LAURAL'S DISH
Laural is our dog, my dog. Everyone else heads off to school, "people like me and Laural" stay home. He's a fine companion, but you have to understand. If he's having a really good time he tries to bite you, me, anyone. Not hard, just…similarly, if you're scratching his belly real good, but then shift to his (apparently less preferable) ears, he'll growl at you. The irregular spelling of his name results from the time that Alexandra and I were mulling the possibilities, in a tunnel in Newton Abbot, when we came across the graffiti: Laura L is a dog.
Laural loves to eat more than any living being ever created, and he will eat absolutely anything. We've weaned him from rocks but he once tried to eat an unopened can of Carlsberg Export. surprise! So his dish frequently has unusual things in it, bits of this or that, absolute treasures that others might consider slightly unfit for human consumption, for whatever stupid reasons.
Beneath please find my literary reflection of Laural's Dish:
Laural's Dish comes out on Fridays, before lunch, usually.
25 March 2011
The Queen is dead.
•••••
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/US-millionaires-population-cnnm-649773567.html?x=0
ALMOST A MILLION NEW MILLIONAIRES IN A RECESSIONARY YEAR! LESS PAY AND BENEFITS FOR TEACHERS AND FIREMEN AND PLUMBERS, AND CLOSE THE LIBRARY! ALL ABOARD THE EXCITING NEW AMERICAN DREAM! (count me among those wondering about President Obama's real circumstances of birth: it's beginning to seem entirely possible that he's the result of some experimental in vitro fertilization of Ronald Reagan by Howard Greenspan )
(ok, that's all the politics for this week--Libya is too complex for me to even take a shot at and no one in their right mind wants to even think about Yemen, but I think Obama's playing it prudently, and well.) I understand that this puts me somewhat at odds with Stop the War's position statement, but in one sentence or less- I don't think we can just stand by and let Libya slaughter its best and bravest the way we did China in Tiananman Square. But the statement deserves consideration.
http://www.voterespect.org/2011/03/stop-war-coalition-statement-on-libya.html
"Gaddafi is like a chicken and the coalition is plucking his feathers so he can't fly. The revolutionaries will slit his neck.."
This isn't politics, really, I just wanted to put in an early request to fund Bedouin education on the flight patterns of chickens...seems like it might help, somehow.
The best teacher I ever had in school was Dr. Cecil Eubanks of the LSU Political Science department. One day he was talking about grace, and how it is all around us, and yet it's so easy to fail to notice it. His example was a little girl with one leg, who designed dolls with one leg, so that little girls with only one leg could relate, and not suffer by wishing they were like their dolls...he told it way better, but you get the idea.
This is so cool. You think of the military as being hard and rough and unsentimental and rigid-and to function right it has to be-but this is absolute and sheer Grace...
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20110323/tuk-arthritis-drug-may-hold-cancer-key-dba1618.html
To dream that I might ever just hang out in the sun again for hours at a time, wearing nuthin' but a pair of cut-offs...It's not difficult to appreciate what you've got. It's just impossible to realize it all.
The week's top 10 list, obviously, is going to be TOP TEN ELIZABETH TAYLOR FILMS I'VE EVER SEEN. Unfortunately I saw several of these before I started recording my brilliant observations for posterity (actually, I think I started saving my commentaries after I sent my little brother a letter telling him I'd seen Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Sandpiper on TCM the same day, and how great they were...and then wishing I could remember what I'd said), and so I can't link to my review. I'm sure that I'll see 'em all again soon enough, and we can all look forward to that. I do, anyway.
Richard and Lizzie
reclining in Heaven's tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
(and this time they fucking mean it, man!)
Elizabeth Taylor is dead. To the extent that such a thing is possible. She's no longer...here. Which is, obviously, a major loss on our part but I think we'd long since failed to give her anything much that she really needed. We gave her well deserved admiration and fortune and fame, respect, and a bunch of adoration and panging and stuff that wasn't of all that much use, frankly.
