Holidays and New Year

I visited my relatives in Miami this Chrismas. My husband, two kids and I drove there and back. On our way there, an enormous sheet of ice flew off a truck and hit our car in Virginia. We spent the night in NC and the next day, in Georgia, noticed the gauge in the dashboard indicated the engine was very hot. It was December 23rd and staying in a hotel would have been out of the question. We exited out of I-95 and into what looked like a very shady neighborhood, pulled into a gas station where repair men were called to help us out.

Two toothless men with very thick southern accents showed up, it was almost impossible to understand what they were saying. They looked at our car and asked us to follow them to their repair shop which was an enormous junkyard about a half a mile away. At the entrance there was a dog, pictured above, that barked furiously until he realized we weren't scared. He watched us roam around taking pictures for awhile and then decided to take a nap.

The two men told us the cooling system had been damaged - most likely by the impact when the ice hit the car - then poured a sealant into the engine. They asked for $45 dollars and sent us off, telling us maybe we'd make it all the way to Miami. It was already getting dark and the thought of our car breaking down halfway was a bit scary.

But we made it alright, arrived at our hotel at 2 am that night. During our stay, the weather was warm and sunny, and the family reunions even more so. Miami is a place where Starbucks can't compete with all the great little restaurants and "cortadito" shops where Cuban coffee abounds. We got the car fixed and returned to NYC energized by a lot of love, interesting and lively conversations, and the fun we had. We'll hold on to all that for a long time.

All the best from us at The Tempest for 2009,

Luchy

The genius

demands quiet.

He shouts down ten stories at the jackhammers,
shakes his fist at the crosstown bus.

Call him too late and he won't answer;
too early,
and you'll wish he'd never picked up the phone.

These are his requirements:
a pot of Earl Grey, six pencils (sharpened),
one blue ballpoint, a pad
of college-ruled notepaper, a bowl
of rice pudding, with a tablespoon.
No television.
No radio.

He never begins until almost midnight,
and then he'll stalk barefoot and mad-haired
until the garbage trucks snort and grumble in the street
and he crumples up half-sonnets and
aborted triolets to throw at them.

Don't you dare bang your broom on the ceiling.

And don't waste words reminding him of the days when poems leapt
from his pen so quickly that he would write in subway cars
and at deli counters, and even if you jostled his elbow
or poked your umbrella in his back
you couldn't stop him from scorching page after page
with hymns of fire and the pink tragedy of a winter sky.


Mark Aiello

Gone are the Days of Careful Foreshadowing

Three quarters of the way through this blog post, I will get to the point of the post. I am telling you this now so that you keep reading the post until that point, and then I will hope that my main point will keep you reading until the end, when I will tell you once again what I have told you.

Actually I am not sure if the above will hold true. But I do know I have noticed that the older a book is, the less likely it is to have a "prologue" or an italicized section designed to give you a reason to read the first 250 pages, or a first chapter that seems to come from a different, more piquant story than the one you soon begin to read; until you realize that the chapter you just read actually comes from somewhere in the middle of the book.

Seems like this is a crutch for the modern writer. Does it mean the moderns are less skillful? I am not one to say (or at least not one to write). But I do know I have a tough time imagining Flaubert needing to spill a few beans about Madame Bovary at the beginning, only to spill the rest of them later.

Movies have indulged in this for quite some time--or anyway, it seems they started doing it before authors took it up. Maybe that's because movies have long been made for a busy audience--folks who don't have that much time and who need to be reassured that, if they spend some time on this story of yours, they will be rewarded later.

Gone are the days of careful foreshadowing: when, just by telling the tale very skillfully, the author was able to convey a sense of what was to come. Here are the days of blunt propositions: step right up--have a peep inside! We won't disappoint!

We get bored so easily today. We feel left out and lonesome if we discover ourselves reading a book that has not already given us every reason to believe we will have made good use of the time we've spent. The prospect of having spent an hour alone, risking the failure of our reading investment, seems to shame us into leaving books closed that have not early made us secure.

--Renaissance

Woods for the words below

I looked among my pictures for an image of snow that would go with JC's beautiful post below but I think this one is the most fitting.

Luchy

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Snow is falling here in the Northeast, not blanketing the streets but slowly drowning them. Do you have a mind for winter? Francois Villon, that fine French ruffian-poet once asked, "Ou les neiges sont d'antan?"("Where are the snows of yesteryear?") They are here today, those snows. Does the snow resemble an assembly of angels, atmospheric confetti, a cosmic grammar assault, with commas, semi-colons, and question marks whizzing about and down? Think of any literary description of snow and invent something even more clever. Take that idea, remove it from your mind, and place it on a warm surface so it melts and is never known. After all, snow is not a symbol or invested image; snow is erasure, the dissolver of material, the begetter of the unknown, the unknowable, the dissappeared. J/C

On Art - trA nO

Jim Dine once said: "My real ancestors are artists of the past. I am comforted and excited and soothed and inspired by them." For those of you that love art, making it, viewing it, thinking about it, its history, here are some thoughts from various artists throughout time and around the globe.

Luchy


Art is dangerous and if it is chaste, it isn't art.
-Pablo Picasso

Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems.
-Winslow Homer

Art disturbs, science reassures.
-Gino Severini

There is no 'must' in art, because art is free.
-Wassily Kandinsky

If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle. -Albrecht Durer

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea..The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
-Ad Reinhardt

Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody.
-Paul Gaugin

The exhibition has now become no more than a bazaar where mediocrity spreads itself out with impudence. The exhibitions are useless and dangerous..they ought to be abolished.
-Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

When we are no longer children, we are already dead.
-Constantin Brancusi

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.
-Francis Picabia

Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.
-Jean Dubuffet

What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man..I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.
-Vincent Van Gogh

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.
-Edvard Munch

The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.
-Francis Bacon

Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.
-Paul Klee

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.
-Andy Warhol

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.
-Constantin Brancusi

A Shoe-in for the Low Point

Last Sunday, as all the world now knows, an Iraqi journalist at a news conference threw first one, then the other of his shoes at President Bush's head.

Smirking, Bush ducked both times and later said "So what?"

No doubt comics the world over felt a week's worth of material had been written for them, and "the Arab street" has made the journalist a folk-hero. But for any American who cares what the world thinks of his/her country, the act becomes--once the chuckling has died down--a deep humiliation. Worse is the clear sense that Bush was asking for it (having invaded the journalist's nation on a liar's dare).

Perhaps more wretched than any of that is the apparent fact that Bush neither understands the sadness of the moment (not for him but for his country), nor cares.

"So what?"? Is that the best you can come up with? Having been subjected to the worst insult an Arab can throw, you, Mr. President, as the representative of your people, can offer no more reflection nor care than "So what?"?

How many years of good will and intelligence will the next President have to muster before the damage to our national image can be repaired?

It is all of a piece, sadly for us all. You're doing a heckuva job, Bushie.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

As the economy begins to plummet (oh wait, the recession began last December, according to lazy, late-in-thinking market analysts), it is important to invest in wishful thinking on a grand scale. A utopian scale even. Since it's imperative that we preserve the present for posterity, we need to establish a historical record that will appeal to the senses and sensibilities of our descendents. And how best can we enable them to savor the immutability of corporate culture's mendacity and predatory boorishness? The arts, of course.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get the federal government to bail out the arts instead of the corporations? With the hyper-infusion of financial endowments, we could elaborate a multi-media expose of our present conditions. What about WALL STREET: THE MUSICAL? Garage rock bands touring with names like "Day Trader," "Powder Blue Shirts," and 401Kaput"? Perhaps we could get Bill Viola to do a video piece entitled "Autoworkers and Helicopters." Just think of it: Video pornography could inaugurate a series entitled "My Nasdaq is Up!," a sensual and exceedingly idealistic melding of erotica and market trends.

