2008 IN REVIEW – CONFIRMATION OF AN ATHEIST

What a relatively peaceful revolution the proliferation of the internet is. This horizontal, people to people communication is like chain logging the vertical, top-down, long established, towering lies about hidden agendas that send youth to kill and die for the profit of incompetent greed. It’s first big test was on the proving grounds of the two year campaign season and the instant fact checking and proliferation about every candidate’s claim. If Obama’s intent to make government transparent is carried out in this way it will be a precedent the people will be loath to relinquish far into the future, perhaps until lying us into wars isn’t SOP.

Although it may be accused of aiding and abetting individual isolation from society as if that were a bad thing, I see it as a way for anyone to shuck the baggage of their off-line reality and present themselves as whomever suits their fancy — as they may have all along had they not been crammed into the mold of education. Let the gullible beware of misplaced belief. The word is not the thing and lying is all too easy. One is free to set up a web site or blog and invite the world to partake of their offerings from valuable wisdom to expensive scams (valuable lessons). One is free to surf shop windows for drill bits, firm tits, worm pits or whittling kits. In the comfort of one’s favorite place to sit and think, one may have conversations with friends they know in the flesh or pixelated characters met virtually through blogs, chat rooms and audio/visual interactive games and services where the only things missing are hugs and passing the joint.

No matter how isolated within one’s own world behind doors locked against intruders in the city or how far one is separated from the pavement out in the open wild one may be, the internet is a super window on the rest of the world used by even the most worldly statesmen to find out what is going on “down on the ground.” I love the implications of that new sound bite. The most valuable service provided by the internet is the multiplicity of versions of any subject to be sampled by the curious and triangulated by the wise to obtain a holographic picture of a reality unavailable from any one of the sources alone. The multiplicity of information requires one realize it's being cherry picked by anyone formulating evidence for his or her own argument and there's always more than one side..

There is an application in development discussed at TED talks whereby all the photographs on the internet are used to create a 3d digital model of the world viewable from any angle ever published on the web — from any time in the history of the camera. Neighborhoods can be scanned like time-lapse photography. The same sort of collation could be, and surely is being done on the history of the world creating a sort of well-rounded view of any subject through time. These are exciting times to be alive, like being around when Henry Ford’s prehistoric ancestor rolled out the first wheel.

•

Amidst my fifth year here at the Dawg Ranch I've begun to notice a bit of discomfort if I am inactive too long; a pea under the mattress. Is this the natural result of human DNA producing creative juices or the muscle memory of a lifetime in a society where it is crucial to at least have an acceptable answer to, “What are you doing?”

I know I have never been so free to do whatever I care to do, what with no client work for several months and plenty of compost moldering on toward spring and the fall garden the best it has ever been. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of things to do if I choose; like learn any number of applications better, improve and update my website, scale Mount Everest, hang out in bars looking for love, but I’ve been there, done that. I’ve even had moments while sitting in the garden shed to greet the sun in the morning that feel like something I’m doing rather than simply groking existence. Somehow I have integrated meditation into my active life so thoroughly that I’ve come to realize the act of translating my thoughts into intelligible language is a doing so automatic it seems like part of perception and imagination rather than preparation of my thoughts with a purpose.

There is also the influence of keeping this blog, this my 325th post, as my journal of thoughts since June ’06, rather than the sorely neglected log it replaced. The log is full of spontaneous scribblings and sketches charting my stream of thoughtful life at leisure, whereas I sit at the computer to write these posts whole cloth from ideas I deem worthy of expressing. Many’s the time I have composed an entire blog in my head out in the garden piddling around and loose it before I can get inside to trap it with the keyboard. I think a voice recorder may be in order, certainly the only thing that can keep up with my flights of fancy.

•

Last year I subtitled my review of the blog, Politicization of a Ponderer. This year I used Conformation of an Atheist to indicate the year-long exchange in the comments about religion, made more intense than I would have ever gotten in discussing one blight of mankind to which I have always remained immune —having missed the inoculated addiction most children get — by being denied admittance to join the Christian afterlife party awaiting my daughter with the same righteousness by which her mother denied my contact with her by any more than child support. Although we didn’t settle anything on the spiritual side, we did discover how much we love each other despite that.

