It's hard to believe that there are still people who think global warming isn't real, or isn't a real threat, or isn't anything we can do anything about anyway. They may be right on that last point, or at least partially. It may have gone too far to reverse in my children's lifetime.
But going through what is our fourth heat wave of the year here in Jersey with Summer only days old, and watching those wildfires in Colorado on TV, which are only the worst for the moment, and the temperature breaking records across the country that'll exceed last year, which broke more records for heat than any in history, etc.
Why aren't Democrats and "liberals" and "progressives" and in fact everyone challenging the right and their corporate masters the way the right challenges actual scientific evidence as though it's fabricated just to take their gas guzzlers or guns or etc. Even the fact that the oceans are rising because of the melting Arctic ice cap faster than "liberal alarmists" were predicting, especially on the East Coast of the USA because that's where the gulf stream has slowed down, due to global warming, so instead of the two inch rise that has occurred elsewhere and is already causing problems we now have a four inch rise that is eroding beaches and islands and if it continues as predicted will leave parts of lower Manhattan under water by 2020 [by only an inch or so, so the city will probably find ways to deal with it by then, though by 2050 they're gonna have to have a much more ambitious plan]!
Remember only a decade ago when the right was dismissing the threat of anything other than normal weather flucuations as fiction, despite the vast majority of scientists offering endless factual evidence to support their predictions? And how these scientists were warning that by 2015 we would start to see drought and flooding becoming more widespread and lasting longer, and stronger storms and tornados, and rising sea levels and all that? And now it's happening and has been happening for a while, and yet the right and its influence on our media and our politics, as well as the influence of energy company money, etc. seems to squelch any real high level discussion of what we are all living through?
It used to just be the Inuit or some islanders or some country we didn't pay attention to who were suffering through the impact of global warming, but now it's all of us. And yet it doesn't top the news shows or political debates or speeches etc. It's like one of those cheesy horror movies where we all know that it's not a good idea for those teens to camp out all night or whatever because the bad guy is about to start slashing, only the bad guy is global warming and those teens are all of us. Hello! Wake up! Run for help!
No? OK, let's just all be the victims of corporate greed and addictive consumerism until Colorado becomes a desert and Florida is under water and the rest of us are filling sand bags, hiding in the cellar, or fighting over potable water or food because farms can't produce thanks to a lack of rain (the Mississippi is so low that ferries that go from one side to the other in some sections aren't running, there's not enough water!) and heat waves that last a month, or there aren't any more natural seeds just one seed created in a lab by Monsato, or whatever corporation, and the defect in that one genetically altered seed turns out to self destruct, or just hasten our individual demises, if the obesity etc. doesn't do it first.
Talk about heads in the sand. I know readers of this blog are aware of all this, but why aren't we all in the streets protesting what's happening to the planet ala the Arab Spring? I shouldn't write posts when I'm tired, but I have. Maybe after some sleep I'll have an answer.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
PS TO LAST POST
It all worked out. The more working class mall nearby had a couple of stores with amazingly low prices on suits, both owned and run by Arab guys who were super nice. I found a linen, or at least part linen suit one of these guys sold me for less than an expensive meal with some friends.
In a department store I found a pair of shoes on sale, and the lady behind the counter showed me how I could even get a further discount on them so that they were less than an expensive lunch. So I'm all set. I did look into new frames for my glasses that were a lot more exciting than the ones I wear now, but maybe I'll put that off for a while.
I actually don't mind so much going to this mall because there's not that many people in it usually when I'm there, and I love the great mix of people. When I was young it would have been mostly Irish and Italian "Americans," but now it's mostly African-American, Arab-American, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans with a minority of European-Americans (although many Europeans now have African and Arab and Asian antecedents) and many of them were speaking another language or with heavy accents.