So her death doesn't sadden me, the way that so many do. I mean, yeah, Kierkegaard said that we weep not for the departed (who have, after all, relocated to Paradise), but for our own loss. They call him philosopher, but Kierkegaard was also a master psychologist, even though everyone else didn't know that psychology had been invented yet. It had, just not recognized. But I think that Kierkegaard was only partly right, I think a lot of our tears are often shed for the departed, too.
And Elizabeth Taylor gave us all a lot of things to weep for her about, but most all of that weeping was overdue long ago. So I'm not really mourning her passing in the same way as, you know, Kurt Cobain or something.
Elizabeth Taylor is probably the greatest star in Hollywood history. If I had to name the five greatest film actresses she would unquestionably be among them (off-hand I can only think of Anne Revere and Bette Davis being in the same class). If I was to name the five most beautiful actresses in Hollywood history, Elizabeth Taylor would certainly be among them. She is-alone-the subset of ultimate feminine Hollywood beauty and brilliance.
And of course the love of her life was Richard Burton. If I were to name the five greatest actors in Hollywood history I think he'd have to be in there too, and the movies that they made together rank with the greatest art produced by mankind...I don't have any argument to make against anyone who thinks that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the greatest film ever made. Just, I personally like Ghostbusters better.
To watch Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in a film...to witness that incredible passion even diluted through so many lenses and machines and screens...it screams out at you that to achieve that is why we're here in a way that cannot be answered, but only applauded. To see the anger and friction between them; that's something else.
Their lives give credence to the ancient Greek concept of competing gods. Elizabeth and Richard, favored by gods and given gifts beyond the reach or comprehension of humans not so endowed. And then a second set of gods-in conflict with the first-placing impossible obstacles in the way of the favored humans, to spite the gods who favored them. Their lives-their love-was the stuff of Greek tragedy. It was not something created and magnified and groveled about at by the media: it was something so elevated that the media could never begin to understand it enough to issue any commentary with anything but the most tenuous relevance.
And so they enjoyed this incredible Love, that most mortals only dream about. And they got hit by tragedies that were more than either of them could sustain, and they pissed it all away. Books have by written on the subject, and I'm no expert. It's just that they were such incredible forces of nature that you didn't have to know much about it to sense what was going on. There was something in each of them that was too dear to give up for what they had together. And so they let it slip away...and the "bad" gods laughed.
But Wednesday their laughing stopped, and as Goofy the dog once said, "Who laughs last, laughs for a very long time." Somewhere inside of Elizabeth Taylor (or orbiting her astral body in some ninth dimensional circuitry, or whatever) there was something eternal, something that still exists, something without self-centered ego, something that is not defensive and cannot be harmed or cursed. And Richard Burton had one, too. And you don't have to know much about the magnetism of such things to understand that there has just now been a major, major collision in space.
One of the great loves has been....reborn isn't right, because it never died... But all of the obstacles are now gone. All of the attraction is now pure and without distraction. I've got a feeling there's this big, big star cluster out there getting ready to be born. They get born out of chaotic explosions, you know. And Dick and Liz sublimated chaos and exploded at levels that Entropy itself is incapable of imitating.
A Great Cosmic Romance has just re-opened! (roll opening credits: Antonín Dvorák's Four Romantic Pieces For Violin and Piano playing in the background) Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Written, Produced and Directed by God. Bless. Amen.
18 March 2011
This week Laual's Dish features pictures of my weekend at The Wilderness Centre in the Forest of Dean with the Woodcraft Folk
I'm not really in the mood to talk a lot of politics this week, but I do have to say this:
The anti-nuclear movement has always been a loud, aggressive minority movement. And I think we're nearing the point where it must be conceded that we were right.
The anti-Iraq War movement (at least in the USA) has always been a loud, aggressive minority movement that argued that the main thing that would come of the war is that it would assist al-Qaeda in becoming exponentially more powerful than it already was (primarily though CIA funding in the 1970s and 1980s when it was fighting the Russians) by giving it a powerful recruiting tool. I don't believe that anyone with much sense of reality is arguing that one any more.
The minorities in the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements are, not incidentally, mainly the same people. Call us liberals in a condescending tone if you want, but you're going to sound like an idiot saying we were wrong.