On the other side of the atheist coin I found something in Barack Obama’s use of the word God to convey a connectedness between living entities that I perceive as being the essence of all life forms, from quarks to the entire universe. This communication was so rare in my experience of God being the great sin finder and heathen smiter wielded offensively against all who will not convert, that I converted — at least so far as supporting Obama actively and voting for the first time in my life for him. No one gets a blank check, but so far so good. 2009 looks to be one of those interesting times whose experience can be either a blessing or a curse. Gee, just like everything has always been out there in that void we named and call the future — and call that a definition.

LET NOT MAN BOGART LOVE

WAY TO BE

I have just figured out the underlying essence of the itch when I’m idle in my ideal idyll. Once one finds one’s place in the world there is no physical or temporal location that can define it.

The old Yaqui sage, Don Juan, told Castaneda to find his “sieto,” a place to sit to seek a deeper understanding of the ways of the natural world leading me to think of a certain place, the bank of a particular stream perhaps, that would be the best place to meditate. Until just now I considered my little seat under the shade of the garden shed to be that place and, until now, it served very well. So well in fact that I have come to realize that, as with all attachments, this one must be obviated as well.

The fact that I am conveying this understanding as clearly as it came to me at an earlier time at a different location is proof enough for me that “sieto” isn’t a place or time, it is the genuine realization of belonging in the universe, of the cosmos, on the earth, to nothing, wherever I choose to roam at whatever pace through space. I have had this realization before, under the influence of psychedelics and through rationally intellectual understanding, but this is the first time it has occurred to me amidst a sober, foggy sodden sunrise in such a clear, coherent, indelibly visceral manner; as if my train of thought burst out of a reality tunnel into the open air and became too large to fit in any container ever again.

I have always felt one’s attitude was the predictor of one’s satisfaction with the progress of the day but attitude is a surface sort of interface compared to feeling at home wherever you are however you feel. Two tales illustrate the difference:

A Buddhist monk meditated a long time in a cave in the Himalayas until he had tapped so deeply into ki forces that he could shake the snow from any mountain by making it tremble. Feeling fulfilled in his mission to become enlightened, he came back down to the village in whose market place the first person to touch him after all that time bumped into him in the jostling crowd. He barked angrily, “Watch out where the hell your going.”

After ordering a special meal composed of specific power foods to aid Castaneda’s quest, Don Juan ordered a cheeseburger for himself, eliciting Carlos’ protestation. “Your food was to help you have a vision, once you have it you can eat anything.”

Once one quits all attachments, one must quit the attachment to quitting. Once the mourning widow has stirred the last dying embers of the pyre she must toss in the stirring stick.

The Mountain Song
Donovan

It was up some laughing river where I'd gone to spend the day.
I had such fantastic visions I could hardly stand to stay.
And I stood within myself and suddenly felt free,
And I stood above the burdens that puzzle you and me.

I became awareness that was shared with all around,
With the trees, the sky, the flowers, and the wind, the sun, the ground.
I heard the birds were singing and I found them same as me,
And I understood our sorrows and why they should not be.

I saw this plane of living, it was nothing more than faith,
A skin that covered glory, far beyond our love or hate,
A living crystal fairyland where loving is our grace,
A pyromanic garden

that knows no time nor space.

I saw what we've been doing to it, saw it as insane,
Still a marching like good Christians with our wars, the sword, the flame,
To crush all those damned infidels, defend what should be shame.
And again I shared our sorrows and knew we all must bear the blame.

I see it all as part of us to know and share alike
With a universal willingness to know and do what's right,
To understand our brotherness and stop this awful race,
Let our children grow in peace, know their life shall not be waste.

First there is a mountain, then it seems the mountain's gone,
But then, if you take another look, why, it's been there all along.
We can be just like that river as it laughs along its way,
Or stand beneath the shadows that take the sun away

SEASONED GREETINGS

SELF STARTING HEROES

Democracy Now featured what I hope is the beginning of a long line of proactive volunteers making the vision of change a reality. Tim DeChristopher saw a chance to delay Bush's last minute auctioning off of 150,000 acres of scenic Utah parkland to the oil and gas industry by becoming a bidder and buying 22,000 acres for himself and driving up the price on the rest of the land before he was sussed and arrested. The entire auction was suspended when it was found he had no means or intention of paying, thereby delaying the fire sale favors Bush was returning to the petroleum industry which has been leading this country around by wallet until the Obama administration can cancell the whole deal.

