Discovering Doug Lang’s DC poetry history blog, led me to my contribution to a similar project done years ago.
I stuck my contribution up there to the right in the little selection of some sites my work or comments about it appear on.
At the time I wrote it, the only history of the poetry scene that included some of the years I was in DC, left me out. So that’s why I took what might seem like a self-serving perspective.
Now that Doug Lang has created his own blog about it and included his entries to the same project, which I hadn’t seen before, but certainly give me more than enough credit, my entry is almost redundant, except for the pre-DC history and early days there, which I think are a useful addition.
I also think my entry must have been cut, because I remember mentioning lots of poets who were a part of the scene, including the actress Karen Allen who hadn’t quite chosen between writing and acting at that time, and the poet/singer/musician who became John Doe after he left the DC-Baltimore area for L. A. and started the band X.
What’s most important for me about Doug’s blog and the DC poetry history project in general, is that it documents one of many poetry scenes that were overshadowed by New York and San Francisco, and that I hope are being equally documented and get their due as part of what I experienced as a lively international poetry scene in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Let me know if you uncover any other blogs or sites about these alternative scenes, will ya?
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
MORE SUMMER READING—DANTE, WHITMAN and GARY SNYDER
Here’s three more books I just finished reading (or rereading):
1. DANTE by R. W. B. LEWIS
2. WALT WHITMAN The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving
3. BACK ON THE FIRE Essays by Gary Snyder
All three of these poets—Dante, Whitman and Snyder—were early influences on my work.
1. Dante’s early book LA VITA NUOVA, with its mix of prose and poetry, influenced the kinds of books I wanted to write. His “DIVINE COMEDY” I dip into various translations of now and then to remind me of the magnitude of his accomplishment.
But despite that, and the fact that I love The Penguin Lives Series of biographies—even did a post about them—I hadn’t really read the one on DANTE by R. W. B. Lewis. That is, I read it while standing in a bookstore but never brought it home and lived with it the way I do with books I really dig.
Interestingly, I’d read and dug years ago Lewis’s EDITH WHARTON: A BIOGRAPHY (she’s another writer whose work I fell in love with early on).
When I wrote the post about the Penguin Lives, my friend Ray DiPalma recommended the DANTE, so I picked it up in a used bookstore and this time brought it home and was glad I did.
Lewis writes of what is known of Dante’s life, and somewhat of what has been speculated or can be surmised, always clearly denoting where he is imagining what is highly likely from all the evidence.
His recreation of a time when poetry mattered to the general populace and not just to other poets, and when poets not only were often respected, even revered, but also when they exchanged poems freely, responding to each other’s work, even touting their own work ala the rap poets of today, made Dante’s life and world extremely real to me.
And Lewis’s own observations are individual enough and smart enough to keep me interested in his perspective as well, necessary to the enjoyment of any biography.
For instance in his discussion of the “Paradiso” section of LA COMMEDIA, when at a lower level of the celestial realm (actually “in” the “moon”) Dante encounters a woman he knows and asks her how she can be so obviously contented at not being on a higher level of heaven, and it becomes clear to Dante (and here I quote R. B. Lewis’s text):
“’…everywhere in Heaven is Paradise.’ Piccarda Donati [the woman] follows with the finest single line in the Pradiso (iii 85): ‘His will is our peace.’ It is a line that seizes the mind at once and repays long meditation: ‘la sua voluntade e nostra pace.’”
2. Whitman’s love of litanies reverberated with the Catholic liturgy in the Latin Mass of my childhood, and matched my own love of lists which became a recurring device in my poetry, as did the long breath of his long lines, and his embrace, at least in his writing, of all experience and all types of humans.
Though not my very favorite biography of Whitman, Jerome Loving’s is one of my favorites, and I am always reading or re-reading Whitman’s poetry and prose and/or a biography of him, and this summer I chose the Loving.
He disagrees with the authors of my other two favorite Whitman biographies—Justin Kaplan and David S. Reynolds—on some of the details of Whitman’s early life and publications (the period before he became the masterful poet we know and was still a journalist and political essayist and fiction writer, as well as a more conventional poet),
But otherwise it is a story I am more than familiar with, and yet it never bores me.
