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.
24 June 2011
If you believe in forever, Then life is just a one-night stand. If there's a rock and roll heaven , Well you know they've got a hell of a band
--Righteous Brothers
I don't know who's been playing sax in the rock 'n' roll band in Heaven before...but from now on it's Clarence Clemens. As far as I'm concerned the discussion about who's been the greatest, best, most influential, most iconic sax player in rock begins and ends with The Big Man.
He wanted a train set for his ninth birthday-his daddy (a preacher) gave him a sax. I've never heard or read anyone say anything negative at all about The Big Man, and all you have to do is listen to the live tapes to get some sense of how he made people feel. The E Street Band is one of the great bands, and it's the only one built on a saxophone. You got Aristotle, you put him up front.
I've been reading all of the obituaries and comments, and the one that stands out was the weeping construction worker in front of the Stone Pony, Asbury Park, New Jersey (official state song "Born to Run" offers ample evidence of what he could do)...and the guy said that he was weeping because he'd "never hear 'Thunder Road' live again." I guess that remains to be seen, sax players aren't an endangered species in the Jersey/NYC, and Bruce could play it as a dirge...but it's true enough.
My best memory of The Big Man will always be "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" at the Assembly Center, Baton Rouge, in the early '80s. They were a band full of love. It was late December, they played it forever. Bruce and Clarence, kept going back and forth. You can't merge two great ideals and a moment-rock 'n' roll and Christmas, on a plane any higher than that.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/barefoot-bandit-barred-selling-story-020050585.html
This does concern me, because I hope that his story gets told. And I hope he's very clear that he got his concept of bare-footedness as a revolutionary concept from his Little League baseball coach, me. Colton's a good kid from a good family that broke, he played a responsible left field, behind Kasmira at third.
He's also obviously-which I had no idea of at the time-a fucking genius willing to take unlikely and imaginative chances. I demand a pardon and his immediate deployment to Afghanistan, where I figure he could do a lot more good than the current alignment. In fact, remove most everyone else, get 'em out of his way!
Badass geniuses are rare, and government functionaries are shooting themselves in their own (already shot-marked asses) by jailing the guy.
Every American should watch this two minutes, it would save me a lot of time explaining things: The post-Reagan economy doubled, all of that went to the people who were already rich in the first place, driving up prices of anything decent, and relegating normal people to less.
Robert Reich, it should be said, ran Clinton's economy until he realized that Clinton wouldn't do anything that would help common people, and was instead intent on being a caretaker for the Reagan/Corporate revolution.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/jewish-court-sentences-dog-death-stoning-170029405.html
Just for those of us who think that Sharia Law in its most absurd interpretation-or Judge Romary of the Exeter County Court-are the most pathetic representations of jurisprudence...comes this...a court who should be insulted, decided that a mad dog running around biting them must surely be the reincarnation of the "bad" lawyer who'd previously insulted, and sentenced the lawyer/dog to death. Well, I'm with the dog.
It's also true that the story was later kind of watered down. Whether this is (a) true, (b) further evidence of the Israeli lobby walking over the truth, or (c) just more evidence that even the big/reputable new agencies fuck up from time to time is, probably beside the point. It's funny as hell, in any representation.
It does raise metaphysical questions, though. I, for example, consider the heart of dogs much more pure than lawyers, in general. Is the suggestion that the lawyer in question was punished by returning as a dog? To be sure dogs seem to have fewer options, generally, than humans. So, what? Maybe they're souls with their blemishes wiped out, and a new chance....if so, I think that the dog distinguished himself by running amok. He's a leading political candidate in his next life, in my opinion.
How can this be a news story? How could the wimpsuits at FOX ever lower even themselves to the point of apology? I mean, they have plenty to apologize for on an hourly basis, but not this...
I had the good fortune to spend no small amount of time hanging around marines. They're tough sumbitches, they insisted that I listen to more Led Zeppelin, and they were right. The first time I smoked pot it was with a marine, he taught me how to sink the eight ball on the break, which has to led to some money and prestige over the years.
Marines are warriors. We still live, and I expect we will for another thousand years, in a culture that needs warriors. Real ones. There's something kind of cool about getting the marine take during a baseball game, and this was so clearly meant to be-and was-very funny. How the hell else you gonna stop Roy Halladay if you don't hit him with a tank or something?
Outstanding baseball commentary from an unlikely perspective...and now they're apologizing for it, and the poor guy probably feels bad. I thought political correctness was supposed to be a liberal malady.... Fox, J'Assuse.
http://www.truth-out.org/nato-says-it-mistakenly-hit-libyan-rebels-again/1308495005
Obama was the peace candidate. He rode it, and took it, for all it was worth. Which was election to the most important job in the world. Now he wants to undo half his ongoing harm in Afghanistan, and expects us to rally around it. Sorry. Most of the other candidates have better ideas on the subject, maybe all of them (assuming McCain doesn't think he's a candidate).