Already, as of this writing, I'm landscaping an abandoned lot in preparation for a sculpture garden which will contain a statue of King Midas in the midst of projectile vomiting (a geyser of sewage water will be propelled through the statue's mouth at the opening and closing of the stock market each day).

Perhaps we could have Spielberg or Scorsese do a blockbuster film called GREED? Wait, that was made over eighty years ago, five years before the Wall Street crashed, burned, and greatly depressed. Well, perhaps they could shoot a re-make. What better way to reflect the Hegelian, hellish cycle of history? J/C

Hudson, Dec 08

Last week, on Thursday, there was an ice storm in upstate NY and western MA. It lasted an entire day and left thousands of people without power and everything covered in ice.

On Sunday, I went into a patch of woods across from my house and shot ice against the sun.

Luchy

A red poem

I will ask you once more to count the days
back to the one when we fell, burning,
into the strange atmosphere of this world
where the weight of every object is wrong
and the distances between everything are fickle.
The night rain falls like sofas and anvils
and in the morning mountains have sprung up
in impossible places towards the horizon.
Our clocks here spin like the eyes
of cartoon characters struck on the head,
in our laboratory where none of the devices
do much but beep, and click, and beep.

Look up – to arrive we had to bisect
that lurid sky, swarmed with the very stars
that guarded the night of your birth,
though now they've been turned on their sides
and made false to even themselves. It is too bad,
but we are here and this will always
be the world where you held your neck out patiently
and let me taste your cupric skin
while we clenched each other inside our failing machine
and wondered what was howling
and banging at the hatch all night.

No matter – this is the mission we flew on,
and where we fell to, you and I, and perhaps
either one of those vicious suns, or maybe
the heat of our craft burning behind us
will scorch the shadows of us holding hands
forever and away across the rusted sand.

Mark Aiello

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

A day late and a decade early: Fridays and Tuesdays are the normal days of operation for this realm of rants, chants, and thieving poets but this last month of 2008 has me prancing on a peninsula of pain in the rain (alas, not in Spain). Forgive the slippage, but perhaps it was intended...my person was gravitating toward this day in history, the occasion of lexicographer Samuel Johnson's death in 1784 at the age of 75. Doctor Johnson's English Dictionary (the first!) came out in 1755 and it is a masterly museum mosaic of words, archaic and useful, and definitions at once perceptive, polemical, comical, and droll. Several years ago Ashgate Press published a selection, nicely edited by Jack Lynch. On this Saturday, I urge you, dear Reader, to pick up any edition of Johnson's Dictionary and read in and around it for your pleasure. Yes, read a dictionary for pleasure! It sounds like a put-on but put paid to that sentiment, Reader. You will enter this dictionary with a delight that just doesn't come from thumbing through thesauruses, examining encyclopedias, gleaning grammar books, or dipping into other dictionaries. In memory of Dr. Johnson and meaning, get thee to his Dictionary now! J/C

Skilled at Photoshop?

In the age of Photoshop, so-called "photographic evidence" has all but lost its power to prove anything more than the digital dexterity of its presenter. And in the case of a borderline crank subject like the study of UFOs, it has simply made for some very cute, very silly pictures of obviously home-made, very carefully photographed models of craft pretending to be evidence of who-knows-what.

And then there are pictures like the above, which to a skeptic like myself (who also happens to have made a living for a time being really pretty good at Photoshop), presents an intriguing prospect. The photograph and its companions were allegedly taken at Green Bay Wisconsin in 2007 and can be found at www.ufoevidence.org.

There is every possibility the photo is doctored, so let us begin with that premise. However, it would have required the skills of someone who is at once truly masterful (Hollywood level at least) at creating verisimilitude--take special note of flares of light ovetaking thin branches as the craft apparently "moves" during the exposure; truly motivated to deceive the public into belief that the sighting really took place; and truly inept or truly not interested in gaining notoriety or payment for the deployment of their considerable skills.

And yet, if we take the position that the photo must be doctored, because of course UFOs are not UFOs at all, but always a hoax, then what are we saying? We are making several assumptions about human character and skill that begin to equal or surpass in their collective unlikelihood the possibility that something inexplicable (to wit--an Unidentified Flying Object) was recorded by a photosensitive device behind some trees in Green Bay not long ago.

The rest is for us to ponder.

--Renaissance

Untitled

Luchy

Ground Zero is No Joke (Unless You're Talking About Construction Schedules)

None of the following should be construed to minimize the catastrophe that took place at the site of the former World Trade Center several years back. I was certainly close enough to "the events" to know it was all shock and awe and nothing at all funny.

However, seven years on we still have this enormous hole in the ground. It is the size of the downtowns of several notable cities I have visited: Portland, Oregon, for instance--a city large enough to have a AAA farm club; or New Orleans--certainly the French Quarter is not much bigger than this acre of hell in Lower Manhattan. Simply put: it's a big hole and lots of buildings were destroyed.

Now comes the joke: they keep saying they are putting up buildings there. This is probably because it would hurt too much to admit the turbaned enemy can awake each morning knowing that, where he knocked down skyscrapers, no skyscrapers now stand. It may also be due to the interlocking nature of dozens of business deals that have been made over the ashes, and to admit that one is not putting up buildings would be to scuttle those deals and all the money that rides upon their progress. All that said, here is a fact: they are not putting up any buildings at Ground Zero.

Sure, there is the Freedom Tower. The Freedom Tower, which will be the tallest building in the United States when built, is a two-story high concrete stump surrounded by a moat of pilings and mud. In no way does it resemble a skyscraper and barely resembles a building. Three or four years ago, they put six girders in the ground--and then stopped. There are two mighty construction cranes towering above the stump, and they both have big American flags on them. But they are mostly silent. A handful of hardhats poke around the site each day, perhaps hammering a nail or two. The site was broom clean and ready for construction in 2002. No other buildings have laid even a foundation (except for the memorial, which is destined to be largely underground).

Folks, they are not putting up any buildings at Ground Zero.

Don't let any computer rendering make you believe otherwise.

There are no buildings now. There are no buildings getting ready to be built. There are no buildings on the horizon. There are only the computer renderings.

I believe this is because Larry Silverstein, the lease-holder of the site, knows that, since he received billions for the loss of the twin towers, and since he is not compelled to build, and since there is no market at all for any office towers he would conceivably build, he would be mighty foolish to waste all those billions on a clutch of very tall skyscrapers that will cost him all his billions and sit empty and make him go broke before the paint is dry in their corridors. I believe there was a limited market before this fall's financial meltdown and that now, only a crazy person would put up an entire city's worth of buildings just blocks away from the epicenter of that meltdown. Heck, it is a wonder that the nearby Goldman Sachs tower is continuing towards completion.

There's no hope for any construction at Ground Zero. And that is a sad sort of joke: the terrorists won.