I suppose that’s just a matter of taste and personal history, or maybe it’s just my own compulsiveness, but whatever the origins, I find Whitman’s life emblematic of the history of the U.S. and of “modern” poetry and writing in general, and his spirit—despite the critical perspectives of his biographers and the differences between his times and opinions and mine—I find his spirit and beliefs, as avowed in LEAVES OF GRASS and SPECIMEN DAYS as compatible with mine as anyone I’ve ever read or encountered.
To me, Whitman is the Dalai Lama of poetry and spirituality, the non organized-religion kind of spirituality that satisfies my soul.
4. I knew of Gary Snyder before I fell in love with his work. That happened in 1966, after I was discharged from the service. My first wife and I were living in Brooklyn Heights, where the only patron I ever had was putting us up in a fancy apartment while paying me to write “the great American novel,” which she was sure I would.
My wife became jealous of the patron, and then my mother passed, creating a reason to abandon the patron and the apartment and the income to move to Jersey to care for my father until other arrangements could be made
It was there, on his TV, I watched a series of educational black-and-white half hour films on contemporary poets—fifteen minutes devoted to each of two poets.
I remember Frank O’Hara being one of the poets profiled, and being amazed as he wrote a poem while talking to whoever was behind the camera filming him and then answering the phone and talking to a friend while continuing to write the poem, which after the call he pulled fresh from the typewriter to read to the camera!
I was already into O'Hara, had been infleunced by him without admitting it yet. Charles Olson was also profiled. I can’t remember anymore who else. I dug them all, but the poet who impressed me most was Gary Snyder, just sitting on a stool reading to the camera. He seemed to be reading directly to me in a way that was an epiphany.
It wasn’t that he was doing something incredibly new, I could see the impact of another of my early influences—William Carlos Williams—on his direct speech and concrete subject matter and so on, but I felt this connection to the stories in his poems, even though I was an East Coast guy with an entirely different set of experiences and reference points.
The connection may have been working with our hands—something I swore I would no longer do after I left home, wanting to make my living by my wits and creativity, not by the manual labor I grew up doing in my father’s home maintenance business where I worked for free after school and Saturdays and the other jobs I had at night and on Sundays to make my “pocket money.”
The idea of work is central to Snyder’s first book, and the one I instantly ran out and bought after seeing that film, RIP RAP, about working in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. I wasn’t an outdoors kind of guy, more city oriented, but I worked with older guys on ancient Victorian mansions—painting, and window washing and replacing, and leader and gutter cleaning, climbing ladders, carrying ladders, hard work in the open air, like Snyder’s poems referred to. Maybe that was the connection that caused that epiphany.
I’m not sure where he was filmed reading his poetry, since he didn’t return to the USA from Japan until 1968, not long after which I met him (working by hand on the first, limited edition of one of his best poetry collections REGARDING WAVE, I was the “printers devil” who set the movable type and worked the old Washington Press and creased the pages with a decades worn piece of bone and helped hand sew the folios together and cut the pages and hold them open for him to sign).
He disappointed me by insisting that the smartest thing I could do for my poetry and my family would be to move to the land Snyder owned in the Sierras and build a house for myself and my wife and our little girl and the second child she was expecting. Snyder couldn’t fathom why I would want to live in Manhattan, or any city.
It was tedious talking to him about it, unfortunately, as are some of the paragraphs in this collection of essays BACK ON THE FIRE that contain the same kinds of West Coast Pacific Rim chauvinism I encountered when I first met him.
There always seems to be an anti-European bent in Snyder’s essays, if not his poetry, that I used to share, from a different perspective, Jersey Irish etc., but which now just seems like another kind of provincialism.
I know enough, and did then, about Japanese history and culture, as well as other Asian societies and their histories, to feel they deserve no special dispensation for their crimes and follies, anymore than European societies do.
Any nation, any society, any ethnic group or so-called “race” or religion or “sexual orientation”—any kind of human category—is just as capable as any other of atrocities toward other living creatures and to the earth itself. No one gets off that hook, including ancient “civilizations” and “pre-historic” peoples.
Yes, some are worse than others in specific instances, but given the right motivation and opportunity, it seems every society can produce some evil along with the good.
But despite that huge caveat, I always love to read Snyder. He’s a terrifically clear writer, who always makes me think and consider, or reconsider, my perspective on whatever he’s writing about.