If the Tea Party harbors any hopes of being remembered as anything other than a loud, aggressive, idiotic minority movement most memorable for repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot that was already in their mouth, they're going to need to find something better to do than attack working people in unions, so that corporate bonuses can be maintained.
Úrsula, on the other hand, who had suffered through a process opposite to Amaranta's, recalled Rebecca with a memory free of impurities, for the image of the pitiful child brought to the house with the bag containing her parents' bones prevailed over the offence that had made her unworthy to be connected to the family tree any longer. Aureliano Segundo decided that they would have to bring her to the house and take care of her, but his good intentions were frustrated by the firm intransigence of Rebecca, who had needed many years of suffering and misery in order to attain the privileges of solitude and who was not disposed to renounce them in exchange for an old age disturbed by the false attractions of charity.
-- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
I've been thinking a lot about solitude this week. Not just because I'm reading the Márquez masterpiece, but probably a lot because of that. At first I was thinking how different we are: how blessed I am with a family that gives me so much, and such focus. I was wondering about Márquez' family situation, and his romances. I was remembering the piece that he wrote in The Guardian about how great Shakira is, and how it was sadly misinterpreted in so many circles as the (admittedly clever) ramblings of a dirty old man who'd had his fancybone tickled by a young lady. Actually, turns out he's been married for more than 50 years, but that hasn't kept him from picking up on the intricacies of solitude or noticing a talented young countrywoman with a social conscience and backing her up with some major intellectual cache.
I spent a lot of my youth growing up in small German towns, so I know something about solitude. Even when I was allegedly attending law school (at least I showed up for the finals) in Southern California and averaging 20 parties a week, I always took a few hours each day for myself, walking along the beach or the back alleys of OB. I've got stupid little songs that I sing to myself as I wander along, if I'm not thinking some better song that someone else wrote.
Since I met Theresa, though, solitude has played a smaller and smaller role in my life, and I guess also in what's important to me. Raising children, but now with the youngest already 11, one already moved out...with Theresa teaching...all of a sudden there's more time for myself again. I guess for the past 20 years or so I've worked my solitude mainly in meditation, and writing which is I guess a combustible kind of solitude. Writing you're alone, but it's not solitude, really. Nothing like it, now that I think on it.
So my solitude has largely been though meditation. I'm not great at it, but I enjoy it and it helps me a lot. I have a lot of natural movement in my psyche-some unpleasant and some indescribably wonderful-and when I meditate things seem to stay more pleasant, even after. I usually start by reading something short and spiritual. There's probably enough wisdom in The Sermon on the Mount to fill ten lifetimes of meditation, but Mother Theresa has worked well for me too, Tolstoy, a nice Leonard Cohen lyric, anything positive that points beyond itself to some space that can not be defined in words. Only limited by them, but with something important lost. So the feelings of meditation, the looseness, my emptiness with maybe something else moving in the corners...that helps me a lot. That's where I find my solitude.
It strikes me that my solitude is spiritual, personal, but not in any way lonely. The spiritual aspect is a communion. Even if you're a hopeless romantic like me, and believe in nothing as passionately or hopefully as the union of souls with the love of your life...even then...the consciousness of solitude is your own. The interactions are not, necessarily. If consciousness has no physical form, if consciousness emanates from a place where you cannot be harmed or scarred or exhausted, if the senses only push you towards what lies beyond their boundaries...that's really a lot of space.
Rather than loneliness, it strikes me that solitude is one of its better opposites.
Theresa always makes fun of me for taking pictures of myself, and reasonably so. But fuck, man, what am I supposed to do if no one else ever wants to take pictures of me? It looks like the burden of all this self-portrait degradation is starting to take its toll...
http://www.the-islander.org.ac/webcam/
Speaking of pleasant solitude and isolation. Here's the live webcam link at Georgetown, Ascension Island, somewhere in the South Atlantic. I've never been there but I discovered it because I was trying to list my "home town" on Facebook as "a boat" (which I haven't met yet), but it wouldn't let me do it. Eventually the closest thing I could find was Two Boats Village, on the island, and after a little research that seemed about right. So it's kind of become one of my goals to visit my new Facebook hometown and experience all of this nothin' goin' on in person.
