POTPOURRI

I always like that category on Jeopardy because you never know what the answer (that the contestant has to come up with the question for, Mike Douglas's brilliantly original idea) will have anything to do with so there's no preparing, no tiny adjustment to at least some sort of narrowing down of the possibilities. [DAMN, DID IT AGAIN, MERV GRIFFIN NOT MIKE DOUGLAS!]

It's often what's exciting about a lot of poetry as well, the unexpected juxtapositions (William Carlos Williams' famous dictum was "No idea but in things" which Ted Berrigan altered to express his own aesthetic—at least he did to me—as "No ideas but in juxtapositions")...

So I've got a couple of unrelated thoughts going around in my head this late December morning after a late night of writing on one of my many projects I always have going and which demand so much more editing and rewriting because of my post-brain-op related or just age related typing mistakes etc....

Anyway the question popped into my mind without even seeing a photo of her or hearing one of her songs which I might not even recognize these days anyway, does anyone else see Rhianna as the Dolly Parton of hiphop? (I think that may have been prompted by a "news" item headline in Huffington Post or somewhere on the net). [WOOPS! I MEANT NICKI MINAJ.]

And how this week alone, the first in December, has seen a couple of days here with abnormally warm—not just Spring-like but at times Summer-like—temperatures in between days so cold—and abnormally so for this time of year—that it might as well have been late January. And on those warm days walking, or trying to, in the nearby park (I've posted about so much) still encountering sidewalks blocked by yellow police caution tape where wires are still hanging down and trees are still fallen over and yet to be cut up like other spots where they have been but are still in piles waiting to be hauled away, and am once again amazed at how much and how quickly things can return or remain "normal" in one location while still being so abnormal in another, especially after the accumulating abnormal weather events caused by the climate changes wrought by global warming, even just from one street to another or one house to another.

And then, totally, or seemingly so, unrelated I thought of the holiday season when I was a kid and found these photos that best reflected that as music and movies were my escapes and these were the kinds of images I related to back then during this season for whatever personal and other reasons.  The first is of one of my favorite movie actresses when I was a very little boy, Jane Greer, mostly due to the great film noir movie (in my mind one of the top three or so) OUT OF THE PAST, but here seen in a shot when she was probably just a "starlet" in what passed for holiday humor in those days (and makes me think of my older brothers, two of whom joined the service in World War Two, and that thought brought on by yesterday's anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack that defined the world I was born into a few months later)...

The second shot is of some of the big influences on my musical taste when I was a little boy (though this photo is obviously, from Frankie's hat, taken later in the 1950s when I was hitting puberty like my youngest is  now, bringing back so many memories from my own teenage years), mainly Louis Armstrong, Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Bing, the first and last of whom I thought I was too hip for by the time this photo was taken because I was by then playing "progressive jazz" and found them too square, but thankfully outgrew that prejudice and now see them as the iconic musical creators they were and remain...)

[and then after editing this post I see that spell check on my totally up to date brand new Word program still doesn;t recognize film noir or Huffington or...woops "doesn;t" as doesn't (I actually typed that with the semi-colon several times before I could finally get it correct!)...anyways...]

[Oh, and if you don't know what a "club coupe" was, it was a sexy (for that time era) style of automobile, which makes me think this starlet shot is after the war but before OUT OF THE PAST (1945 to 1949) because during the war they stopped production of cars in order to use the same factories and equipment and skills to make tanks and jeeps etc.]