In BACK ON THE FIRE it’s mostly ecological matters, but also poetry. His mini-essay on the passing of Allen Ginsberg is almost worth the price of the book. And there are other thoughtful and thought provoking pieces in this collection of published essays and forwards and afterwards and fragments of poems and etc.
Here’s an example from “Writers and the War Against Nature”—the longest piece in BACK ON THE FIRE:
“Later it came to me, green plants doing photosynthesis are the ultimate working class. Nature creates the first level of value, labor the second.”
Bet you hadn’t thought of that one.
But if you don’t know Snyder’s work, the best introductions are his two slim volumes of poetry and prose: RIP RAP and EARTH HOUSEHOLD.
If you do know him, you might dig a lot in this collection.
1. DANTE by R. W. B. LEWIS
2. WALT WHITMAN The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving
3. BACK ON THE FIRE Essays by Gary Snyder
All three of these poets—Dante, Whitman and Snyder—were early influences on my work.
1. Dante’s early book LA VITA NUOVA, with its mix of prose and poetry, influenced the kinds of books I wanted to write. His “DIVINE COMEDY” I dip into various translations of now and then to remind me of the magnitude of his accomplishment.
But despite that, and the fact that I love The Penguin Lives Series of biographies—even did a post about them—I hadn’t really read the one on DANTE by R. W. B. Lewis. That is, I read it while standing in a bookstore but never brought it home and lived with it the way I do with books I really dig.
Interestingly, I’d read and dug years ago Lewis’s EDITH WHARTON: A BIOGRAPHY (she’s another writer whose work I fell in love with early on).
When I wrote the post about the Penguin Lives, my friend Ray DiPalma recommended the DANTE, so I picked it up in a used bookstore and this time brought it home and was glad I did.
Lewis writes of what is known of Dante’s life, and somewhat of what has been speculated or can be surmised, always clearly denoting where he is imagining what is highly likely from all the evidence.
His recreation of a time when poetry mattered to the general populace and not just to other poets, and when poets not only were often respected, even revered, but also when they exchanged poems freely, responding to each other’s work, even touting their own work ala the rap poets of today, made Dante’s life and world extremely real to me.
And Lewis’s own observations are individual enough and smart enough to keep me interested in his perspective as well, necessary to the enjoyment of any biography.
For instance in his discussion of the “Paradiso” section of LA COMMEDIA, when at a lower level of the celestial realm (actually “in” the “moon”) Dante encounters a woman he knows and asks her how she can be so obviously contented at not being on a higher level of heaven, and it becomes clear to Dante (and here I quote R. B. Lewis’s text):
“’…everywhere in Heaven is Paradise.’ Piccarda Donati [the woman] follows with the finest single line in the Pradiso (iii 85): ‘His will is our peace.’ It is a line that seizes the mind at once and repays long meditation: ‘la sua voluntade e nostra pace.’”
2. Whitman’s love of litanies reverberated with the Catholic liturgy in the Latin Mass of my childhood, and matched my own love of lists which became a recurring device in my poetry, as did the long breath of his long lines, and his embrace, at least in his writing, of all experience and all types of humans.
Though not my very favorite biography of Whitman, Jerome Loving’s is one of my favorites, and I am always reading or re-reading Whitman’s poetry and prose and/or a biography of him, and this summer I chose the Loving.
He disagrees with the authors of my other two favorite Whitman biographies—Justin Kaplan and David S. Reynolds—on some of the details of Whitman’s early life and publications (the period before he became the masterful poet we know and was still a journalist and political essayist and fiction writer, as well as a more conventional poet),
But otherwise it is a story I am more than familiar with, and yet it never bores me.
I suppose that’s just a matter of taste and personal history, or maybe it’s just my own compulsiveness, but whatever the origins, I find Whitman’s life emblematic of the history of the U.S. and of “modern” poetry and writing in general, and his spirit—despite the critical perspectives of his biographers and the differences between his times and opinions and mine—I find his spirit and beliefs, as avowed in LEAVES OF GRASS and SPECIMEN DAYS as compatible with mine as anyone I’ve ever read or encountered.
To me, Whitman is the Dalai Lama of poetry and spirituality, the non organized-religion kind of spirituality that satisfies my soul.
4. I knew of Gary Snyder before I fell in love with his work. That happened in 1966, after I was discharged from the service. My first wife and I were living in Brooklyn Heights, where the only patron I ever had was putting us up in a fancy apartment while paying me to write “the great American novel,” which she was sure I would.