By the way: I hope I am proven the world's worst prognosticator, and that they have everything tall and shiny by 2012 just like they keep promising. But I am not feeling optimistic.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Forgive the late posting, I was re-reading parts of PARADISE LOST by the poet celebrating his 400th birthday and turning back to Ronald Johnson's poetry gloss/renovation/reinvention of that epic, RADI OS. You would do well to read them respectively.

Onwards to other matters...

The predicament of the word leads the consideration of the disturbing state of bookstores. Ron Silliman's site has tracked the tragic closure of independent bookstores throughout the country. Awful news to add to the awful news of the world in general. The loss of bookstores is lamentable for many reasons, especially since there is nothing to replace them. 'Tis true: Amazon, Alibris, and any other online book-buying service will never replace the text enclosed in book covers. Although there has been much speculation about online book-producing services superseding the print copy found on shelves of stores and bookcases, this is a forecast that will forever be predicted and never really happen. Downloading novels? Possible and luridly so. But this kind of service will always serve an ancillary function to that mastodon of material, the published Book. As many critics and pundits have mentioned, the Death of the Book has been long been prophesied and has never happened. Dear Reader, it never will, at least in your lifetime or the next four or five generations. Lest one feel comforted by the assertivess of this prediction, keep in mind that most books are shite. Seriously, computers will never become bookstores and books will never be read by computers. Books are not yet Paradise Lost; nor, for that matter, are bookstores. But let's hope the book chains go under and the mom and pop's renew their leases of life.

Morandi's Silence

The Metropolitan Museum in New York is currently having a retrospective of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), the 20th century Italian painter.

Morandi studied art in the Accademia di Belle Arti, Firenze, and lived his whole life in Bologna with his three sisters. Early in his artistic career, he met with Carra and di Chirico and aligned himself briefly with the Pittura Metafisica movement. But Morandi was not interested much in isms, nor in external events, though he is now considered one of the most important forerunners of Minimalism. He was in fact deeply introverted and held a detached perspective on common events, as evident in his work.

All alone in his studio, he never stopped painting, drawing and engraving a deeply personal universe: vases, bottles, bowls and boxes, stripped of all trivial detail. When looking at these small compositions of silence and meditation, one can clearly see the influences of the great masters: Giotto, Massaccio and Piero de la Francesca - from the simplicity of his palate to his focus on the eternal through geometric form. He once said: "Nothing is more abstract than the visual world", a profound statement, and with personal restraint he concentrated on form, color and space to capture the eternal in objects. He is considered the quintessential artist’s artist, but even someone not finely tuned in to visual artistic processes, may appreciate his efforts.

Morandi lived during WWII, extremely difficult times. Perhaps during these trying days, the calm, yet fully alive work of such a master, someone whose lifetime dedication was the investigation of reality through the familiar with profound integrity and simplicity, would be inspiring. The stillness of these paintings might open the viewer to a sense of serenity and infinite possibilities.

The show is only the second retrospective of Morandi ever held in the US and closes on December 14. There are over 100 still lives, but Morandi painted the same subjects repeatedly and there's really no need to see them all. Fully focusing on two or three that capture your eye, and joining him in his meditative quest, is all you need to do in order to gain a great deal more than you ever thought you needed. It's that simple.

Luchy

The Metropolitan Museum
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Information: 212-535-7710

why the business traveler reads bukowski

for starters, his poems are just the right size
for a short hop flight. much better than, say,
anna karenina. in a half hour wait (not including delays)
you still feel like you've gotten somewhere
moving with him through exotic zipcodes
and several soul-crushing jobs.

i guess we're lured by the romance
of such desultory days, maybe headed to the diner
or to santa anita (where I've never been,
and wouldn't know how to go about even placing a bet
but I picture a parking lot of red dust, palms standing lonely
in the distance like desert prophets,
sun making a yoke of the horizon)
or to the corner store for an impromptu beer,
any of these preferable to waiting for the 7:35 to san jose,
another expensed cab-ride to an oatmeal conference room,
with its inoffensive art, those phones and flipcharts,
all those rehearsed handshakes you'll face.

others find nobility in his demotic concerns;
making rent, or the six horse in the fourth race,
or the egyptian eyes of the night waitress
at a diner you would never really set foot in.
me, i just like the way all those lower case letters feel
so modest and cool on my eyes, after rummaging in my bag
for the right powerwords for my presentation.


Mark Aiello

A Small Plea for Transportation Parity

I am told President-Elect Obama has an on-line suggestion box. If this turns out to be true, it will soon contain at least one note from an Eastern Seaboard voter who would very much like to see a change in the way our nation orders its transportation priorities.

We know already that Obama wants to pump up our "aging infrastructure" (as it seems always to be called) with billions of dollars worth of patches and struts. I say, how about a whole new system? One that relies far less on the resource-squandering, city-destroying, strip-mall enabling automobile; and far more upon one that has been successfully embraced by what a former cabinet-member once referred to rather contemptuously (in a more headstrong time for the U.S.) as "old Europe"?

I am talking about high-speed rail.

As an occasional traveler to Washington, I can attest to its attractiveness on a limited scale: the Acela, a slow-poke among the world's high-speed trains at about 150 mph, gets you from New York to DC in less than 3 hours. It feels like no time at all if you have even a moderately good book to read. Why can't this be speeded up, and why can't it do more than serve the Boston-Washington Corridor?

Can't we build a fast train that extends to Florida? If that is too much, a line from New York to Chicago is certain to be heavily utilized--and if the rails are laid well and the train moves at European-level speeds, the trip would probably take about five hours. It would easily compete with air travel, considering the deep circles of hell that our airports have become. What's better, trains are so much more fuel efficient than cars, this becomes almost a case by itself--for national security, even (if you want to stretch it).

Once, my family and I missed a flight from a city in southern Spain to Madrid, and we had a flight out of Madrid later in the day. It seemed we were in no position to make that flight back home. But we got on the Spanish "Ave" train, and it sped us to the capital at over 200 miles per hour. We ended up beating the missed plane by about half an hour. I have long regarded this as a stupendous achievement.

So, President Obama: all I want for Christmas is a promise that you will build a comprehensive high-speed rail system. Note, please build them as follows: Boston-Richmond; New York-Chicago; San Diego-San Francisco for starters.

--Renaissance

All Poets Are Thieves!!!

Today we wonder whether the financal chaos will consume us financially, emotionally, psychologically. Artistically? No, we don't think much of that dire descent into aesthetic despair or even madness. But many writers have indeed. Today is the anniversary of American poet Vachel Lindsay's death at the age of 52. He drank Lysol to kill himself, not the most aesthetically or palate-pleasing beverage with which to pull the plug. In any case, Lindsay, a basement-bargain Walt Whitman, a middling, perhaps even mediocre poet, died when his personal indigence was not equivalent to the nation's. When those around you are boisterous successes, it is surely demeaning to be the economically failed and frustrated pen-man. Now we face a capitalist fiasco where everyone, including the artists, will take a real hit. Will artists and/or citizens decide to drink Lysol? I hope not. If they cannot, as radio commentator Tavis Smiley encourages, "keep the faith," then perhaps they will experiment with red wine and sleeping pills, a finer means to construct a death. In celebration of Lindsay I will encourage Tempest readers to read his work. You might like it. Since I haven't a clue whether the poems from Lindsay's THE CONGO AND OTHER POEMS are still under copyright or if I am permitted to quote an entire poem in this space, I will simply recommend that you take a gander. But if one is to drink while reading, try wine, whiskey, fabric softener, Lestoil, or--dare I say?--water. Lysol should only be consumed within several feet from a toilet or a defecating child. J/C

Iris Murdoch on Philosophy and Literature

I found this interview in a literary blog somewhere and had to post it. For artists, here are some brilliant psychological insights into the creative process such as the distinction between fantasy and imagination.

