "most artistic" or "nicest eyes." Salisbury and
Lagasse, both 17, have been a couple for more than two years. "I
am shocked and appalled at the school's apparent support of
homosexuality and girls touching other girls and kissing each other
and probably doing icky things to each other with long smooth
slender objects that vibrate," said New Hampshire mother of three
Pauline Engleberry, as the universe looked over from the Elizabeth
Hurley thing and rolled its eyes and sighed and ordered another
round of mudslides.
MARK'S NOTES & ERRATA
Where opinion meets benign syntax abuse...
***********************************************
Dick Cheney Sucks Your Soul
Of Kid Rock, jingoistic Santas and far too many little flags on SUVs
Maybe it was the bloated black 3-ton Cadillac Escalade with the
huge chrome wheels and the low-profile tires and the tinted glass
and the awful thumping house music and the belching exhaust and
the 37 cupholders and the leather everything and the refrigerator
and the DVD and the automatic genital massager and the built-in
oil refinery and the shredded little US flag waving limply from the
antenna that did it.
Is this what finally killed any nubile traces of spiritual rebirth in the
New America? Is this what finally destroyed that new bud of hope,
the one that represented change and togetherness and a refreshed
perspective, honest communication and better sex and the end of
road rage?
Or was it was the latest piece of eager spam to careen into my
in-box, a plug for the $39.95 "Patriotic Santa" doll, "just in time for
Christmas," like they had to rush those 25-cent/hour Malaysian
sweatshop factory workers to get the thing to market right away.
Whew!
And not to belabor the whole SUV thing -- but their grating ubiquity
really does cry out for endless gleeful derision -- it could've been
that incredible Chevy Tahoe commercial, so pumped with
proto-American aggro attitude and thuggish machismo you can cut
it with a chainsaw, all grunting deep-throated voiceovers and flying
mud and the Star Spangled Banner churning like a medieval chant
behind the screaming 0% financing promotional ad copy.
The message of course being that there's simply no better time
than a depressing post-traumatic kill-'em-all wartime recession to
dash down to your Chevy dealer to dump 30K on a 12mpg pollutive
tank you can't even parallel park, much less afford to fill with Saudi
Arabia's finest.
Then there's the USO benefit show organized by MTV and featuring
Kid Rock and J.Lo and Ja Rule, to be broadcast to all our
not-really-suffering 19-year-olds stuck out in the Arabian Sea for
three whole weeks. Barely talented multimillionaire egos preening
on stage -- yep, that's sure to make our boys feel all warm and
homesick.
Was it the adorably self-whoring Hollywood PR machine offering
free, round-the-clock showings of formulaic military dreck like
"Behind Enemy Lines" and jingoistic revisionism like "Black Hawk
Down" to those same pimply troops on those same incredibly
expensive aircraft carriers, ostensibly to boost morale and give the
poor lads some monosyllabic ultra-violent faux-entertainment but
really just to pump the PR copy for a couple surefire domestic
flops?
Is it the multiple weeks of solid bombing with nothing to show for it
but a desperately poor dust-choked country razed into gravel, the
brutish Taliban regime now replaced by the brutish Northern
Alliance regime, the latter ironically now including many of those
very same defected Taliban soldiers now wearing rebel garb and
getting the chance to shave their beards and listen to bad AM radio
and kill each other over who gets to drive the old Taliban jeeps? Oh
yes, that was so worth it.
Is it the sinking awareness that terrorism is still just as much of a
threat as ever and this war-that's-not-really-a-war is only
exacerbating the general anti-US hate simmering deep in the black
and repressed hearts of roughly a half-dozen other furious Arab
nations, and is this a good time to mention that bin Laden will most
likely never be caught?
Not that it would make a difference if he were, given how his
terrorist network is extensive and intricate and spread throughout
Syria and Egypt and Lebanon and Iran and Iraq and probably parts
of Arizona and maybe Colorado and hey isn't that Dick Cheney,
grinning sinisterly in his bunker, surrounded by flying monkeys?
Whatever it was, anything resembling authentic American
patriotism has now left the building. It has been fully compromised,
commodified, assimilated, sold back to you as Old Glory designer
dishware and red-white-and-blue argyle socks and delicate
Christmas ornaments shaped like Tomahawk missiles, Ashcroft
wiretapping your calls to your shrink as you plead for another Zoloft
refill.
America has processed. America has digested. America is strong
and beautiful and proud and often incredibly backward and
values-impaired and run by giddy capitalists and enormous
corporations and Steve Case, all of whom would sell you their own
mothers dressed in cute glittery American-flag sweaters if it would
move product.
It is not a time for reflection. It is not a time for turning off the
consumerist firehose and getting quiet and trying to figure things
out.
It is time for buying and bombing and getting used to the bitter taste
of the current situation, maybe years and years of it, and realizing
that, sure enough, everything has definitely changed -- except for all
those ways it's exactly, painfully the same.
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