My wife became jealous of the patron, and then my mother passed, creating a reason to abandon the patron and the apartment and the income to move to Jersey to care for my father until other arrangements could be made
It was there, on his TV, I watched a series of educational black-and-white half hour films on contemporary poets—fifteen minutes devoted to each of two poets.
I remember Frank O’Hara being one of the poets profiled, and being amazed as he wrote a poem while talking to whoever was behind the camera filming him and then answering the phone and talking to a friend while continuing to write the poem, which after the call he pulled fresh from the typewriter to read to the camera!
I was already into O'Hara, had been infleunced by him without admitting it yet. Charles Olson was also profiled. I can’t remember anymore who else. I dug them all, but the poet who impressed me most was Gary Snyder, just sitting on a stool reading to the camera. He seemed to be reading directly to me in a way that was an epiphany.
It wasn’t that he was doing something incredibly new, I could see the impact of another of my early influences—William Carlos Williams—on his direct speech and concrete subject matter and so on, but I felt this connection to the stories in his poems, even though I was an East Coast guy with an entirely different set of experiences and reference points.
The connection may have been working with our hands—something I swore I would no longer do after I left home, wanting to make my living by my wits and creativity, not by the manual labor I grew up doing in my father’s home maintenance business where I worked for free after school and Saturdays and the other jobs I had at night and on Sundays to make my “pocket money.”
The idea of work is central to Snyder’s first book, and the one I instantly ran out and bought after seeing that film, RIP RAP, about working in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. I wasn’t an outdoors kind of guy, more city oriented, but I worked with older guys on ancient Victorian mansions—painting, and window washing and replacing, and leader and gutter cleaning, climbing ladders, carrying ladders, hard work in the open air, like Snyder’s poems referred to. Maybe that was the connection that caused that epiphany.
I’m not sure where he was filmed reading his poetry, since he didn’t return to the USA from Japan until 1968, not long after which I met him (working by hand on the first, limited edition of one of his best poetry collections REGARDING WAVE, I was the “printers devil” who set the movable type and worked the old Washington Press and creased the pages with a decades worn piece of bone and helped hand sew the folios together and cut the pages and hold them open for him to sign).
He disappointed me by insisting that the smartest thing I could do for my poetry and my family would be to move to the land Snyder owned in the Sierras and build a house for myself and my wife and our little girl and the second child she was expecting. Snyder couldn’t fathom why I would want to live in Manhattan, or any city.
It was tedious talking to him about it, unfortunately, as are some of the paragraphs in this collection of essays BACK ON THE FIRE that contain the same kinds of West Coast Pacific Rim chauvinism I encountered when I first met him.
There always seems to be an anti-European bent in Snyder’s essays, if not his poetry, that I used to share, from a different perspective, Jersey Irish etc., but which now just seems like another kind of provincialism.
I know enough, and did then, about Japanese history and culture, as well as other Asian societies and their histories, to feel they deserve no special dispensation for their crimes and follies, anymore than European societies do.
Any nation, any society, any ethnic group or so-called “race” or religion or “sexual orientation”—any kind of human category—is just as capable as any other of atrocities toward other living creatures and to the earth itself. No one gets off that hook, including ancient “civilizations” and “pre-historic” peoples.
Yes, some are worse than others in specific instances, but given the right motivation and opportunity, it seems every society can produce some evil along with the good.
But despite that huge caveat, I always love to read Snyder. He’s a terrifically clear writer, who always makes me think and consider, or reconsider, my perspective on whatever he’s writing about.
In BACK ON THE FIRE it’s mostly ecological matters, but also poetry. His mini-essay on the passing of Allen Ginsberg is almost worth the price of the book. And there are other thoughtful and thought provoking pieces in this collection of published essays and forwards and afterwards and fragments of poems and etc.
Here’s an example from “Writers and the War Against Nature”—the longest piece in BACK ON THE FIRE:
“Later it came to me, green plants doing photosynthesis are the ultimate working class. Nature creates the first level of value, labor the second.”
Bet you hadn’t thought of that one.
But if you don’t know Snyder’s work, the best introductions are his two slim volumes of poetry and prose: RIP RAP and EARTH HOUSEHOLD.
If you do know him, you might dig a lot in this collection.