Luchy

Whither Pontiac?

In 1763 the Native American Chief Pontiac led 300 men in an attack on Britain's Fort Detroit. Circumstances intervened (an Anglo-French peace treaty was signed) and he never carried out the attack. Many years later, he was paid homage by an automobile company that took his name, and for a time used a profile of him as its logo.

Now with America's Detroit under attack and no sure treaty in sight, General Motors suggests it may shut down the line of cars bearing the great chief's name. As a going concern, Pontiac will be no more.

This should come as no surprise. Pontiac as a brand lost its purpose long ago and we should perhaps not be sorry to see it rest peacefully alongside the Oldsmobile, the Jordan and the Stanley Steamer.

At the peak of its fearsome might, General Motors had five distinct brands, each built to satisfy a slice of the American consumer public. In order of social ascendancy, they were as follows:

Doughty Chevrolet was for the working stiff, the young couple, the thrifty, and was often a family's first second-car. The cars had a rugged flair that made them almost ridiculously popular.

Second from the bottom was Pontiac. When you got that promotion and wanted a little lift, you traded up--to Pontiac. It was, most of the time, a Chevy with a few extra gadgets and chrome. In the 1960s it was "wide-track" and developed a taste for speed: it was gutty (think GTO).

Oldsmobile was for the man who'd made it to the solid-to-upper-middle: clearly luxurious, the Olds had a sobriety and solidity appealing to those who were as close to the bottom as to the top. It also had a reputation for technical advancement--first with power-steering; first with (a disastrously poor) front-wheel drive in the Toronado.

Buick was a sumptuous, heavy ride, the natural choice of the professional who wanted all the luxury of the best a motorist could have, but without the extra dollars associated with a very fancy nameplate. But make no mistake--this was a fancy car: for the doctor, the lawyer, the self-made man.

Cadillac was the paragon of motoring. If you had to ask the price, you couldn't afford it. Truth to tell, the least expensive Caddies were less expensive than the most expensive Buicks (but don't tell anyone). This was the car for both the arriviste and old money; it spoke plainly of wealth, of opulence, of raw power. The cars were extravagant, often stunning and immensely powerful. Few would have refused one had they been given a chance to own one. The hurtling behemoths enjoyed extraordinary popularity.

Now the culture is more fractious. For whom is the Mazda Protege? The Saturn Astra? The Aztec? We know who drives the Hummer, but their type are going the way of the Great Auk.

Several years ago, GM retired Oldsmobile. Could anyone have saved a brand that had the name "Old" in it? I used to love the Olds--but that was then.

Now GM must sacrifice its weakest offspring and today that is Pontiac. The reason it's such a weak brand, I believe, is because it has no public. It's not thrifty, brawny, wide-track, sporty or even interesting in any way shape or form. As a brand, it lost touch with its buyers--and must go.

GM will still have Saturn, Hummer and Saab (!) kicking around. They will probably end up with just Cadillac, Buick and Chevy. It makes sense: fancy, mid-price, and cheap. These are not elegant slices of the pie, but in GM's chastened state, it needs to keep it simple.

Good-bye Pontiac--we hardly knew ye.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

I am a week early and so be it. But to celebrate prematurely is preferable to being late and, when a celebration calls not only for lighting birthday candles but also countering the darkness of poor taste, one should rise to the occasion. Next Tuesday, December 9th, is John Milton's 400th birthday anniversary. I rarely find Milton enthusiasts in my midst; he tends to be dismissed or, worse, unread. The old saw by students at Western universities in the early 20th century went so: "Malt does more than Milton can/To justify the ways of Man." At the overripe, over-priced university I attended, the Milton course was tossed like a hot potato or hell-fire ember around the relevant faculty. No one wanted to teach Milton. Several goodly readers have acknowledged boredom or indifference with Paradise Lost. How can anyone be bored or indifferent with a narrative about Satan? Hail, Milton! The political pamphlets, dealing with topics such as divorce, censorship, and regicide, are supremely sharp and eloquent. All the poems, some commemorative, some polemical, burn with a fiery passion, akin to the burning precincts of Satan's Pandemonium. So happy anniversary, fair poet! If I can get just one Tempest reader to discover you, I just might go to heaven and look down at your creation. J/C

Better World Books

This holiday season, I would like to promote an online retailer with a positive message about the role a company can take in the world: Better World Books. I think it's a good idea to support the competitors of huge monopolies like Amazon and more importantly, companies like Better World which embody a shift in corporate values. Better World Books immerse themselves in the community they serve by supporting libraries, colleges and literacy programs around the world while striving to offset the environmental impact of their operations. It is a for-profit enterprise that sells new and used books and donates part of the profit to charities; they also promote literacy around the world. You can click here to read about their three bottom lines.

Like Amazon, Better World Books has a website that's attractive and easy to navigate. Consumers can choose between new or used books (if available in a particular title) as well as compare prices across online booksellers. But most importantly, it's a socially conscious company and this is a paradigm shift worth supporting. Through the site’s “online sidewalk sale” it’s possible to connect with, for example, The New York Public Library and buy a book they can’t keep on their shelves. The money spent helps the library support its mission.

I hope this season, with all its problems and hope for more socially and environmentally conscious ways to navigate transactions, inspires you to try a company like Better World and others like it.

Luchy

The local

You've watched him become undone,

station by station. First it was just his face

gone slack in afternoon sleep, around Harrisburg.

And then, in Lancaster, you watched his cuff ride up

showing a pale length of shin that won't see sun again

until his August vacation.

And when his newspaper cascaded to the floor

one section at a time, it was finally safe

to set your book aside for a moment

to study the man and his bag

tilting together like two drunks on a bench.

Midway along another long curve,

the train sways all down its length,

just as every fan stops turning, and somewhere

a baby you didn't hear crying suddenly stops.

and you realize you've lost count

and can't name the next town.

You might have to wake the man

whom you heard on the phone an hour back

saying that today was the biggest day of his career.

When the train finally emerges from that no place

between towns, back into the world

of zip codes and cellphone service,

you will look for the station sign, so you can read it

for both of you, blinking in the sudden light,

both surprised to hear the name

that won't seem right for this little station

with hanging baskets of flowers

and no one on any of the iron benches

waiting for you to arrive.

Mark Aiello

Terrror on Two Fronts

This week in Mumbai, we witnessed multiple, coordinated attacks on famous-name, heavily-traveled venues that resulted in over a hundred senseless deaths. The authorities have not yet determined exactly who is responsible, nor whom they will arrest and try for the outrages.

The terror involved a band of as-yet unidentified gunmen attacking, among other unfortunate locales, the Taj and the Oberoi hotels in central Mumbai and the killing of numerous innocents. One presumes the target selection was the result of a strong resentment against affluence, consumerism and, in general, the freedoms associated with openness.

Yesterday in a New York suburb, we witnessed a mindless, mob-driven attack on a famous-name heavily-traveled venue that resulted in a single senseless death. The authorities have not yet determined exactly who is responsible, nor whom they will arrest and try for the outrage.