I did see a gaggle of "white" young teenage girls with no accents except Jersey and when they spied a friend they tried to run to her but they were all wearing ridiculously stilted and platformed high heels that made it impossible for them to stand up straight and almost impossible to walk, let alone run. I saw some older women wearing them too and I have to admit, I dug the platform shoes women and some men (including me) wore back in the seventies, which were more or less based on the platform shoes from the forties (Carmen Miranda et. al.). But even though the women I knew who wore those then, like one of the loves of my life who came from Costa Rica so had the right, as I saw it, to wear them, and looked good in them, they also sometimes had trouble keeping their balance, especially after a few drinks.
But the current style look ugly to me, with the spike like heels and then what looks like two or more inches of sole. There's an ugly imbalance to them before they even have to be walked in. Oh well, I ain't no fashionista, but like all of us, I knows what I like. Hope those girls don't have too many leg and back troubles when they get older from them.
Here's what I mean. They look like cartoon shoes, like Minnie Mouse should be wearing them:
In a department store I found a pair of shoes on sale, and the lady behind the counter showed me how I could even get a further discount on them so that they were less than an expensive lunch. So I'm all set. I did look into new frames for my glasses that were a lot more exciting than the ones I wear now, but maybe I'll put that off for a while.
I actually don't mind so much going to this mall because there's not that many people in it usually when I'm there, and I love the great mix of people. When I was young it would have been mostly Irish and Italian "Americans," but now it's mostly African-American, Arab-American, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans with a minority of European-Americans (although many Europeans now have African and Arab and Asian antecedents) and many of them were speaking another language or with heavy accents.
I did see a gaggle of "white" young teenage girls with no accents except Jersey and when they spied a friend they tried to run to her but they were all wearing ridiculously stilted and platformed high heels that made it impossible for them to stand up straight and almost impossible to walk, let alone run. I saw some older women wearing them too and I have to admit, I dug the platform shoes women and some men (including me) wore back in the seventies, which were more or less based on the platform shoes from the forties (Carmen Miranda et. al.). But even though the women I knew who wore those then, like one of the loves of my life who came from Costa Rica so had the right, as I saw it, to wear them, and looked good in them, they also sometimes had trouble keeping their balance, especially after a few drinks.
But the current style look ugly to me, with the spike like heels and then what looks like two or more inches of sole. There's an ugly imbalance to them before they even have to be walked in. Oh well, I ain't no fashionista, but like all of us, I knows what I like. Hope those girls don't have too many leg and back troubles when they get older from them.
Here's what I mean. They look like cartoon shoes, like Minnie Mouse should be wearing them:
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
WOOPS
Meant to post yesterday but was so tired I forgot. On Sunday I drove my fourteen-year-old and one of his friends to a skateboarding camp in PA, about a three and a half hour ride or more depending on traffic, but gorgeous landscapes including the last half hour or so in Amish country (saw many horse drawn buggies full of families probably returning from church).
A friend of mine came along to keep me company on the ride back (though he slept for at least half of it and would have slept for more but I woke him to see a big black bear on the side of the highway, not in the woods but on the mowed grass section—though of course by the time my friend opened his eyes we had passed the bear). But I did all the driving (my choice) and it hit me the next day. I used to be able to drive for ten or twelve hours only stopping for gas, but I guess those days are gone now.
So Monday I was wiped out but had a busy day, including looking for a cheap summer, or at least light, suit for a wedding I'm going to on Saturday, and for some shoes, since the only ones I have are my old Beatle boots from actually before the Beatles hit it big here and they got that name, so they're pretty raggedy and I haven't used them in years (but keep because I only wore them for what seemed like many decades and the ones I used since then wore out and have no sentimental value so are long gone).
Someone told me I could find what I needed in Banana Republic and the nearest one is in a fancy mall in this part of Jersey, the Short Hills mall, where I almost found a suit at Banana Republic, that was pretty reasonable, though for someone who rarely buys clothes—I spent most of my life wearing whatever I was given as gift or I picked up in second hand stores—I find what others call reasonable or even cheap to still seem like an awful lot. But the size choices were limited and I couldn't find anything in mine.