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Since we're working a theme of solitude-however little it feels like it has to do with me typing merrily with a big cup of Italian roast coffee on Friday morning-how about closing with TOP TEN PLACES THAT I'VE EXPERIENCED SITE-INDUCED SOLITUDE:
11 March 2011
Nanny state bureaucrats looking for something to do...in "action"! Isn't it about time we turn real power over to these guys:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_wisconsin_budget_unions_protest
Speaking of places that a darkhorse long-shot, hard left potential 2012 presidential candidate should show solidarity…and what he should say…
Bruce….Springsteen!!! Where ya at?!!
http://www.truth-out.org/michael-moore-america-is-not-broke68265
"Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined."
Michael Moore's there. If the election was tomorrow and the candidates were President Obama, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin (populist third party), Donald Trump (corporate desperados who understand that Mitt can't beat anyone, nationally) and Michael Moore….that would be an easy one.
http://www.truth-out.org/how-wisconsin-could-turn-austerity-prosperity-own-a-bank68282
I think I've mentioned this one before. How can the Tea Party-with all of its emphasis on states' rights-not be the driving force behind the establishment of a state bank in every state….unless it's become a tool of Koch and ExxonMobil and the other corporate clods who pay its bills? Wake up and notice your chains are made out of paper, my friends. Can they possibly really believe-humans with brains in their heads-that the problem is teachers and firemen, rather than corporations and banks? Did they, or did they not, notice the bailouts, and isn't that what they were yelling about until they got distracted by teacher pensions?
The Tea Party has something to offer…there is a line of independent libertarian rugged individualist thinking that has its place-and is in fact very much needed-in America and throughout the world.
Unfortunately the TP is showing every sign of settling into being the populist arm of corporate hegemony…willing to believe (and take to the streets in support of!) the absurd lie that our economic difficulties are the result of teachers and firemen, rather than CEOs who give themselves bonuses for putting people out of work, and then claiming absurd tax benefit for their efforts.
I hope the Tea Party gets well soon, because we need something like it. On the other hand it can't get much dumber than hard working blue collar workers voting for tax-breaks-for-billionaires candidates…as such voters have consistently done since Reagan…so there's no real downside. Just that they'll get madder and madder because educated folk are calling them ignorant even more than usual.
Ok, on to a nice film update. How about...in the order of how great I think the best actor in it is (usually, not necessarily in this one):
4 March 2011
http://www.truth-out.org/koch-brothers-prank-no-laughing-matter68032
“he [Governor Walker] literally planned to use five to six thousand hardworking Wisconsin taxpayers as political pawns in his political game. He actually thought through a strategy to lay people off – deny them the ability to feed their families – and use it as leverage for his political goals."
The most telling part of this story isn't that (a) Governor Walker is so stupid that he fell for such a ridiculous con, (b) Governor Walker admitted considering illegally putting agent provocateurs in the pro-union crowd in order to credit it, or even that (c) Governor Walker clearly states his intention to put thousands of his own constituents out of work as a mere political ploy to make it look like he has a point.
The most telling part of this story is how obsequious Walker is to the faux-Koch. How he grovels in bragging about his exaggerated service, how he refuses to confront "Koch" even when what Koch is saying is unethical, illegal and insane. Of how Walker's entire goal of the conservation is to demonstrate his absolute subservience.
The good news is that Wisconsinites aren't nearly as dumb as Governor Walker, or even as dumb as he's relied on them to be. Early polls showed majority support for the governor…that support has eroded to the point where he's unelectable today and likely to be recalled in the very near future. The Tea Party, however, has a lot of explaining to do about how it got taken in by such a transparent corporate con…oh wait, Koch gave them a bunch of money too , didn't he?
http://www.truth-out.org/jim-hightower-the-kochs-and-guv-stir-a-hornets-nest68165
This joke has been running around the internet:
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, "look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of... your cookie."