Monday, August 6, 2007
DOUG LANG
Doug Lang is one of those not to be overlooked or underrated poets and writers and creative treasures of our universe.
He’s a Welsh guy who ended up in Washington DC back in the early 1970s when I was still living there. He had written a novel, FREAKS, which I read around the time I met him, and that I’m sure he’s gonna be pissed off I mentioned because as far as I know he kind of disowned it. But at the time, and ever since, I found it one of the truest depictions of “the sixties” (which actually were 1964 to 1974) in any book of fiction back then.
He’s also a terrific poet who had his own unique take on approaching “the problem of the poem” as someone used to refer to what we poets do. and his early books, some of them one-of-a-kinds, I still treasure.
(Hmmm, the word “treasure” has come up twice in this post already, now three times obviously, which shows what I think of this guy.)
Anyway, I hadn’t heard from him in a while, or seen him in a few years, but got turned on to his art-in-DC blog (dadaville) that I added to my recommended list over on the right a week or so ago.
Now I’ve learned he has a poetry blog and a film blog as well, both of which I’ve also added to my lists—the poetry to the little selection of internet sites I have at the top right, because he mentions me in his posts about the history of poetry in DC as he has witnessed and lived it. I appreciate his honesty and his perspective in all that. (I’m in a few of the photos he’s posted there as well.)
The film blog I added to the recommended sites down lower.
He’s always been an original thinker and an avid scholar of the arts he’s focused on. I think you’ll learn a lot from reading his blogs, and probably about some artists you might not have heard of or know much about.
Check him out, anywhere you see his name, and dig for yourself what a treasure he is. (Four times! He’s gonna despise me after all this gushy shit, but hey, I love what I love, which is a lot, and why not?)
He’s a Welsh guy who ended up in Washington DC back in the early 1970s when I was still living there. He had written a novel, FREAKS, which I read around the time I met him, and that I’m sure he’s gonna be pissed off I mentioned because as far as I know he kind of disowned it. But at the time, and ever since, I found it one of the truest depictions of “the sixties” (which actually were 1964 to 1974) in any book of fiction back then.
He’s also a terrific poet who had his own unique take on approaching “the problem of the poem” as someone used to refer to what we poets do. and his early books, some of them one-of-a-kinds, I still treasure.
(Hmmm, the word “treasure” has come up twice in this post already, now three times obviously, which shows what I think of this guy.)
Anyway, I hadn’t heard from him in a while, or seen him in a few years, but got turned on to his art-in-DC blog (dadaville) that I added to my recommended list over on the right a week or so ago.
Now I’ve learned he has a poetry blog and a film blog as well, both of which I’ve also added to my lists—the poetry to the little selection of internet sites I have at the top right, because he mentions me in his posts about the history of poetry in DC as he has witnessed and lived it. I appreciate his honesty and his perspective in all that. (I’m in a few of the photos he’s posted there as well.)
The film blog I added to the recommended sites down lower.
He’s always been an original thinker and an avid scholar of the arts he’s focused on. I think you’ll learn a lot from reading his blogs, and probably about some artists you might not have heard of or know much about.
Check him out, anywhere you see his name, and dig for yourself what a treasure he is. (Four times! He’s gonna despise me after all this gushy shit, but hey, I love what I love, which is a lot, and why not?)
Sunday, August 5, 2007
AMERICAN BRIDGES FALLING DOWN
When I was a boy (the 1940s and '50s) the USA was the marvel of the world, not just for winning the war, but for the Marshall Plan, which included money to help the war torn nations of Europe rebuild their infrastructure. We helped Japan too.
Meanwhile, at home, the USA was becoming a shining example of how a country could improve the lives of its citizens, as well as create the basis for a booming economy that benefited everyone, not just the wealthy.
Part of what made the USA such a shining example in those years (in many other ways it was a lousy example, i.e. racial prejudice, but these were the years when that began to be seriously challenged by the few that by the ‘60s became the many) was its amazingly new and well maintained infrastructure.
By the 1970s and ‘80s, that was no longer the case as things began to deteriorate.
And now, forget about it.
Ireland, which when I was a boy was still pretty much the way it had been for centuries—impoverished and without almost any infrastructure—is now generations ahead of us in that regard, which is a large part of the reason why Ireland has one of the most successful economies in the world.