The New York suburban incident took place at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream. The terror involved a mob of early shoppers on Black Friday (the media-anointed Biggest Shopping Day of the Year) trampling to death a Wal-Mart employee in its frenzied pursuit of heavily discounted consumer totems. One presumes the target selection was the result of a strong, not to say fatal attraction to the baubles that have come to symbolize affluence, combined with a total lack of openness to the notion that one may need to examine one's history of decisionmaking should one find one's self crowded during the chilly, pre-dawn hours before the portals of a purveyor of mundane baubles.

Making matters worse at the Wal-Mart, once the crowd had done its trampling, its members continued to shop. When told the store was closing due to the tragedy, many could not understand, and were shocked and even angered that the mere trampling of an employee might somehow interfere with their pursuit of flat-screens and mittens.

Elsewhere in our great nation, a Black Friday-morning shooting at a Toys-R-Us may or may not have been directly related to shopping. Yet we can now fully imagine that, under the wrong circumstances, we too may be wounded or killed while toy-shopping.

Mindless terror stalks the earth--claiming victims at the Taj, the Oberoi, the Mumbai Jewish Center; claiming more victims at the hallowed gates of Wal-Mart and Toys-R-Us. It pays to keep an eye out--for armed attackers; for mindless tramplers. Let us hope not to find ourselves or a loved one fallen victim to either hateful number, and offer sincere condolences to those who have.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

On this notorious day, the acme or nadir of contemporary American commodity fetishism, known as Black Friday or, contrarily, National Buy-Nothing Day, one should read Kafka's short story, "The Hunger Artist," burn all money in either purse or wallet, and purge oneself of all the glut thrust so ceremoniously into one's digestive tract yesterday. Today, let's hope for a lessening, a diminution, a purging of the mind and soul. Some self-abnegation isn't so despicable. Perhaps the Puritans had some enlightened conceptions of restraint after all.

J/C

Give thanks, don't pray

Today, we'll be eating too much and making small talk with relatives we might not see for another year. And in many parts of the country there will be people who are hungry and wondering how they'll pay their bills. And in too many parts of the world, there is so much suffering that we might try to drown their already resigned cries with television and chatter.

So today, instead of thinking about how lucky we are, let's push our race an inch closer towards evolution. Let's take responsibility for our souls. Today, let's try to not be literal about our existence, but instead look beyond our material world towards awareness.

We are the Universe, painted in light and slithering in dirt. We are the light and the darkness, the storm and the calm deep lake, alive while dying. We and everything around us, animal and mineral, are a metaphor - the Universe becoming conscious of itself.

Most importantly, the reason we have consciousness might be so that we exercise compassion. We're limited, that's true. And we feel like pawns in a game with rules we don't understand. But the power we have is actually limitless: we have the power to feel compassion. Let's start there and see what happens.

Luchy

Feeling Poorer at the Guggenheim

When I was in fifth grade, a class trip took me to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York. Perhaps a philistine at the time, I was unimpressed with the architecture. My report to the teacher indicated I felt the building was "ugly" and that it "did not fit in with its surroundings". I may have mentioned it looked like a toilet bowl.

Many years later and with several years of art school and art-making behind me, I now appreciate (but don't especially love) the building itself. The swirling galleries are a stroke of genius, but the shoe-horned anterooms are a bother. That said, the exhibitions (aside from the outstanding permanent collection), with their dogged focus on the "new", are often enough not better than a scam, and an expensive one, at eighteen dollars a visit.

This weekend I saw a show of conceptualism and minimalism there. I have nothing against either of these genres. Their practitioners often enough have some interesting perspectives. However, they often confront us with what amount to cliche, silliness, effrontery and a palpable desire to insult.

Moreover, many of the effects they present are not better than (and often less effective than) what can be seen at the shopping mall--video screens, cheap scrims, pop caricatures; but done in a less committed way than at the mall. Does anyone who can muster the intellectual fortitude to make their way to the Guggenheim in the first place need tepid, mundane commentary on the tepid and mundane? Does it add to the sum of all light (or at all necessary) to print on the wall phrases like "I am closer than you think."? And the shopping mall is rather more welcoming: it's free!

One of the works consisted of a knee-high sculpture of Disney's Pinocchio face down in a pool of water. I found this both interesting and amusing in a disturbing way. The rest of the work--all of it--could have been hauled away in a truck like so much holiday-season detritus and not have been missed.

Or, the Guggenheim could take into account our recessionary times and lower the price--to what it costs to enter a typical shopping mall.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

The local weather is bleak, the sky looks nauseated and the cultural and celestial atmosphere rife with unrest, unpredictability, and ominousness. So perhaps to simulate these conditions, it is best this Tuesday to concentrate on gripes, what irritants to my system particularly gall or induce bile-building discontents. I'll keep it literary, though not necessarily literate--perhaps form here should be an extension of the content, a bad, broken state of affairs. I'll put the inventory in a list form to make the sequence more of an algorithm of despair and frustration:

1. The lack of vital book reviews in The New York Times Book Review for the past twenty years.

2. The lack of any quality fiction (with perhaps three exceptions) in The New Yorker for the past twenty-five years.

3. How small press journals now tend to mimic their more well-heeled counterparts--the The Paris Review, for example-- in publishing the same authors over and over, coteries, cabals, and interdependent collectives over a diversification of content.

4. The sheer dearth of literature in translation in this country. Is English the only language? America the only country?

5. The damn sectarianism of many readers, critics, and writers, either siding with lyrical Realism or Postmodernism but not embracing both. Yes, how awful to express a love for both James and Foster Wallace, Cheever and Pynchon. Even worse to conceptualize middle-spaces between the realistic and the postmodern.

6. The divisiveness of poets and some poetry critics, neatly ascribing avant-gardism or symptoms of quietude and seeing the pure good in theorizing poetry into more camps than we have firewood for.

7. The general parochialism of academic readers of literature.

8. The general insularity and idiocy of non-academic, non-readers, in terms of literature, popular or obscure.

9. The canonization of literary critics, and so selectively, one might think that Saint James Wood is the only conjurer of serious literary criticism.

10. You, the Reader, for not challenging any of these bombastic claims and comments, as if they had real weight.

Postscript: The weather just changed, sun brightening the expanse. This change either gives credence to my remarks above, how they illuminate the general trend and bend of things literary, or perhaps how the literary weather isn't as bad as I indicate. You decide.

J/C

Monday news

Luchy

Napa is all around you

On the first day, we never know the way anywhere –
surprised when the road doglegs left
and takes us over a white stone bridge,
letting the car idle at the crossroads to unfold our map,
vineyards all around, those twisted black stumps
spread over the far fields, like an army
of the halt and lame marching back home
in defeat after a winter's campaign.

At dinner we'll brag about the town
we discovered, made entirely of white houses and places to sit
with a newspaper and coffee, the stores so full
of things to buy that the shelves creak with the weight,
just like that village in Maine, ten years ago,
whose name we always argue about.

Here, in the shadow of mountains so rich
it seems you can smell them like warm coffee beans
in a bag; here, where every car brings another blonde wife
to her dinner date, where dark men stand in the fields
burning things in barrels for reasons
we'll never ask or understand; here
we finally arrive at the secret
at the heart of all travel,
that everyone needs to believe they've ducked
beneath the sword forever turning outside Eden,
found El Dorado, here in their own private Napa,
where no one is poor, or limps, or drives
a dirty car, and nothing dies
without us willing it to be brought to us
garnished and served on a warm plate.