It's a damn good joke that sheds more truth on the budget problem than 100 years of Walker speeches, but I thought I'd continue it continue just a bit…
The Tea Party guy grabbed his sawed-off shotgun and pointed it at the Union guy and yelled "Git away from mah got-danged cookie yew greedy monster!" Unfortunately the CEO missed out on enjoying this moment of shining camaraderie-or savoring the wonderful irony-as he was on the phone dictating Governor Walker's next bill: that the CEO would get all twelve of the next dozen cookies, since that aggressive Union guy and Tea Party simpleton wouldn't know how to enjoy a good cookie anyway…and the accompanying press release along the lines that Tea Party and Union would both share-FAIRLY AND DEMOCRATICALLY- in the great wealth of cookies to come some day in the future, when there were enough cookies to trickle down…and times didn't call for such universal sacrifice.
Analysis:
CEO: Raised primarily in boarding schools, he is responding to what he has always responded to-the need for objective results confirming his drive, ingenuity and superiority. Confirmation that he is the bully, rather than the bullied. A life well wasted? I would say so, in no small part.
Tea Party: Serves himself less by identifying with the most powerful force in the room, rather than joining with the Union guy and becoming a part of it himself. Dealing himself out of the game by pretending he's winning. The least productive of any conceivable approach, for himself and everyone else? Pretty much.
Union guy: Even if he understands that unions are-these days-too often just another special interest group…has no choice but to unionize in order to protect himself against greedy bastards and idiots.
Concluding uneconomic postscript: Capitalism has served us well in permitting us to remove ourselves from the feudal system. It continues to facilitate incredible advances in technology and commerce, in the broadest sense including medicine and the proliferation and availability of diverse art. But we have allowed it to turn on us, and it is forcing us to do not only things that we collectively don't want to do…but things that we know are stupid and not in the common good. Compare and contrast with 1979: no one had an iPOD then, but way more people owned their own homes. Capitalism is mutating into a kinder, gentler feudal system.
http://www.truth-out.org/the-liberal-media-strikes-again68115
What conservatives call the "liberal media" is the "corporate media," that's why its coverage denigrates the better aspects of conservatism.
What liberals call the "conservative media" is really the "corporate media," and that is why its coverage denigrates or ignores the best aspects of liberalism.
You don't need to postulate a conspiracy theory to explain this (though some help, a little), you only need to understand that greedy people excel in business, have common interests at the rest of our expense, and control the corporate media.
You need only understand that people who got where they are by acting exclusively in self-interest are, right now, at this very minute…that's right, here we go, acting exclusively in self-interest.
The saddest part of this isn't that Huckabee is wrong by about 12,000 miles on where the president of his own country grew up, and is going on about it like an idiot for anyone to listen.
The saddest part is that the rest of it's even dumber.
I'm an English citizen (and an American, I enjoy dual citizenship), I've lived in England for the past ten years, and for twelve years of my life. I hang out with smart people, and political people of various persuasions. They all want to complain about American politics to me most of the time. I've never heard anyone make a statement of any kind about where in the White House the bust of Churchill should stand.
No one's mad at America over interior decorating. They're mad because the Iraq War was predicated on obvious bullshit and has helped radical Islamist to recruit in ways otherwise unimaginable. They're mad because of American/corporate hegemony of the global economy. They're mad because the United States supports Israel in enforcing apartheid in Palestine. They're mad because the United States is the biggest polluter in the world.
Not statues, no one over here's worried about the statue, Huck. Talk to a British person before you go on about what we all think, next time, right mate?
With the Academy Awards going off all over the corporate media ( that way we won't have to cover police solidarity with the Wisconsin protesters, hyeh!), I was looking at it thinking about a top ten list of…you know, maybe worst movies ever to win the best picture Oscar or something. But there really weren't many of 'em, especially before the 1980s when global aesthetics just generally took a major turn for the worst. And of course since the 1960s it has become more common for artists to take chances-and for artists who take chances to get attention-so while there have been more and generally better long-shots since then they haven't always been comprehensible, or fully appreciated, by the Academy goof element…so the voters have admittedly had a more difficult time of it these past few decades. So how about… TEN BEST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MOVIES NEVER EVEN NOMINATED FOR AN ACADEMY AWARD IN ANY CATEGORY (that don't pre-date the awards)
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