That these two countries have exchanged places, in terms of infrastructure, would have been unthinkable when I was a kid. But nonetheless, it’s mostly true.
Not to oversimplify, but highways and bridges and tunnels and phone and electricity lines, etc. are to a country what the bones and muscles and nervous and circulatory systems etc. are to the human body.
The USA is like an aging human ignoring her health, and instead of using what money she has on doctors and medications and procedures to keep her alive and healthy, instead she spends it all on lawn flamingos and kitchen gadgets and gives the rest to the wealthy few who already have access to the best doctors and hospitals, and in the case of infrastructure, rarely travel in anything other than their private jets and helicopters.
I wonder if the Secret Service has a list of the most dangerous bridges and tunnels etc. that they avoid whenever Cheney emerges from his cave to address his faithful.
Any true “conservative” would be a staunch supporter of “conserving” not only the environment—including our native plants and trees and animals etc., and all our natural resources, as well as in discovering new sources of energy etc.—but also in maintaining and improving our infrastructure, the engineering marvels that once made us the model for most nation’s futures, but now too often seem to be just crumbling monuments to a past that is quickly becoming the history of a nation’s decline.
Meanwhile, at home, the USA was becoming a shining example of how a country could improve the lives of its citizens, as well as create the basis for a booming economy that benefited everyone, not just the wealthy.
Part of what made the USA such a shining example in those years (in many other ways it was a lousy example, i.e. racial prejudice, but these were the years when that began to be seriously challenged by the few that by the ‘60s became the many) was its amazingly new and well maintained infrastructure.
By the 1970s and ‘80s, that was no longer the case as things began to deteriorate.
And now, forget about it.
Ireland, which when I was a boy was still pretty much the way it had been for centuries—impoverished and without almost any infrastructure—is now generations ahead of us in that regard, which is a large part of the reason why Ireland has one of the most successful economies in the world.
That these two countries have exchanged places, in terms of infrastructure, would have been unthinkable when I was a kid. But nonetheless, it’s mostly true.
Not to oversimplify, but highways and bridges and tunnels and phone and electricity lines, etc. are to a country what the bones and muscles and nervous and circulatory systems etc. are to the human body.
The USA is like an aging human ignoring her health, and instead of using what money she has on doctors and medications and procedures to keep her alive and healthy, instead she spends it all on lawn flamingos and kitchen gadgets and gives the rest to the wealthy few who already have access to the best doctors and hospitals, and in the case of infrastructure, rarely travel in anything other than their private jets and helicopters.
I wonder if the Secret Service has a list of the most dangerous bridges and tunnels etc. that they avoid whenever Cheney emerges from his cave to address his faithful.
Any true “conservative” would be a staunch supporter of “conserving” not only the environment—including our native plants and trees and animals etc., and all our natural resources, as well as in discovering new sources of energy etc.—but also in maintaining and improving our infrastructure, the engineering marvels that once made us the model for most nation’s futures, but now too often seem to be just crumbling monuments to a past that is quickly becoming the history of a nation’s decline.
Friday, August 3, 2007
MEDIA MANIPULATION
It’s still going on.
The real political news gets lost or never reported in most major news outlets because either they are controlled by owners with mostly rightwing agendas (e.g. Fox and the NY Post by Rupert Murdoch) or are easily misdirected (because corporate owners don’t want to offend rightwing forces or powers that be in the administration and elsewhere).
Thus, all the good this congress has done under the historical precedent of a woman leader is either not noted or dismissed or discussed in terms of personal and/or presidential politics, while constantly repeating the administration’s mantra that anything attempted or accomplished against their agenda is “playing politics”!
AS IF THAT ISN’T WHAT THE REPUBLICANS WHO HAVE CONTROLLED EVERY ASPECT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR YEARS AND YEARS HAVEN’T BEEN DOING!
And with much worse results, if you are anything other than part of the top tier of wealthy citizens.
The fact is, Nancy Pelosi has accomplished many of the goals she set for herself and her fellow members of Congress when she took over as Speaker of the House. Something that should be newsworthy in any case, but particularly since this is the first woman to do so.
But that ain’t the news. The news is that Democrats are “playing politics” and Republicans are just the poor losers who messed up by following Bush down a dead end and are now trying to find a way out.