"I knew that as bad as this could possibly turn out, if I ended up going to prison, then I could live with that. But if I saw an opportunity to protect the land of southern Utah and I saw an opportunity to keep some oil in the ground and give us a better chance for a livable future and I passed up that opportunity, then I wouldn’t be able to live with that. And so, I just had to make that choice on my own."

Tim DeCristopher

CINEMA—COLLABORATIVE LITERATURE PART II

Happy Solstice everyone.

This second installment of my favorite cinematic literature should in no way be taken as second choice as each one I list is the best of its kind. Surely there is no other movie like the one I lead off with this time.

Being There — Peter Sellers' last and best of a long string of outstanding performances since I first saw him playing ping-pong with James Mason in the original Lolita. I have mentioned that his character, Chance, entering civilization late in a lifetime of tending a garden is the exact reverse of my trajectory. With his single-minded care for symbiosis with nature he advises the nation’s top bean counters to grow healthy stalks/ stocks and large pods/portfolios. The closing scene of him strolling out on the surface of a lake is the only solid evidence for the surrealism of where he is throughout the story. A masterpiece of multiple entente, among all the genres of movies, this is the one I prefer watching with the uninitiated. It evokes the most interesting discussions about how we paint our reality with our attitude.

Ruling Class — The rehabilitation of Jesus to make him fit to be British aristocracy. As I mentioned to Leslie in a comment on her favorite movies post (she gave me the idea to do these two posts) about this movie being the turning point in realizing that I was an agnostic, non-card-carrying atheist when Peter O’Toole replies to the question of why he believes he must be god with, “Because, when I pray, I find I am talking to myself.” Nothing ever made better sense out of the quandary I was in at the time – only made more profound by studying Buddhism. The primary difference between Buddha and Jesus seems to be that Buddha realized that his enlightenment sprung from the same place within him that is within everyone and taught how to access it by going inward through meditation whereas Jesus is reputed to have allegedly claimed to be the only, exclusive access to some exterior creator god. Yeah, this movie was nearly as profound a turning point in my reality tunnel as Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, with his simple statement, “Agriculture is not the solution to famine, it is the cause.”

Lion in Winter — Never has such a horrible story been so well acted as King Henry II (Peter O’Toole Again) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) celebrate Christmas by slicing and dicing each other with acting chops honed over many years of excellent performances preparing for just these roles. Calling Eleanor out of her tower prison, their sons, Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey and clumsy John and Phillip, King of France (Timothy Dalton) Henry schemes to settle his affairs before his death leading to treachery and recrimination that plays like a combination of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and House of Games and superior to both. Best scene: After a particularly scathing exchange that leaves Eleanor groveling at the door of her bedroom as Henry storms down the stairs, with uncanny timing she realizes herself and looks straight at the camera and says, “Every family has their ups and downs.” If it weren’t for the acting I mightn’t have included such an emotionally violent movie for it has no other redeeming quality.

Once Were Warriors — One might say this is the same story as Lion in Winter being enacted at the other end of the British Empire’s caste system in the persons of the displaced indigenous Maori population caught between the new zeal of New Zealand's colonials and the pride of the traditional island culture. It certainly would not be recommended without the light of a beautiful redemption at the end of a very dark tunnel through social hell. It makes me think about the possibility of my friends’ opportunity to gain land in Hawaii if the indigenous restoration legislation goes through.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — a launching pad for almost the entire ensemble into memorable careers, this hot house of socially unfit characters may be one of the few movies to live up to, and for me surpass, the original, wonderful book by Ken Kesey. Jack Nicholson is the only actor I knew to look for, from his breakthrough role as George Hanson in Easy Rider, but I wasn’t quite ready for this. Best scene: McMurphy hijacks the prison bus and takes his ward buddies out deep sea fishing by conning the owner of the boat into believing that these are all research scientists who, to a man, shape shift into a believable facsimile thereof as magically and subtly as the last supper scene appears amongst the cast at a funeral in M.A.S.H.

