Thank You...
Christopher Davis:  Author of Blue Sky.
Another book I found sitting on the $2 rack at the Center for Fiction (nee Mercantile Library) and back cover copy convinced me to give it a try.  Account of prison life (on Death Row no less) and though I have no way of knowing from experience or otherwise how accurate it is, it simply has such a ring of truth that I can't imagine that the real thing could be otherwise. With no novelistic tricks or devices and an acute ear and eye for the telling detail, this is strong stuff. Straight no chaser.




Thank You...
Eliane Elias, Marc Johnson, Victor Lewis: 
Caught up with the Paulistana Pianist from paradise last night, along with her Bass Master husband and drumming legend Mr. Lewis. A night of trio jazz magic, with all three in dazzling form.  There is simply no one else like her.  And she seems to get better all the time, and now she's composing more and a new one in particular (B is for Butterfly) had me sitting there at the bar close to tears. Realized for the first time that a trio setting may be the best way to appreciate her genius, though she's never had anything but the finest collaborators and I love that guitar player she's had on board in previous years.  BTW: She's at the Iridium through Saturday...



Thank You...
Anthony Bourdain: Food and Travel Adventurer. Yes, he's a bit full of himself and his anti-hipsterism can come off as more annoying than the thing he's mocking, but I gotta give him credit for his work ethic and generosity of spirit.  No Reservations (though unfortunately, not the new show The LayOver) rarely fails to make me feel hopeful about the world because Tony celebrates and appreciates all that is simple, basic and universal.  Love of friends and family, the rewards of honest work, gratitude for nature's bounty, the joy of creative play, and not least of all, respect for the value of words.  Even the episodes that don't quite satisfy on other levels, almost always contain moments of narration that strike a chord and reflect his serious effort to make his observations as memorable in prose as they are in image.  A rare thing to encounter on TV. Other than catching an old Seinfeld episode I never saw and those addicting costume dramas and mystery series that the Brits keep shipping to our shores, this is about the only other tube offering I find myself feeling little post show remorse over when the final credits roll.


And thank you... Rich Cohen, whose book, Israel is Real was an eye-opening and rich learning experience.  


And Thank You  Leroy and Bobby Ah Choy, John Zabatocky, Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama, Brian Keaulana, Mel Pu, and Bruce De Soto for getting up on your boards with Outrigger Paddles in your hands and making it possible for old men like me to head out to sea for hours of fun without fear of never coming back. 

Reporter approaches group of attendees 

at the 'World Economic Forum' in Davos...

Reporter:  Excuse me, but could I get your opinion concerning the current grain shortages in the third world?
British Royal: "What's a 'shortage'?"

Saudi Oil Sheik: "What's 'grain'?"


German Banker: "What's an 'opinion'?"


American Media Mogul: "What's 'the third world'?"

Israeli Diplomat: "What's 'excuse me'?"

“To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. " Joyce Cary--The Horse's Mouth

Partial list of the missing & forgotten:  

Computer backup flash drive, key to bike lock, combination to combination lock, every password to every online site that requires one, answer to security question to get into VISA account online, the covers for the CDs in car stereo, musical mnemonics, 

chords and lyrics to every song I didn't practice today, the name of the guy in the office next to mine, and the woman next to him...and so on down the hall, and the thing that I was thinking a minute ago about using to end this list. 

“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love. 
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST.”

Frank Zappa.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds. Mark Twain. 

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Igor Stravinsky

Boys, look like you're having fun, but don't have any.  Lawrence Welk (To his band just before going on the air)

Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free.

Nat King Cole

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.

Louis Armstrong

Do it again on the next verse, and people think you meant it.

Chet Atkins

I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-five.

Mick Jagger

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout.

Melvin Maddocks

Inadvertently left off list of "words I like" from last weeks post...

Conundrum, 

Ecdysiast, 

Corpulent, 

Capricious. 

“You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.” 
― G.K. Chesterton

Saw latest exercise in cinemagical sensationalism and cultural semantics by Quentin Tarantino and loathe as I am to join the foolish fray surrounding this provocative punch to the cultural solar plexus, I'm finding it "hard to resist" (in joke for those who've seen the flick) putting in my two cents.  But, in the interest of imposing some discipline on myself and with the hope that a playful approach might help in avoiding the pitfalls of a smug pedantry,  I'm putting my observations in the form of "Jeopardy" style answers and will leave it to you to intuit the possible response questions.
And if it's not obvious from the following, (despite some quibbles with how the auteur paced and structured his opus) I found it to be  profoundly affecting and effective. Ellen was tempted at times to leave the theater when she found some scenes too painful to endure, and I suspect that is precisely what Tarantino was hoping for--even while knowing in advance that he would be charged with glorifying violence.  An unjust charge in my view because I believe his intent was to magnify violence in order to glorify the act of defeating it.