Interesting how my conservative friends are always touting the benefits of capitalism and the free market but how the actual choices available in the marketplace in the good old USA have often become extremely limited since I was a boy back before the rightwing Republicans, especially Reagan and Bush/Cheney, started dismantling all that FDR and Truman did to make the country more economically fair and equal. Back then they sold shoes, for instance, not just in every size but in every width. Now it's the widest common denominator.
Anyway, I hate shopping and I don't like malls so I speed walked through that fancy one on Monday trying on clothes and checking sizes and price tags etc. and shoes and came up empty. Then I had some friends over that evening and watched an old movie on TV and got up yesterday and dealt with some family matters that needed immediate attention and then hopped a train to the city and did 34th Street.
Since the brain operation my mind gets really exhausted from too much stimuli, so walking down one of the most crowded streets in Manhattan popping into stores trying to find shoes (found one I dug but never in my size) and a suit (found a few that more or less fit but were way too conservative for me) was very challenging. After what seemed like hours of that, but was more likely an hour and a half, I headed downtown to see what I could find in spots that used to have second hand shops or cheaper clothes etc. like the Village and East Village and even Soho when it first changed over from empty warehouses and manufacturing lofts to shops back in the '70s.
But everything was either way too upscale, as they say, meaning too expensive for me, or not there anymore (and Soho was as crowded as 34th Street). I saw there was a "digital gallery" in the basement of the building I lived in through much of the '70s and early '80s, on Sullivan Street below Houston, and stopped in to ask how long they'd been there ("three years") and then asked if Jerry (my old landlord) had passed since it was his basement ("yes, four years ago"). Where there had been two Italian "social clubs" anchoring each end of the block there now were sidewalk cafes and boutiques.
A few old places remained (the cheese shop and one butcher) but otherwise the gentrification was so complete I couldn't afford anything being sold around there. But even on The Bowery, which has changed the quickest in recent years, it was too expensive for me, and even the lower East Side except for one second hand shop I found, but it wasn't the second hand stuff I wanted, the slim suit jackets from the '60s that I bought in the '70s and '80s but more like used suit coats from the '90s. Oy.
By then I was so exhausted I needed to sit and rest and met my good friend the poet Simon Pettet at a really terrific and cheap Vietnamese restaurant on 1st Avenue, but by the time I got home I could barely think, let alone talk, so vegged out watching Alfred Hitchcock's SABOTEUR, not one of his best but with the great closing scene of Robert Cummings trying to save the bad guy from falling from the head of the Statue of Liberty. A very stylized movie made in 1942 at the start of the war and way overestimating the number, or at least the activism and power, of Nazi agents in the USA at the time.
By the time it ended I was too tired to remember to post, let alone have the energy to (as you probably have read here, I type with two fingers while looking at the keys and since the brain op have more difficulty doing that so spend a lot of time correcting typos etc. etc.). So here's a morning one before I return to our local much cheaper mall where I should have gone in the first place to see if I can find some shoes and a cheap lightweight suit, since this Saturday in the city is supposed to be in the 90s with humidity almost as bad.
Wish me luck.
A friend of mine came along to keep me company on the ride back (though he slept for at least half of it and would have slept for more but I woke him to see a big black bear on the side of the highway, not in the woods but on the mowed grass section—though of course by the time my friend opened his eyes we had passed the bear). But I did all the driving (my choice) and it hit me the next day. I used to be able to drive for ten or twelve hours only stopping for gas, but I guess those days are gone now.
So Monday I was wiped out but had a busy day, including looking for a cheap summer, or at least light, suit for a wedding I'm going to on Saturday, and for some shoes, since the only ones I have are my old Beatle boots from actually before the Beatles hit it big here and they got that name, so they're pretty raggedy and I haven't used them in years (but keep because I only wore them for what seemed like many decades and the ones I used since then wore out and have no sentimental value so are long gone).
Someone told me I could find what I needed in Banana Republic and the nearest one is in a fancy mall in this part of Jersey, the Short Hills mall, where I almost found a suit at Banana Republic, that was pretty reasonable, though for someone who rarely buys clothes—I spent most of my life wearing whatever I was given as gift or I picked up in second hand stores—I find what others call reasonable or even cheap to still seem like an awful lot. But the size choices were limited and I couldn't find anything in mine.