Mark Aiello

A Rogue's Gallery

If you are wondering who these three unappealing men are, and why they merit your brief attention, here is the answer: they are Mr. Wagoner of GM, Mr. Nardelli of Chrysler and Mr. Mulally of Ford, all come a-begging for your tax dollars at a hearing in Washington this week. They claim that without billions in immediate aid, their automobile companies will wilt like Mayflies in early June and disappear altogether.

Having arrived each in his own corporate jet, and each fortified by a paycheck that earns him in a week what many will never see in their best-paid years, they put aside their competitive differences, set out their tin cups before them and proceeded to disgrace themselves and their companies in ways that could never have been imagined.

Had anyone attempted to concoct a world's-worst script for beggary, it certainly would have included arrival at the begging location by personal jet. It would also have included very recent assurances from the board of GM that "nothing has shaken" the confidence they have in the fine gentleman now overseeing their disaster; in response to which no less a friend-of-business than George Will wondered: "not even the destruction of nearly all shareholder value"?

This arrogant, unimaginative, unsuccessful triumvirate deserves no quarter. They have built wretched vehicles for over thirty years--squandering the devotion of a willing consumer base that would have bought their cars out of patriotism if only they weren't expensive, poorly-constructed, poorly-serviced, poor on gas mileage, and especially if they only stopped looking like the tail ends of donkeys compared to the trim, attractive offerings from overseas.

When asked if they would reduce or eliminate their own salaries as part of the "plan" for eventual success should they get bailed out, they demurred. When asked if they had done anything wrong, they said they had not. When asked to describe how they would use the money to transform their companies, they could not.

All of the above notwithstanding, I actually do believe their companies should, somehow, be rescued--or at least their workers' jobs should be.

My question to Congress is: why ask these guys to tell you anything at all? They clearly know nothing about running, and especially rescuing, a car company.

How about getting someone else up on the hill to testify? How about getting testimony from, say, two or three men and women from the production line? Doesn't it seem like the taxpayer would be a thousand times more willing to give these companies a shot if, instead of sending in these pampered clowns to beg for stuff they cannot genuinely care about (their fortunes already assured), the companies sent in (or Congress called in) some folks whose livelihoods actually depended on, and who might actually deserve, a helping hand from the electorate?

I am waiting.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

As this Friday extinguishes itself like a cigarette (having just quit smoking the simile is no longer apt, I suppose), I feel a flick of ash catch my metaphorical scarf that doubles potentially as a metaphysical noose when I think of the contemporary world in all its awfulness, idiocy, cruelty, and shame. This ash, in fact, signifies the burnt-out brains of our intellectuals and policy makers who mislead us, whose missteps have all of us falling down the stairs, who mistake power for justice and make us pay in body bags, cash, confusion, or our dignity. Yes, when I think of the political landscape, I think of finding a tree to test the durability of my neck hanged by, crushed by, a less-than-metaphysical noose. (At my weight it would take a drop of six feet, according to my hangman's guide).

So when I hear about political unity in this country, I can almost smell the pungency of the rope below my head. For matters literary, one should be partisan but not so much as to be a snob and sectarian. Camps and schools are fine, but one should be ecumenical when thinking about the sheer breadth and variegated beauty of the plenitude of poetry and fiction. (I'm inclined to agree with Ron Silliman's notion of the School of Quietude, how so much contemporary literature is middling, sentimental pap but, that said, I see conflicting and contrasting tastes disturbing my palate in wonderful ways).

In any case--in all cases, actually--I am for the unity of diversity in literature and in politics I approve of people staying in their corners and smashing the opposition's arguments when need be. If Obama wants to go beyond the blue and red state paradigm, fine; I'll stay in my green field dreaming of more radical transformations and possibilities than the centrist rhetoric of his Democratic party. There are some values you'll have to beat me to death to compromise on (or you can hang me, I've got the noose, remember?). I cannot merely renege on my commitments to human rights and social justice to concede the viability of a center-based coalition of right wingers and centrist liberals. I'll stay left. And probably left out. Fine; I'll take some consolation in Roberto Bolano's 2666 or some of the new and old poets who have vision and never burn out.
Bless you, sisters and brothers! J/C

Kubin at the Neue

If you haven't already done so, check out Alfred Kubin at the Neue Galerie in New York City. Kubin was an Austrian artist of Czech origin during the early 20th century. He was part of the expressionist movement for a short time and was also associated with the Blaue Reiter group. He created primarily pen and ink drawings, watercolors and lithographs.

Kubin had a traumatic childhood and young adulthood. As a young child, he witnessed his mother die and then his father carry her dead body around the house while wailing in deep despair. His father beat him regularly and they became estranged. Shortly after they reconciled, his father died. His fiancee died before he was thirty. During his lifetime, he was suicidal and suffered more than one nervous breakdown.

He began drawing as a small child and during his artistic career was deeply influenced by Klinger, Goya, Ensor, Munch and Redon. There are over one hundred works currently on display at the Neue. They're profoundly emotional, mysterious and depict all the irrationality that you're trying to control and can never really get a hold on; a visual journey into your subconscious, the stuff your dreams and nightmares are made of.

Don't miss it.

Luchy

By the way, the Neue also has a beautiful giftshop, perfect for some unusual trinkets your mom and sisters will love during the holidays.

NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK

1048 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10028

http://www.neuegalerie.org/

The GO[CMW]P and Evolution

If anyone had wondered whether the Republican Party has taken ill with the political equivalent of double pneumonia, look no further than conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's column today in the Washington Post "The GOP's Problem with G-O-D". In it she says (I paraphrase) the GOP needs to ditch the Christers or forget about electoral success in the foreseeable future. Also paraphrasing, the GOP has become the Grand Old Christian Married White Party.

Few things could make a Secular Humanist more happy than the prospect of dreary, Bible-thumping bigots going the way of the Dodo. Ms. Parker says their ilk was once relegated to standing on wooden crates at busy intersections; the GOP's mistake, it seems, has been to mistake an energized base for electoral strength.

I'll take it a couple of steps further: without the ability to market an al Qaeda-sponsored mass destruction to cow the electorate, the GOCMWP is revealed as a party in thrall to creeps, ideologues, hypocrites, and no-tax bigots. The era of the thoughtful conservative is at low ebb (K. Parker, D. Brooks and G. Will notwithstanding).

Let me caveat the following with this: there's nothing wrong (in my opinion) with a belief in larger, unknowable things. It may even be irrational not to hold some high regard for the unknown and perhaps all-powerful forces that seem to be constantly at work in the world.

That said, religion as we know it is fighting a rear-guard action. It has been doing as much since at least the eighteenth century, when folks began to notice such wonders as "cause and effect". As is typical in bitter retreats, there has been a last, dangerous surge (the Bush years). However, not unlike at the end of World War Two's Battle of the Bulge, the losing side has been stopped in its tracks: the attack has literally run out of fuel.

With capital-R "Religion" branded with defeat in 2008, can we look forward to a day when open-mindedness and enlightened self-interest might flourish as we have never seen before? Might we witness, at last, a turn of the evolutionary page?

