Wow. Hurricane. Didn’t do any damage to Bushwick, Brooklyn (nothing does) except blow apart the lawn-chairs and roof-garden. X. still lives with her parents in New Jersey. I was there only days before the hurricane; weather-wise it was “Spring.”
Enter: Climate Change, stage Extreme Right. Blow apart the “burbs” and lower Manhattan. NYU was shutdown for a week, giving X. a much-needed vacation. She said trees had been scattered all over the Garden State, as well as the looser parts of peoples homes — outdoor lighting fixtures, shutters, lawn furniture, etc. My sister, her husband, and my three-year-old nephew were without light and water for a week. They took flight the day after the storm and to stay at a friend’s uptown.
Oh solipsistic me! Didn’t notice a thing until last Monday, when I had to go into Manhattan for a doctor’s appointment and navigate the New Labyrinth created to get the workers to work on time while a quarter of the subway-system’s tunnels were flooded (let’s see…what’ll it be…hip re-replacement, eye surgery, hearing aid? I say none of the above; enough of this medical shit; let ‘em “impose austerity” and cut back all the “social services” they want; we’ll see who flinches first: the doctors, hospital, pharmacists, and lab technicians who depend on the Adam Engel Franchise, or me).
But these were just the imaginary symptoms of Climate Change, which doesn’t exist, so nothing actually happened.
Once again the ridiculous Election Day “choice” between a mass-murdering but young, bright and good-looking Yes-man in the Kennedy mold, or a wanna-be mass-murdering, obtuse, sinister old law-and-order Vampire in the Nixon mold, for CEO of The Nation, reporting to the Board of Trustees and other Major shareholders though “elected by the people.” I actually wanted Romney to win, so people might wake up and fight back. Or might in theory. But they’re Americans, bred to be “tough enough” to take whatever type and quantity of shit gets dumped on their heads — and LIKE it: “Thank you, sir! May I have another?”
Power, as writers of the Black Agenda Report rightly noted (including Cynthia McKinney, erstwhile Democrat — until she finally, finally realized “enuff iz too much!”) made a wise-choice in selecting a black-Kennedy to “run” for CEO; an improvement even over their greatest Kennedy since Kennedy: Bill Clinton.
Nobody’s gonna criticize this particular sociopath-in-a-suit for bombing civilians abroad or imposing “austerity” at home cause if they do, they’ll be RACISTS. As bad as the MIS-VAGINISTS who criticized Hillary Clinton for clucking salaciously — “We came, we saw, he died!” — over the abduction, torture and dispatch — sans habeas corpus, which nobody reads anyway cause its in Latin, or worse: Old English — of yet another Hitler: Qaddafi.
So, the morning after the election we — that is, we who read about such things — read that another hundred or so unarmed civilians (who can count these people, there’re billions of ‘em; they breed like rabbits) in a drone bombing and that the sitting President-elect, gathered his staff of nochshleppers to finally, finally discuss cut-backs in “social services” now that the coast was clear. Said cut-backs had been recommended by the 80 “top CEOs” in the nation — bankers mostly, living off the $16 trillion in “aid” they got as reward for…fucking up, failing utterly and completely in the one thing they are allegedly competent to do (kinda like the Iowa Writing Workshop-approved silvanicidal graphomaniacs) and commended as “the right course” by both Obama and his alleged opponent — I didn’t believe any of it. Honestly, that’s the best the Republicans could come up with? And, like McCain before him, he deliberately chooses an even bigger imbecile/psychotic to run as Veep?
Begs credulity, as did McCain’s run (Power’s way of giving loyal John a nice send-off; and “let him use the bimbo from Alaska, if he wants; it’ll say…something about how we’re this and that or whatever the fuck we’re supposed to be about women and doling out good investment money from the tax-payer-till for their silly abortions and what-not…”)
Gertrude Stein was a Buddha: her work is a meditation which leads to personal discovery or “meaning.” Asking “what its all about” is like asking for the “explanation” of a Zen Koan.
Joyce (of Finnegans Wake) was a museum: all the artifacts of all language to be viewed, re-viewed and re-viewed again, with or without curator commentary, for deep contemplation of cerebral meaning, i.e. history, civilization and what the general definition of ‘is,’ is…
“That is all ye know in life, that is all ye need to know.”
All of the above, and Keats too, explained by the life and works — including production and sound scores of every Monty Python and Terry Guilliame movie after Holy Grail, up to and including Brazil, of George Harrison, as presented through the prism of Martin Scorsese in his brilliant documentary, Life in The Material World. That Harrison was only one of FOUR such extreme paragons of personality and creativity speaks volumes; I do believe the Beatles were and remain the most variegated and influential — across all spectra of caste and age group (and they composed and recorded music with and/or inspired by black soul and blues musicians, Jazz, old time Pub songs, vaudeville, Far East Indian raga, The Tao, avant garde and classical riffs and musicians, not to mention folk and country, Dylan, Brian Wilson and other extra-terrestrials) “social-literary phenomenon” since Shakespeare…
Of course the name/term “Beatles” refers, by any definition, to George, John, Paul, Ringo and the fifth, perhaps most important Beatle, George Martin.