The news is also always bad, when it comes to politics, unless it’s some artificial situation manufactured by the Republican propagandists to make them seem sympathetic (though this no longer works so well for Bush as he speaks before handpicked crowds of the military, but may for his wife as she flies off to the Twin Cities to offer symbolic solace to the families of the victims of that bridge collapse, which could easily have been avoided if instead of tax cuts for the rich and tax dollars wasted on pork and perks for local projects for elected officials (Democrats equally guilty of the latter) money was spent on the basics necessary to keep people safe and healthy and well fed and housed (i.e. infrastructure, a national health plan, elimination of poverty and affordable housing, etc.).
As I said back when the presidential campaigns were still in the speculative stage, the very fact that so many precedents are being set in this campaign, at least so far, is great political news.
No matter what you think of them, the reality that if any of the frontrunners were to be elected president, it would be a precedent—our first woman president, or African-American, or Italian-American or Mormon (or the long shot Richardson, Latino). All the usual white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male politicians in the race are lagging way behind, even the once popular John McCain, whose Bush ass kissing only hurt him in the long run. (I don't consider the Mormon religion part of the Protestant category, though Mormons might.)
Of course, there's that actor from Tennessee, who fits the WASP male description. He might get into the race sometime in the coming weeks and win the Republican nomination and then win the general election, just because he is none of the precedent setting labels mentioned above, which would be a set back to the historical aspect of any of the current frontrunners getting elected.
But still, just the fact they are seriously in the running should make all of us happy, to see that finally, if not a voting majority, at least a sizable minority (and probably an actual majority) have no qualms about electing someone who only ten years ago would have been seen as an impossible contender.
Anyway, for a really well argued take on one specific case of media manipulation and misdirection, (i.e. the Tilliman cover up) check out this nightlight post.
The real political news gets lost or never reported in most major news outlets because either they are controlled by owners with mostly rightwing agendas (e.g. Fox and the NY Post by Rupert Murdoch) or are easily misdirected (because corporate owners don’t want to offend rightwing forces or powers that be in the administration and elsewhere).
Thus, all the good this congress has done under the historical precedent of a woman leader is either not noted or dismissed or discussed in terms of personal and/or presidential politics, while constantly repeating the administration’s mantra that anything attempted or accomplished against their agenda is “playing politics”!
AS IF THAT ISN’T WHAT THE REPUBLICANS WHO HAVE CONTROLLED EVERY ASPECT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR YEARS AND YEARS HAVEN’T BEEN DOING!
And with much worse results, if you are anything other than part of the top tier of wealthy citizens.
The fact is, Nancy Pelosi has accomplished many of the goals she set for herself and her fellow members of Congress when she took over as Speaker of the House. Something that should be newsworthy in any case, but particularly since this is the first woman to do so.
But that ain’t the news. The news is that Democrats are “playing politics” and Republicans are just the poor losers who messed up by following Bush down a dead end and are now trying to find a way out.
The news is also always bad, when it comes to politics, unless it’s some artificial situation manufactured by the Republican propagandists to make them seem sympathetic (though this no longer works so well for Bush as he speaks before handpicked crowds of the military, but may for his wife as she flies off to the Twin Cities to offer symbolic solace to the families of the victims of that bridge collapse, which could easily have been avoided if instead of tax cuts for the rich and tax dollars wasted on pork and perks for local projects for elected officials (Democrats equally guilty of the latter) money was spent on the basics necessary to keep people safe and healthy and well fed and housed (i.e. infrastructure, a national health plan, elimination of poverty and affordable housing, etc.).
As I said back when the presidential campaigns were still in the speculative stage, the very fact that so many precedents are being set in this campaign, at least so far, is great political news.
No matter what you think of them, the reality that if any of the frontrunners were to be elected president, it would be a precedent—our first woman president, or African-American, or Italian-American or Mormon (or the long shot Richardson, Latino). All the usual white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male politicians in the race are lagging way behind, even the once popular John McCain, whose Bush ass kissing only hurt him in the long run. (I don't consider the Mormon religion part of the Protestant category, though Mormons might.)
Of course, there's that actor from Tennessee, who fits the WASP male description. He might get into the race sometime in the coming weeks and win the Republican nomination and then win the general election, just because he is none of the precedent setting labels mentioned above, which would be a set back to the historical aspect of any of the current frontrunners getting elected.