Interesting how my conservative friends are always touting the benefits of capitalism and the free market but how the actual choices available in the marketplace in the good old USA have often become extremely limited since I was a boy back before the rightwing Republicans, especially Reagan and Bush/Cheney, started dismantling all that FDR and Truman did to make the country more economically fair and equal. Back then they sold shoes, for instance, not just in every size but in every width. Now it's the widest common denominator.
Anyway, I hate shopping and I don't like malls so I speed walked through that fancy one on Monday trying on clothes and checking sizes and price tags etc. and shoes and came up empty. Then I had some friends over that evening and watched an old movie on TV and got up yesterday and dealt with some family matters that needed immediate attention and then hopped a train to the city and did 34th Street.
Since the brain operation my mind gets really exhausted from too much stimuli, so walking down one of the most crowded streets in Manhattan popping into stores trying to find shoes (found one I dug but never in my size) and a suit (found a few that more or less fit but were way too conservative for me) was very challenging. After what seemed like hours of that, but was more likely an hour and a half, I headed downtown to see what I could find in spots that used to have second hand shops or cheaper clothes etc. like the Village and East Village and even Soho when it first changed over from empty warehouses and manufacturing lofts to shops back in the '70s.
But everything was either way too upscale, as they say, meaning too expensive for me, or not there anymore (and Soho was as crowded as 34th Street). I saw there was a "digital gallery" in the basement of the building I lived in through much of the '70s and early '80s, on Sullivan Street below Houston, and stopped in to ask how long they'd been there ("three years") and then asked if Jerry (my old landlord) had passed since it was his basement ("yes, four years ago"). Where there had been two Italian "social clubs" anchoring each end of the block there now were sidewalk cafes and boutiques.
A few old places remained (the cheese shop and one butcher) but otherwise the gentrification was so complete I couldn't afford anything being sold around there. But even on The Bowery, which has changed the quickest in recent years, it was too expensive for me, and even the lower East Side except for one second hand shop I found, but it wasn't the second hand stuff I wanted, the slim suit jackets from the '60s that I bought in the '70s and '80s but more like used suit coats from the '90s. Oy.
By then I was so exhausted I needed to sit and rest and met my good friend the poet Simon Pettet at a really terrific and cheap Vietnamese restaurant on 1st Avenue, but by the time I got home I could barely think, let alone talk, so vegged out watching Alfred Hitchcock's SABOTEUR, not one of his best but with the great closing scene of Robert Cummings trying to save the bad guy from falling from the head of the Statue of Liberty. A very stylized movie made in 1942 at the start of the war and way overestimating the number, or at least the activism and power, of Nazi agents in the USA at the time.
By the time it ended I was too tired to remember to post, let alone have the energy to (as you probably have read here, I type with two fingers while looking at the keys and since the brain op have more difficulty doing that so spend a lot of time correcting typos etc. etc.). So here's a morning one before I return to our local much cheaper mall where I should have gone in the first place to see if I can find some shoes and a cheap lightweight suit, since this Saturday in the city is supposed to be in the 90s with humidity almost as bad.
Wish me luck.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Sunday, June 24, 2012
YET ANOTHER RIGHTWING MYTH IRONISIZED
Maybe the best line is the one under the "PG"—"Please, Get over it!"
Saturday, June 23, 2012
U SAM OEUR (ANOTHER HERO)
I stood out a little because I was married with a child on the way, a veteran of four years in the military (the GI Bill was helping me pay for my schooling, thanks to Democrats), and working on a BA and MFA at the same time (first time they allowed anyone to do that) because I wasn't a college graduate yet. And Sam stood out because he was Cambodian, originally studying something a lot more practical than poetry when he wrote a poem that got someone's attention who got him to Iowa. That brought us together into a friendship I was grateful for.