Answer: Historical truth isn't the point.
Answer: Resorting to distorted stereotypes is not the same as employing universal archetypes.
Answer:  Violence that is easy to watch is the greater distortion.
Answer:  If he showed how it really was, you couldn't watch. 
Answer: Catharsis
Answer: It's not real. It's hyper-real. At times evern Surreal!
Answer:  "Art is a lie designed to make us realize the truth."
Answer: It's his movie, not yours. 

And currently appearing on the other side of the revisionist history equation...

...are the ups and downs-upstairs and downstairs- in the  victorian soap opera concerning those to the manor born and those having to bear with them.  Admit I got hooked and now I'm a goner (as is Ellen) and guess I'll stick it out to the end.  Most recent episode took the plunge into genuine tragedy, which was almost a relief after so much petty melodrama, and certainly had the power to stir heavy emotion--Ellen was shaking in grief.   But I'm beginning to see the wheels of  the formulaic mechanism at work and (like a Dickens novel) feeling played like a puppet from week to week as the multiple plot lines play out like grandfather clockwork with the  cuckoo popping out at regular intervals to keep me on my toes.  One thing that bugs me is that from watching this season, you would never know or suspect that they had all just a few years back gone through that seismic cataclysm during The Great War.  No one ever refers to it, no one acts like it changed them or their attitudes, and it kinda annoys me cause I thought that was the whole point of last season when it seemed like it would force the story (and family) into a whole new way of dealing with the the world-- transitioning from 19th century victorian era into 20th Century Age of anxiety.   Well, more or less like I said earlier, it's their show, and I gotta say it's a finely crafted piece of work and I've grown quite fond of the maids and kitchen staff. Only hope Bates gets whatever's comin to him soon, maybe gets some help from Oprah--cause he's holding everyone else up with his dilly dallying around that snake pit of a cell block.

Sea and Sky.  Albert Bierstadt (1830- 1902) 

Sitting waiting (and waiting) for meeting and flipping through 'Hudson River School' coffee table book of Paintings that was thoughtfully provided by someone who understood the frequency with which such meetings fail to commence even close to their scheduled time.   This one stood out and provided the muse for today's musing.  

Life is Long

In youth

Dreams

Rise up

as the rain from every summer shower
and winter storm

evaporates and takes flight

 metaphoric
vapors from the roiling sea of familial tides

 clouds take shape 

our unique precipitate

different  (we tell ourselves) 
from those that fed

our father’s dreams

and our mother’s dreams

 We sail from port to port

seeding clouds along the way

with our gaze turned ever

skyward 

We follow them

Year after year 

Cumuli rise, 

Spend their weight

 and drift away

Until in time

The day to day

of the dutiful

and familiar

becomes all that remains 

from horizon 

to horizon.

And now with eyes level on the road ahead
and sometimes behind

We  may glimpse the shadows cast

By (the memory of) clouds gone by

And see that they were never ours alone 

and that it was they

that  followed us. 

You talkin to me?

A random selection   of warnings, instructions, and  irrelevant advisories.

Wonder how many arsonists used this
method? 

Walt Disney concert hall  in Downtown LA had to be refinished to remove the glossy metallic coat that was reflecting sunlight into neighboring apartments. No fires reported, but some living rooms were turning into Saunas.  Maybe the lesson is that they should build similar structures in places like Juneau Alaska.   

Below... from instructions for external hard drive.  

(making the effort is really all that matters.) 

...think I'll take the elevator.


I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning that you may prepare your mind for your fate. 
John Adams 

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR 

per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE” 

― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn

The new iPod Touch is so easy to use! 

And you can learn how easy in this step by step 

600 page instruction book. 

                        

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before, Bokonon tells us. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 

“Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; 
those parts that you can only curse at are called software.”
--anonymous

And as my Hunter College geology professor often concluded his lecture:
See ya next time, and don't forget...
Eat your school
Stay in Drugs 
And don't do vegetables. 

How cold is it?

A full two-thirds of the country is in the grips of a blast of cold Arctic air with temperatures falling to some of the lowest marks in years and wind chills plummeting to dangerously low levels. 




The nation’s capital is experiencing what could be its coldest stretch in almost 10 years, according to NBCWashington’s Chief Meteorologist Doug Kammerer, and brutally cold weather and snow continued to hit much of the Northeast and Great Lakes area. 




In the D.C. area Wednesday morning, temperatures were between 16 and 21 degrees with single-digit wind chills, according to the National Weather Service



I like these cold, gray winter days.  Days like these let you savor a bad mood.~Bill Watterson




I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.  ~Andrew Wyeth




Winter is not a season, it's an occupation. ~Sinclair Lewis




Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.~William Shakespeare




Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours."  ~Robert Byrne




Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat. ~Unknown






And if all that doesn't help stop the shivering, I hope this will...
always works for me.  (I know I've posted it before, but I think it deserves a return engagement) 

Was reading an essay about J.M. Coetzee and it mentioned that he declined to take a phone call from the Booker Prize people because he was busy invigilating his students. Sounded suspiciously unethical to me until I discovered...

invigilate : 1. To watch examination candidates, esp. to prevent cheating  

2. Archaic to keep watch.

So, as long as I'm on a word track here, the following are words I find interesting for any number of reasons, including simple sonics. 

agrestic (ah-GRES-tik) — 1. rural; rustic. 2. unpolished; awkward. 