May we be lucky enough to see it.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Today is the official release of 2666, the uncompleted final book by the late and all-too-great, Roberto Bolano, author of By Night in Chile, Distant Star, and The Savage Detectives, among others. It has received raucously winning reviews and I am certain it will be another luminous part of RB's canon. I rarely feel compelled to slouch impulsively toward my nearest bookstore to obtain a tome on its first official day in the world, but Bolano's mischievous meditations on politics, nightmare, literary creation and social disintegration, always merit immediate purchase and poring over.

Bolano's work typically divines the entrails of South American dictators and their apparatchiks. Speaking of which, today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Don't follow leaders and be Bolano readers...

...and double space and type your manuscripts! At least in this North American country, Mark Twain was the first to do so, roughly one hundred and fifty-two years ago today. JC

What I'm afraid of

Strawberry Fields might be my favorite Beatles song. It illustrates beautifully the attitude towards life that too many people have: refusing to look into the void, bathe themselves in the black ocean of truth because they're afraid to drown in awareness. So their existence is reduced to bodily functions, safe routines and empty entertainment. Some are well educated, some are not. They might ask themselves from time to time "Why do I feel lost?" but that's as far as their effort goes and they give up again and again, continue their arid lives with little curiosity and no imagination.

I'm afraid of ghosts. But the empty expressions, like masks that attempt to hide but never stop revealing how little this chance at awareness is valued, of the indifferent are much more scary.

Luchy


Strawberry Fields - Lennon, McCartney

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right.
That is I think it's not too bad.

Always no sometimes think it's me, but you know I know when it's a dream.
I think, er No, I mean, er Yes but it's all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.

Setting things in order

Is there anyone you'd like to punch in the face

more than the man who spent the weekend

cleaning his closet?  So smug to be finally free

of the burden of false hope, and

those khakis that fit five years ago.

 

His shirts hang logically, stripes with the stripes,

collar buttons of the oxfords all facing north,

bowling shirts and other weekend trifles

waiting quietly way back in the dark.

 

He holds the door open and looks upon it

as an orchard gravid with bright fruit,

a marble city sleeping in the desert night.

 

A pleasing order.  The craft of his own hands.

 

Nowhere is there dust.  You won't find it

even in the corner by his skates.

 

Tonight he will sleep on sheets

that smell as clean as all the church days of his childhood.

The plants on every windowsill are watered

and he will live the life of the monk,

the Spartan, the man who calls his mother every day.

 

Until he wakes up tomorrow.

 

Mark Aiello

Who Won the Culture Wars?

You keep hearing (a little less, now) about how we are a "center-right" country. In 2004, I might have thought we were a "right-wing-nutjob country" having just re-elected a simpleton to four additional years of havoc.

But now that "right"-ness seems to have been just the veneer many of us might have suspected. With a thoroughly new kind of man in the White House and the GOP relegated to hillbilly country, we may be looking at a more accurate picture of a liberal-minded country that had been in hiding.

The Culture Wars was always a right-wing idea. For those on the other side of it, this was just a matter of common sense: should men and women of all colors and creeds actually be taken seriously? What about the evidence that science lays out, making no promises but delivering results over and over? How about the freedom to love and to marry as you see fit (Prop 8 to the contrary) without fear of persecution? And there's music. Funny how even the most reactionary talk-show hosts seem to have a thing for the Devil's Own Noise--rock and roll.

Is there really any question who won the culture wars? Even Sarah Palin felt the need to admit she had a "gay friend" or two. Would this have been remotely thinkable before the 1960s?

Religiosity, bigotry and stupidity--always on the wrong side of the culture wars--are in retreat. The liberals had long ago won, but had not been given credit. The evidence is in, and we are not--and have not been for a long time--a center-right country.

Let's declare the culture wars over. We have more important things to do.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

A writer's relation to locale can run to the claustrophobic and acidly nostalgic-- think of Joyce's Dublin, Faulkner or Welty's U.S. South, Russell Banks's Northern badlands, Philip Roth's Newark. Oh, Newark. New Ark. The other night, travelling from Newark to Manhattan, I sat in an ark otherwise known as a PATH train. Beside me, Amiri Baraka and his wife. If you recall, in late 2001, early 2002, Baraka wrote a controversial poem about September 11, "Somebody Blew Up America." In it, he adverted to Israelis being told to stay home. A pathetic fallacy in a non-poetic sense. But the inventory of U.S. historical and political chicanery and cruelty the poem unveils is pertinent, even if the poem is not formally interesting or rhetorically innovative. Regardless, sitting next to Mr. Baraka, a poet I've long admired, as we approached the World Trade Center PATH station, was touching. He was reading the newspaper and muttering under his breath the phrases, "education" and "health care," and "Obama must..." The man still has the fiery passion of a radical and naysayer, an individual of seventy four years still determined to make art and rant against the powers of improvidence, i.e., the D.C. and Wall Street fat cats, unpoetic and ignoble felines of finance and force. Former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey stripped Baraka--and the state of New Jersey, for that matter-- of the state poet laureatship. I suppose that the title for this column is incorrect for today's subject matter . Perhaps it should read: "ALL POLITICIANS ARE THIEVES!!!" (j curley)

Thoughts for a Thursday: art-making

When I'm not taking care of my family or at work, I struggle to make art. I photograph models and then attempt to see my soul through their portraits. It's an intuitive process and the only reason I do it is because I have to.

I enjoy the process, however, there's nothing I dislike more than having to explain an image. I think that it's a sign of laziness when someone asks me what something I've made "means". I wonder what a writer would think if anyone asked him to illustrate a novel, if someone said: here's pencil and paper, please sketch for me your story. Imagery, unlike words, is open to myriad interpretations so unfortunately symbolic meaning has to be defined. But it's unfortunate that the majority of people are afraid to let go the safety of knowledge and find their own meaning or lose themselves in someone else's unknown.

Even the visually educated few in the artworld want to follow a thread most of the time, a Hansel or Gretel following a trail of words back to the real world. And when they arrive with meaning in hand, proud of their understanding, they refrigerate it along with everything else they've killed along the way.

However, I accept that this is the way it is. The power of all work relies on its verbal interpretation. We're no longer living in an age where the image itself is enough and we're never going back. People want definitions, everything explained, so as an artist, I find myself in the world with a dictionary in hand.

Here are some thoughts on the process. Every artist, in my opinion needs to:

- First and foremost: have a thorough knowledge of art history; there's no making art without a deep understanding of what has been done and why. Every artist needs to be visually encyclopedic.

- be fully aware that there's a limited inventory of visual possibilities in the physical world and that the power hidden in those possibilities depends on how authentic the artist's perception is.

- arrange those known elements in order to push boundaries, peer into the unknown, represent hidden mythologies.

- detach herself from facts, from what is already understood and safe and never try to please or enlighten anyone - creating authentic work is hard enough.

Keeping an image alive and powerful despite definitions is half the work. Translations are rarely fully accurate, but the transition from the visual to the verbal is like putting a lion in birdcage. It's not that verbal expression is inferior, but that most artists are not writers.

Luchy

Who is this Man?

I don't really want to know his name, or where he lives, or how much he has contributed to his local church.

Pretty much the only thing we need to know about the guy, we know by looking at this picture: he's at a Palin rally with an Obama-monkey and a self-satisfied smirk.

So, who is he? And of whom does he remind us?

He reminds me of the smirking racists who in the sixties used to sit behind the defendant's table when they were being "tried" by an all-white jury for lynching an unfortunate black man who got caught and mutilated and hanged for no reason except race-hate.