Bedazzled (1967)– Written by and starring British comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, this satirical mock of Christianity and the futility of planning the perfect mate is a masterful twist on Faust as nebbish Moore attempts to plot the perfect conditions for getting into his fast order waitress’ knickers, always to be thwarted by Cook, the Devil, who granted him seven tries to get it right. Best scene: in his fifth attempt to get Margaret for sure the Devil sets him up with stage, lights, girls and rock n’ roll stardom only to be upstaged by the Devil’s song declaring his haughty ennui with the line, “You fill me with inertia.” The code for escaping a wish gone wrong was a Bronx cheer, or “raspberry,” which I have found myself doing when real life situations get too crazy. Damn a bunch of pacts with the Devil, anyway

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Quit Worrying And Love The Bomb — If Jonathan Swift can write satire about the British dining on Irish babies Kubrick can make satirical movies about nuclear holocaust and boy did he. Peter Sellers plays three roles against actors like Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn and George C. Scott to portray the failed strategy of having a doomsday machine if no one knows about it. I have always viewed it as a twisted example of how almost all of civilization’s strategies are doomsday machines that people are just coming to suspect have already been detonated but would still rather debate.

Catch-22 — Joseph Heller wrote this blistering condemnation of the entire absurdity of war and those who would profit from it in a vein so absurd one might mistake it for comedy. Army quartermaster Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight) is a neocon prototype dealing chocolate covered candy on the black market … and stock in the black market itself. Best scene: Yosarian (Alan Arkin) wakes up in the hospital after being stabbed to witness two nurses exchange a patient’s empty IV drip solution bag with his full colostomy bag and move on down to the next bed.

Dark City — As Mahakal mentioned in comments to the first half of this post, this movie's style is gorgeous — in the most sinister way. It takes the notion of waking up feeling like a new person to a new extreme as the city folk struggle to realize they haven’t seen the sun or gone to the beach in … how long has it been now? … how did we used to get there? The manipulating villains float off the ground wearing black leather dusters a couple of feet longer than normal legs would be and gather every midnight to change the architecture of the city by combining their ability to “tune” materiality. I’m still not sure why I like it so much because I find no parallels of, or metaphors for, any life experience — maybe it’s prescient.

K-PAX — This sweet indictment of establishment’s walls of permissible reality personified by psychiatrist, Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) in his examination of the perfectly harmless alien, Prot (Kevin Spacey) who appeared from a mote in a beam of light unnoticed among the throngs in Grand Central Station. His benevolent innocence gets him arrested when he is the only person who tries to stop a purse-snatcher in the crowd of inured me-my-mine New Yawkers and his candor gets him into the shrink’s office when he explains that he has no proper ID because he has just arrived by light from K-PAX. Even after his brother-in-law verifies that Prot knows more than any earth astronomers about the just discovered neighbor hood of his planet, Doctor Mark remains convinced he can “cure” Prot’s problem. Quintessential dialogue:
Mark: “if you have no laws on K-PAX, how do you determine right and wrong?”
Prot: “Every being in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong, Mark.” I have never seen such a simple validation of genetic memory and the stifling of it with preemptive directives from clueless authority.

Well, I gotta quit now before I synopsize every movie I’ve ever liked. Terry Gilliam deserves a post all by himself. I could never be a movie critic because I wouldn’t want to waste any notoriety on something I felt was better off not existing, not even the chance to be as perfectly curt as the reviewer who wrote, “The Deep wasn’t.”

I still want more feedback on these and/or any others these bring to mind.

CINEMA —COLLABORATIVE LITERATURE

Although much lighter in weight, the boxes full of my VCRs rivaled the volume and gravity of the boxes full of my books when I moved here five years ago. When I gave up on television a good twenty years ago, I still had the tube, the culturally conditioned habitual dependence on being visually entertained and Waterloo Video and Records right around the corner.