(And ironically,the name of the upscale and decidedly un-rustic suburban community on Weeds)

Wonder which came first?

nepenthe (ni-PEN-thee) — 1. a drug mentioned in the Odyssey as a remedy for grief. 2. something that induces forgetfulness of sorrow or eases pain. Surprised that a pharm hasn't used it for an anti-anxiety drug yet.  

Synecdoche:  (si-nek-də-kee) This has to be one of the strangest words in the language if for no other reason than it has so many definitions. 

In general it refers to that which expresses either more, or less, than it literally denotes. 

When a whole is used as the part or a part of a thing is used to substitute for the whole 
 "The world treated him badly." A part referring to or acting as a stand in for the whole
*  "the gray beard" for an older man or "the long hair" for a hippie.
* Referring to animals onomatopoetically
* Describing a car as "wheels" A whole thing referring to a part of it
* "Capitol Hill," when referring to the US Legislature A general class name used to denote a specific member of that or an associated class
* "He"s good people." 
A specific class name used to refer to a general set of associated things
* "John Hancock" for the signature of any person
* "bug" for any kind of insect. The material that a thing is made of referring to that thing
* "lead" for bullets
* "rubber" for condom
* "threads" for clothing A container used to refer to its contents:
* "barrel" for a barrel of oil
* "keg" for a keg of beer 

 WOW...If there's another word with as many definitions, I don't know it.  But here's a related one. (and could just have easily been folded into Synecdoche)

Metonymy (pron.:  mi-tonn-ə-mee)  is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept.  It's picturesque and economical, for it lets you use one word where you would need several words to create a meaning.

 He chose the gun instead of the pen (that is, he became a soldier instead of a scholar)
 Have you read Shakespeare (that is, his works)?
 Only the knife (that is, having surgery) can save him.

queef (KWIF) — a noisy emission of air from the vagina, generally during coitus. The word (not the phenomenon)  was new to me, gotta check OED for details, if they have any.

uxorious (uk-SOR-ee-es)  

Prelapsarian...

"I'll wear the plants in this family."
 ...(pre-lap-SAR-ee-an) — of or relating to the period before the fall of Adam and Eve .          

susurrus (soo-SUR-es) — a soft, whispering or rustling sound; a murmuring.  So sonically apt.  quidnunc (KWID-nungk)  — a busybody; a nosy person.                       
Amadeus (am-ah-DEY-es) a male given name. Means "loved by god" and if anyone warrants it, it would be Wolfgang, but what are the chances of naming a kid Amadeus and then having him turn out to be so deserving ?  Guess his dad knew even earlier than we thought. monophagous (moh-NAF-ah-ges) — eating only one kind of food. apricity (AP-ris-i-tee) — the warmth of the sun in the winter. But still get a sense that it's kind of chilly.clishmaclaver (KLISH-mah-klay-ver) — casual chat or gossip.  Much more expressive than "idle talk.doryphore (DOR-ee-phor) — one who draws attention to the minor errors made by others, esp. in a pestering manner; a pedantic gadfly. eunoia (yoo-NOH-ee-ah) — It comes from a Greek word meaning "well mind" or "beautiful thinking." It is also a rarely used medical term referring to a state of normal mental health. In rhetoric, eunoia is the goodwill a speaker cultivates between himself and his audience, a condition of receptivity. In book eight of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle uses the term to refer to the kind and benevolent feelings of goodwill a spouse has which form the basis for the ethical foundation of human life. (from Wikipedia)Eunoia is the shortest world in the english language that contains all 5 vowels. fungible (FUN-ji-ble) — 1. being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation. 2. interchangeablekakistocracy (kak-i-STOK-rah-see) — government by the worst or least qualified citizens.borborygmus (bor-bah-RIG-mes) — a rumbling noise produced by the movement of gas through the intestines.  Didn't want to leave Queef alone without some company here. lethologica (lee-tho-LO-gi-ca) — 1. the inability to remember the right word. 2. a psychological disorder that inhibits an individual's ability to articulate thoughts by temporarily forgetting key words, phrases, or names in conversation. 

lachrymose  [lak-ruh-mohs] :  tearful, sorrowful, sad, pertaining to tears, weeping, causing tears or crying It's just a beautifully sad word.  Oh, and it's relation to Mozart's Mass  gives it some chilling associative weight...and for you guitar arrangement fans, here's one of the Lacrimosa that makes that grieving melody mourn without sounding maudlin. If he'd only make the transcription available, I'd buy it. 
lumpenproletariat (lum-pen-proh-li-TAR-ee-it) — 1. the lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat. Used originally in Marxist theory to describe those members of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class consciousness. 2. the underclass of a human population.  Used to hear my parents use this term and it always sounded vaguely patronizing.

lollop (LOL-op) — to move with a bobbing motion.  Perfect.