That's Sam above, in my apartment in Iowa City sitting at my desk around 1967 (and James Joyce playing the guitar in the photo under the one of Dylan doing the same). If you want to learn about his amazing life, he wrote an autobiography called CROSSING THREE WILDERNESSES (Coffee House Press 2005) with help from Ken McCullough, another poet at the Iowa Workshop, who had been a minor league baseball player before getting his MFA there in poetry [see photo at bottom]. Sam writes of our friendship in it:
"I formed a particular bond with Mike Lally, who was very 'hip.' Norman Mailer wrote a pamphlet entitled The White Negro, and Michael fit that mold. He had a quick mind, was a good poet, knew his music, but more than anything else, he could run circles around anyone when it came to talking politics. He didn't have much use for white people, though he was one of them. Whenever there was a panel discussion with senators and other big shots, Michael would usually be called upon to represent the far left, and he was always the most articulate person on the panel. I recall in a discussion about Ho Chi Minh, Michael made Uncle Ho seem like Mother Theresa. I'm not sure why we became friends—on the surface we were exact opposites, but on the inside we were brothers."
Although I no longer have such a quick mind and have use for plenty of white people (and other things that have changed since then), when I read Sam's take on me back then I am moved and touched by the power of tolerance and love and poetry.
But most importantly, in CROSSING THREE WILDERNESSES Sam tells how when Pol Pot's murderous legions took over Cambodia, Sam destroyed anything that would identify him as an intellectual (especially one who had worked for the previous government when he went back to Cambodia after Iowa) except for some pages of poetry (Emily Dickinson among them if I remember correctly) which he buried near his home and then tearing his clothes and covering himself in dung he acted the role of a crazy man so that when the youthful Khmer Rouge soldiers came to get him they mostly found him amusing and thus didn't execute him but took him to one of their crude concentration camps, keeping their distance because of the stench.
He lost everything, including family members, but managed to save a son when after being confined to a camp he'd sneak out to catch by hand crayfish in a nearby river to take to his son to eat so he wouldn't starve like so many campmates were doing. (One of the only early photos of him in his book is the one above because almost all of his personal photos were lost or destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.)
Ah, read his book and you'll see all he went through and transcended and why he is one of my heros. He ended up back in the USA in the 1990s working with Cambodian youth gangs in this country and still believing in "the power of literature" as it says in the copy on the back cover of his book.
I saw him back then, and he had the serenity of Nelson Mandela or the Dali Lama. I attribute his lack of resentment and anger for what he and his family went through to his spiritual beliefs, but also to his belief in that power of poetry.
[Here's a photo of Ken McCullough and me in my DC "commune" in 1972.]
Friday, June 22, 2012
UPDATE ON AI WEIWEI (A TRUE HERO)
If you don't know who Ai Weiwei is you can look him up on the internet for his amazing accomplishments and heroism [and here's one of many posts about him I've done on this blog], but the short version is he's a world renowned artist whose art I was already a fan of when he started becoming more and more politically engaged in the struggle for human rights in his native China.
He chose to confront the authorities there even though he could have moved to New York or Paris or wherever and lived the life of a highly successful artist with riches and fame. The Chinese authorities have made him pay, though not as much as they may like to (thanks in part to his international fame) by bulldozing the building that housed his art studio and putting him in prison with conditions he has only hinted at but which kept him isolated from family and friends and even his lawyer etc.
He is out but not allowed to leave the country and lives under the threat of being imprisoned again at any moment and yet he continues to speak out and fight injustice. Here's the link to his latest communication from yesterday's UK Guardian.
He chose to confront the authorities there even though he could have moved to New York or Paris or wherever and lived the life of a highly successful artist with riches and fame. The Chinese authorities have made him pay, though not as much as they may like to (thanks in part to his international fame) by bulldozing the building that housed his art studio and putting him in prison with conditions he has only hinted at but which kept him isolated from family and friends and even his lawyer etc.
He is out but not allowed to leave the country and lives under the threat of being imprisoned again at any moment and yet he continues to speak out and fight injustice. Here's the link to his latest communication from yesterday's UK Guardian.
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