He reminds me of the local prelate who in an earlier age might have ordered the death by burning of heretics and/or folks who'd taken up the wrong end of an argument in a land dispute with a good buddy of the church (often referred to as "witches").

He makes me think of all the hapless, morally bankrupt, incurious so-called "Americans" who shouted "kill him [Obama]" at the urging of the snarky, hapless, morally bankrupt, incurious so-called "Vice Presidential Candidate" now known as Sarah Palin.

That his party is defeated at the polls and his opponent cheered by the entire thoughtful, hopeful world, is a great cause for celebration.

We need to remember, however, that water-bugs still lurk under the tilework. Keep your eye on them. Watch them scurry in the light.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!

MANIFESTO (?)

All artists decry a straw man and all politicians are--come on, face it, even you Obama triumphalists (congratulations, by the way!)--straw people or straw dogs, depending on your species-preference. A hairline crack divides mass culture and art culture especially at the level of gut-level scepticism. Those who endorse any brand of politics outside of aesthetic considerations tend to cheerlead and bark into a megaphone sculpted by (the audacity of?) hope. Artists are hopeful but refuse to reject that voice of doubt, casting cold eyes on the political process, its players, and the windy rhetoric that occasions reflections on that great windblower, Aelous, the Greek god of hot and cold air.

While it may be that artists will be invigorated by the Obama election and wish to represent the potential, the vast possibility, that his presence hearkens in the collective spirit of his supporters, writers, painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers of any stripe and style should maintain, if not a cold eye, a clear one. A vigilance of criticism and a modicum of disbelief, of unhope against hope, needs to be the kind of clairvoyant and eternal rite of passage and being for any artist worth her or his weight in gilded page, golden paints, or bronze sculpture.

Artists, poets in particular, are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world (pace Shelley!) nor should they be the lobbyists of received wisdom, public accolade, or social temperament. Some caller on Brian Lehrer's WYNC program today called for a return to political art. Fine: but most examples of political art in the past eight years have been hackneyed and minimally diverting. A political art arising from the optimism of the moment would, most likely, be unworthy of a space on one's personal refrigerator. But we'll see...and the artists will see even better and more deeply.

And of poets in particular and their relation to Presidents: JFK's inaugural choice for inaugural poet was Robert Frost. Not bad. Bill Clinton chose Maya Angelou, one of the worst poets writing in the English language. Who, pray tell, will Obama pick? Hopefully not someone happy to foresake their taste for the banalities of D.C. politics.

Cheers, Curley

Pour un bon weekend: Hudson, NY

For New York City readers, here's a post-election-elation suggestion for a not-so-lazy weekend:

If you have a car, drive to Hudson in Columbia County. It's 2 hours from the city if you leave at the right time: Friday night (9:00 pm) or very early - for a Saturday - the next morning (9:00 am). There are several bed and breakfasts in town, most within walking distance to Warren Street, where most of the action is.

If you don't have a car, the Amtrak train station is just blocks from Warren Street. And if you're not interested in all the hiking and bucolic scenery available minutes away (as well as the lovely Olana, Frederick Edwin Church's historic home), you will find plenty for one rewarding day.

Hudson is an architectural gem. All of its 18th and 19th century buildings lining Warren Street have been lovingly restored and house some of the most extraordinary antiques and housewares stores you will find anywhere - it's considered a decorator's mecca. But there are also galleries, interesting clothing shops, bookstores and cafes.

Also, this region is the cradle of of the Hudson River School of painting, and you will find much of the art shown in galleries in that tradition. My favorite: Carrie Haddad, who has always shown impeccable taste in her selections. If you don't watch out, you might tell yourself that new laptop can wait and you'd rather invest in very affordable, karma-boosting, top-quality art.

Accross the street from Carrie Haddad is Le Gamin. If you decide to have lunch there, take the paper and interesting topics for conversation with you. This is Hudson and the world has slowed down. The waitresses are indeed French and luckily didn't forget to pack their attitudes; though if you visit more than once, you'll realize they're very warm and friendly. Mais plus importante, your meal will have been worth every minute waited. It's a beautiful restaurant and the back half is an antiques shop (naturellement!). They also sell hand made, unbelievably aromatic soaps.

There is lots more to see and do, just stroll down Warren Street, you will find it. And return restored and very relaxed.

Luchy








Pictures
Top: Warren Street
Bottom: Carrie Haddad Gallery and Le Gamin

Just Visiting

Spend a month's salary on airfare and guides;
but you will be nearer to the heart
of India's nacreous mystery here, in the ticket queue
at VT Station, and not last night
watching a full moon risen straight from a bedtime picture book
slowly banish itself behind the dome of the Taj Mahal.

Being this out of your element
is like watching a movie with the sound off
and then narrating the plot over the phone to your aunt.

- They're obviously late for a doctor's appointment.
- I think she loves him.

In this surfeit of sense, everything is distilled,
the salwars become a tidal flow of mere color,
the chatter of the crowd one communal word
inflected by palm gestures and a head waggle
that you still can't pull off. It's a bit like high school
when you were never sure of the nuance of anything
and didn't know who to ask.

- I wonder why the police are taking his bicycle.
- Maybe they haven't seen their daughter in years.
- That little guy looks shady to me.

It's an odd advantage, to be the alien. You alone
are not expected anywhere tonight, you're the only one
squinting up into this ridiculous amount of sunlight
to read every billboard. It seems that it's just you
trying to count the broken dogs, somehow curled and still asleep
among all these walking feet, just you looking into the eyes
of a boy hoping for a coin to drop into his ancient palm.

- It says here not to cross the tracks.
- Help, apparently, is wanted.

Mark Aiello

The GOP Revealed

Stripped of the plumes and feathers of electoral success, the Republican brand is now laid bare. And it is a scrawny-looking bird at best.

In 1980, Reagan ushered in an era of Republican prominence that ended on Tuesday. Reagan claimed it was "morning in America" when in fact the lights of liberty and reason were being extinguished across the land. Since that sad moment, it has been hailed a truism that we are a "conservative nation"; and accepted as fact that small-mindedness, bigotry, xenophobia and war are tantatmount to true American virtues.

In the era of Bush these ruinous notions were put into overdrive; and coupled with a stunning incompetence as well. The stated intention was "small government". But it might just as well have been "bad government" or "failed government". Didn't matter--as long as American tax dollars weren't being spent to help Americans.

The chief virtue of the Republican party has been its ability to win elections. It has lost that ability. And now it becomes obvious that this had been its only virtue. Any level-headed look at the guiding principles of the GOP reveals an utter lack of substance.

It can be safely said that the GOP offers nothing to the voter who is not a Republican officeholder, a large shareholder, a well-to-do evangelical, an arms merchant, an oil profiteer; and in certain elections, a bigot. This tiny percentage of the population cannot muster the votes to elect anyone to national office.

Since Reagan, the GOP has been able to keep folks distracted with pomp and circumstance; with wars, with fears, with party success and the gerrymandered gifts that flow from it. Now reduced to a regional party and with no discernable core principles except perhaps greed, it will be much, much harder for the party to distract the voter from the bankruptcy of its offering.

Perhaps the GOP can rebuild--no doubt they will try hard to do so. But it will have to be with a plan that benefits more people, more often, and in fundamentally a much more progressive manner.

To the age of Reagan and Bush: don't let the door hit you on the way out.

--Renaissance