The movies became a big part of my life before I discovered books. I got home one evening in 1944 to learn a neighborhood search was frantically underway for my three year-old sister and six year-old self during our impromptu adventure to the matinee and the feature twice on no other authority than my own. Later, during the glorious frustration of puberty, when the chain of neighborhood theaters in Tampa dissolved, the one in Palma Ceia became an “art theatre,” much to my lascivious delight. Featuring ballet, opera, plays and foreign movies, it replaced the raucous anarchy of matinee serials, cartoon festivals, double feature westerns and Duncan yo-yo contests of my callow youth with new, quieter, more private considerations of the shadows in the cave. The well-muscled thighs of prima ballerinas and the unkempt hairy armpits of Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice introduced me to the adult world of Onan anon and eventually to a deeper appreciation of the visceral power of cinema to create reality beyond my puerile obsession with sex.

I don’t think I’ll ever become asexual but I did manage to engage in the entire portrayed reality without waiting for the good parts to suspend disbelief. I did eventually discover the power of books through Jack London and John Steinbeck and have come to hold some of them more valuable to my developing worldview than any of the movies in this list of my favorites so far.

My special appreciation for movies stems from my ability to cue up a tape or disc and share the experience with friends whose perceptions often cast a new light on and a novel depth to an already profound experience. The influence of the shared watching experience with dear friends has sometimes shown me another side to the truth of a movie so powerful it totally obviates my Pollyanna, hippy-dippy version. This, and the fact that the best movies are the successful, symbiotic creation of a collaboration of artists dedicated to a common vision make them a form of literature on level with the solitary creation of the printed word. Good movies are far scarcer than good books.

So saying, I give you a list of faves out of the two hundred some odd movies I have in boxes in the order they come to mind, some of the later ones came from an older, deeper part of who I have become, or always have been. I’m never quite sure about that.

Off the Map — First on the list because the latest discovered. Joan Allen becomes someone I would never have suspected was within her from her usually businesslike, suburban hausfrau roles. In a matching cast of characters who have discovered the reality that the best things in life are free if that’s where you concentrate your attention — then it’s not work. It’s a great example of living on the earth symbiotically way ahead of the necessary popular realization that it’s the only way to live to survive.

Barfly — This masterpiece leads an entire genre of cinematic portrayals of the camaraderie among the rejects and rejecters of society with whom I identify more than with the artificial dysfunction of civilization.
A few lines Between Henry (Mickey Roark) and Wanda (Faye Dunnaway) —
W: “I hate people. Don’t you hate people?”
H: “I don’t hate people, I just feel a lot better when they’re not around.”

•

W: ”I don’t know if I can love you.”
H: “Don’t worry. No one has ever loved me before.”

•

H: “You don’t believe that shit, do you?”
W: “Oh, yeah. The more you believe, the better your chances of being safe.”

Nell — Jodie Foster rocketed beyond merely competent acting in this brave role about the natural sanity of the uncivilized. In a two or three minute scene she squats to greet two little girls who in her memory become she and her long lost sister. Just thinking of the panorama of emotion that crosses her expressive face wells up the same depth of feeling I had when I first saw it.



Walkabout — My first experience of the work of Nicolas Roeg was about two white Australians abandoned as deep in the out back as a tank of gas would take their suicidal father’s Volkswagen after escaping his attempt to take them with him. About to perish, they are discovered by an aboriginal lad on his tribal walkabout, the equivalent of Native American’s vision quest. The incessant chatter of the seven year-old only serves to point up the silent beauty of the environment they cross contrasted with the noise of the civilization back to which he leads them while feeding them along the way with his proficient hunting skills and knowledge of nature. I am still puzzled by the ending where he is left hanging from a tree, in ceremonial paint and remaining feathers, a branch under each armpit. I’ve never been sure whether he died from the sorrow of returning them to the white world or was in a trance as part of his ritual departure dance, and I like the not knowing.