But still, just the fact they are seriously in the running should make all of us happy, to see that finally, if not a voting majority, at least a sizable minority (and probably an actual majority) have no qualms about electing someone who only ten years ago would have been seen as an impossible contender.
Anyway, for a really well argued take on one specific case of media manipulation and misdirection, (i.e. the Tilliman cover up) check out this nightlight post.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
QUOTE FOR TODAY
"...the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things..." —F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Three Hours Between Planes"
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
THE SIMPSONS MOVIE and DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE
A lot in common these flicks.
Both basically cartoons—highly entertaining cartoons.
Lots of laughs and adventure in both.
The heroes of each are aging bald guys, who perform unrealistically heroic acts, in part to save their relationship with one of their children, who had shunned them.
Both heroes are primitive guys, not big on the heavy thinking.
Both talk as if they don’t want to be bothered helping others and doing the right thing, but in the end can’t help doing it because they’re “that guy.”
Both are faced with pseudo-intellectual megalomaniac villains, who work, or recently worked for, the top levels of the federal government.
Both seem to be the only ones capable of saving the society they live in, but stand out from and don’t necessarily approve of.
The very survival of their city/country is in jeopardy until they save the day.
Which they both do, but only after receiving help from outsiders who have arcane knowledge that the heroes need to fulfill their destiny.
And both films leave you (or at least me and a few million other people) satisfied at the end, having had a perfectly mastered movie escape for a few hours.
Homer Simpson and John McClane (did the writers of the original really base the name on the war hero Senator?).
I used to know Bruce Willis, back before he became a TV star and then a movie star. He tended bar at an actors hangout on the upper Westside of Manhattan, a bar I used to call Grand Central because it was always so crowded and the name of the place reminded me of that name, so much so I can’t remember the real name.
He was a likable, funny, South Jersey guy and I was happy for his success, just sorry to see his rightwing politics later on (another example of how much of a myth that whole “liberal Hollywood” jive is).
This character, the hero of the DIE HARD franchise, is such a cartoon who performs,—especially in this latest flick—the most humanly impossible feats, but has such good one liners and Willis plays him with such cocky insouciance, you can’t help enjoying watching him.
Just as you can’t help but enjoy watching Homer Simpson as he refuses, or is incapable, of being anyone other than who he is.
Which is the real message of both these flicks. You gotta love these guys because they refuse, or are incapable of being anyone other than who they cartoonishly are. God bless’em, in gratitude for the great entertainment they provide.
Both basically cartoons—highly entertaining cartoons.
Lots of laughs and adventure in both.
The heroes of each are aging bald guys, who perform unrealistically heroic acts, in part to save their relationship with one of their children, who had shunned them.
Both heroes are primitive guys, not big on the heavy thinking.
Both talk as if they don’t want to be bothered helping others and doing the right thing, but in the end can’t help doing it because they’re “that guy.”
Both are faced with pseudo-intellectual megalomaniac villains, who work, or recently worked for, the top levels of the federal government.
Both seem to be the only ones capable of saving the society they live in, but stand out from and don’t necessarily approve of.
The very survival of their city/country is in jeopardy until they save the day.
Which they both do, but only after receiving help from outsiders who have arcane knowledge that the heroes need to fulfill their destiny.
And both films leave you (or at least me and a few million other people) satisfied at the end, having had a perfectly mastered movie escape for a few hours.
Homer Simpson and John McClane (did the writers of the original really base the name on the war hero Senator?).
I used to know Bruce Willis, back before he became a TV star and then a movie star. He tended bar at an actors hangout on the upper Westside of Manhattan, a bar I used to call Grand Central because it was always so crowded and the name of the place reminded me of that name, so much so I can’t remember the real name.
He was a likable, funny, South Jersey guy and I was happy for his success, just sorry to see his rightwing politics later on (another example of how much of a myth that whole “liberal Hollywood” jive is).
This character, the hero of the DIE HARD franchise, is such a cartoon who performs,—especially in this latest flick—the most humanly impossible feats, but has such good one liners and Willis plays him with such cocky insouciance, you can’t help enjoying watching him.
Just as you can’t help but enjoy watching Homer Simpson as he refuses, or is incapable, of being anyone other than who he is.
Which is the real message of both these flicks. You gotta love these guys because they refuse, or are incapable of being anyone other than who they cartoonishly are. God bless’em, in gratitude for the great entertainment they provide.
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