Big Chill — One of the few really popular movies on the list. Hands down the best soundtrack to capture the music five years either side of 1970, as several once liberal college friends gather several years later at the funeral of one of them after his suicide (Kevin Costner’s most dramatic role). Best dialogue: Sam Webber, TV star, (Tom Berenger) and Harold Cooper, host and owner of an expanding chain of shoe stores, (Kevin Kline)
S: “Did you ever think we’d make so much money?”
H: After a long, thoughtful pause, “Good thing it doesn’t matter anything to us.” Followed by another pregnant pause awash in the facetiousness of it all.
Best scene: JoBeth Williams’ Karen closes the downright maudlin funeral services with the deceased’s favorite song, Satisfaction. You know you can settle down for some fun with that beginning.
I attended just such a gathering of “alumni” at a 25 year wedding anniversary of a couple I knew from the Hole in the Wall and was helpless to prevent seeing it in exactly the same light with I, in the William Hurt role of Nick Carlton, being the only one still smoking pot and living with even fewer possessions, hob knobbed among hypocritical parents, chain store inheritors, retired bureaucrats, international lawyers and a Bush spin doctor with virtually nothing left in common with them but the booze.

Little Big Man — A quantum leap in my consideration of the extent of the U. S. government’s treachery, not advanced until I read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Jack Crabb’s (Dustin Hoffman) epic suffering at the hands of western ho, both as a white gunslinger, muleskinner and drunk and as an “injun,” adopted by Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George) who greeted his every return with “My heart soars like an eagle.” It is one of the most beautiful gestures to be found in the movies, for me.

Dersu Uzala — An aging Goldi hunter befriends and guides a Russian army survey team in Eastern Siberia while teaching them simple essentials to living in the wild. Years later when his failing eyes keep him from being much help the leader of the expedition takes him home to civilization. Unable to tolerate civilization, Dersu persuades his friend to return him to face death in the wild rather than be killed in the city. Another significant gesture at the end of the movie became a ritual greeting between my friend John Christian and me whenever we cross paths: As Dersu gets almost out of earshot on his toddling way into the woods beside the railroad track, the friend calls out, “Dersu!”
He turns and hollers, “Kapitan!” and you can hear his chuckle for the first time since he left his wilderness.

Blade Runner — Dystopia Maximus, which alone would have allowed A Clockwork Orange to nose it out in the genre of sci-fi, but its very real depiction of the possibility of being a programmed tool so seamlessly implanted with human memories that one seems to be real, even to oneself, was so well done that even Matrix couldn’t match it.




13th Floor — While we are on the subject of self-as-unwitting-tool, another less well known, perfectly portrayed mystery in which a virtual reality research team designs a game wherein the player inhabits his avatar in a perfect reproduction of 1938 Los Angeles indistinguishable from reality only to discover that they too are avatars in a game inhabited by the godlike players.



The list is getting long so I’ll save the rest for a sequel. I would love to hear feedback on these exemplars of my cinematic tastes, they are easier to discuss than reality and just as worth it.

UPDATE ON SOLAR HIGHWAYS

DEWY DAWG RANCH

The reason I would go closer to the equator if I should ever decide to move again has kept me huddled in the RV by the heater with Priest for the past week — the only occasion we'd use either device. But this morning was different.

The sub freezing weather thrice threatened to chill my body to the point where I begin arrhythmic breathing when checking the garden or chickens that only an inhaler relieves. Suffering as dire a dose of cabin fever and hibernation musk as I care to indulge, it was with a sense of great relief that I awoke this morning to the sound of water dripping from the limbs over the roof of the bedroom and peeked out to see … nothing! Overnight the temperature rose from 30° to 57°F and the fog could drown you.


We spent several hours in the garden photographing the beauty of the healthiest crop I’ve ever hoped for on a day so grey the flash went off when pointed at where the sun was supposed to be. It’s all good.

Broccoli, Arugula, Spinach, Cilantro, Garlic,
Bibb and Romaine Lettuce and Cauliflower
The insert is looking from the other direction six weeks earlier

Veronica Broccoli

Red Cabbage

PROPAGANDA OR PROPER GANDERING?

Now that I have worn a path between my habitual intertube news and opinion sources during the run up to the election over the past few years I have this new momentum of reinvested interest in the promising future of this country I trusted long ago much more than its politicians have since belied. I stepped into a journalistic arena that has morphed from the ideal of probing investigations of facts behind the headlines and before opinions into an array of news superstars spinning tidbits of gossip into national scandal like the trash in the wind howling down canyon-like city streets between insulated bank skyscrapers while ignoring the truth behind government denials of economic corruption.

I reentered by getting hooked on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, the single remaining practitioner of the old school of journalism understanding, “Governments lie.” I use it as the calibration device by which I judge the depth and spin to which others treat her reports, most of which are ignored by all the networks — and the blogs who only add their two cents to the MSM spin as if upping the price made it truer.

Next came Keith Olbermann’s Countdown and his first few special comments righteously lambasting the Bush administration were as cathartic to me as they obviously were to him. As time went on he began to bug me with his obsession with, and consequent popularization of his perceived nemesis, Bill O’Reilly. In the past year a new face began bringing a calmer, more humorous approach to the show while bolstering his arguments.

Rachel Maddow apparently had quite a following of talk radio fans from her time at Air America since MSNBC gave her her own show following Keith after a short period of kibitzes on his. Although it doesn’t make much sense to have two programs back-to-back that essentially cover the identical news items, it does emphasize the differences in their approaches to journalistic reportage with Rachel faring better for my taste. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do the same thing but are more purposefully contrasted, much like Olbermann and O’Reilly.

It was Rachel’s humor last night that prompted this paean to her fresh enthusiasm exemplifying the possibilities of our next generation getting it right finally. In the picture above she is comparing the Bush/Cheney scramble to rewrite history for their legacy make over and last minute ass covering legislation to two drunk teenagers who have crashed the family car into the living room and who, rather than having the keys taken away, rev the engine and ask anyone if they’d like to go around the block one more time. She is a delight among the sad plethora of pundits twisting different pretzels out of the same ingredients.

A BIG CAT DOZES

A big cat dozes

Ever faithful gato
His idyll justly kept
Like madam's nubile
Odalisque's parading queue
Ransoming sensual temptations
Under very wanting xenophobe's
Youthful zooms.

CIVILIZATION OR SYMBIOSIS?

I Knew there was a reason I haven't posted in a while and here it is. Blog Bud, Pisces Iscariot, has posted on the lies of civilization saying everything I have ever opined about the subject and then some. If more people understood this post, I would give up blogging all together.

RAFTING THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Like ten empty tattoo needles going at a half a cycle a second, purring Priest returns my absent minded stroking of his luxurious nape with simultaneous piercings of my bare knee by talons so sharp they must slip between the cells and what at first felt like pain is only sharp, yet bloodless sensation of feline affection as we watch the evening gather of grackles test the watering hole in slower, more deliberate shifts until he can stand it no longer and slithers off my lap for a closer observation. He has yet to grok the lookouts in the trees while perfecting his invisibility from ground level to a foot above; where he can barely see them either.

Fools rush in and get the best buys where angels fear to tread upon clerks full of turkey in walls full of mart, compounding the hypocrisy of Thanksgiving with Black Friday’s opening ceremony of the month long idolization of the latest models of golden calfves for the profit of money lenders culminating in the birthday of one later crucified for warning about both. Ironic, it’s trategic stragedy if ever I saw it — parents paying off the yearlong threat/bribe to children’s good behavior lest Santa punish them with switches and coal. It’s built in conditioning like the DNA of civilization, these generations of closed minds following the habitual limits of the invisible prison pointing out the window at the crazy people dancing through walls to inaudible music.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art, and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead, his eyes are closed. —Albert Einstein

You don’t have to know how to read sheet notation to make music. You don’t have to make music to love it. Music is the string we claim as our heart that runs through all mankind. I enjoy playing my bamboo flute for my garden far more than playing any part of my 4.6-day’s worth of music on iTunes, which I prefer to going out for live performances these days. If it weren’t for getting to meet up with old friends, I might never rejoin the pub-crawl crowd. I think I enjoyed music more before I got too close to the business exploitation of it by managers, venue operators and fame seekers alike that seemed to tarnish the purity of all but the most dedicated musicians’ performances. The most important quality of musical performance is the musician’s love for it. The sour notes make the good ones sweeter so I can’t bitch about any of it.

DAWG RANCH IN DECEMBER

Here's a little sample of the world from Priest's and my observation post on a balmy December day … doin' what merely bein' brings round.

Liona Boyd — Fantasy