This is foreign policy that has demonstrated that it does not work. Most every son of every mother or father or brother killed by us has now dedicated his life to revenge. And, quite frankly, I would too. It's a political ploy, the idea being that anyone will fall for it, Obama's assuming we're idiots, and that's going to be the campaign strategy. Wall Street cuddling, healthcare sell-out, whatever happened to that big transition to green energy that he kept telling liberals about while he was selling out universal healthcare...he has to be challenged from the left to lose, but http://front.moveon.org/ has, like me (and unlike me, played a major role in his election), has moved on....it's going to be an interesting campaign.
17 June 2011
WEINER WITHDRAWS!!! (the fun's all over, for awhile)
I guess there's always a certain sadness in witnessing a Weiner's last stand. In this case, mainly, what are we going to laugh about now?
But no one loves penance and redemption more than the American (Christian forgiveness) public. And let's not forget Weiner's exhortations not to fail to credit his "package"...he's got an appealing wife who's apparently forgiving him, everyone loves a love story... harbor no doubt that right now, at this very minute, some semi-brilliant minds are working on Return of the Weiner...and, if they're successful....Weiner Rises Again!
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pm-makes-promise-vaccinate-worlds-poor-001508370.html
"This will help vaccinate over 80 million children and save 1.4 million lives."
This is foreign policy that will work. Do you make enemies by blowing up the vegetable market, or by saving someone's child?
So, gee, what? If we diverted cash from wars we can't win, and stopped giving construction workers' wages to corporate CEOs as a reward for putting people out of work, and started helping people instead of blowing them up...we'd be better off? Radical, radical...
http://www.truth-out.org/zapatistas-return-amid-failed-drug-war/1307854154
Then you carried your ashes to the mountains: will you today carry your fire into the valley?
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra
When the peace talks broke down, Wild captured an exchange between her fellow journalists and the Zapatistas' famously clever spokesman, Subcommandante Marcos. Asked on camera what would happen next, he snapped, "I have no fucking idea. Excuse me for using the word 'idea.'"
Return of the Zapatistas. You may recall that they killed a few people a decade or so back, defending their land against agents of Corporato (who in one way or another would have, and probably already have killed more), who figured there was oil under it. Repeated efforts by government sanctioned terrorists to wipe them out by killing innocent women and children failed to do the trick, and finally they were accepted as some sort of political reality.
Popular for integrity and anti-imperialism, they marched on Mexico City. They played with electoral politics, but couldn't find anyone or party worthy of their support. They returned to their homeland; where what you are is more important than what you have, women's equal rights are a reality instead of a slogan, and they're still willing to shoot the ass off any Exxon mutherfucker who starts digging in their dirt...
The area controlled by the Zapatistas for now more than a decade is perhaps the most stable, calmest, violence-free area of Mexico...
A good friend and inspiration of the Zapatistas is the more brilliant-than-brilliant Gabriel García Márquez (also a close friend of Fidel Castro). Márquez is the greatest living writer in the world, and his most popularly acclaimed work One Hundred Years of Solitude was recently voted the "Greatest Novel of the 20th Century" by some of those Ivy League types who read even more than I do. More telling, though, and better in my opinion, is The Autumn of the Patriarch, which, like One Hundred Years, Márquez skewers socialist tendencies towards totalitarianism. In any event, these are my favorite passages from One Hundred Years of Solitude
Α
"I want to be alone with you," he said. "One of these day I'm going to tell everybody and we can stop all of this sneaking around."
She did not try to calm him down.
"That would be fine," she said, "If we're alone, we'll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody's having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of."
•••
He felt himself forgotten, not with the irremediable forgetfulness of the heart, but with a different kind of forgetfulness, which was more cruel and irrevocable and which he knew very well because it was the forgetfulness of death.
•••
He already had his back to the wall and his hands were on his hips because the burning knots in his armpits would not let him lower them. "A person fucks himself up so much," Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. "Fucks himself up so much just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can't do anything about it." He repeated it with so much rage that it almost seemed to be fervour, and Captain Roque Carnicero was touched, because he thought he was praying.
•••
Every time they passed the run-down house she would tell her about an unpleasant incident, a tale of the, trying in that way to make her extended rancour be shared by her niece and consequently prolonged beyond death, but her plan did not work because Remedios was immune to any kind of passionate feelings and much less to those of others. 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.
•••
Amaranta Úrsula returned with the first angels of December, driven on a sailor's breeze, leading her husband by a silk rope tied around his neck. She appeared without warning, wearing an ivory-coloured dress, a string of pearls that reached almost to her knees, emerald and topaz rings, and with her straight hair in a smooth bun held behind her ears by swallow-tail brooches.
•••
A year after the departure of the wise Catalonian the only one left in Macondo was Gabriel, still adrift at the mercy of Nigromanta's chancy charity and answering the questions of a contest in a French magazine in which the first prize was a trip to Paris. Aureliano, who was the one who subscribed to it, helped him fill in the answers, sometimes in his house but most of the time among the ceramic bottles and atmosphere of a valerian in the only pharmacy left in Macondo, where Mercedes, Garbiel's stealthy girl-friend, lived. It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending. The town had reached such extremes of inactivity that when Gabriel won the contest and left for Paris with two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and the complete works of Rabelais, he had to signal the engineer to stop the train and pick him up.
•••
At night, holding each other in bed, they were not frightened by the sublunary explosions of the ants or the noise of the moths or the constant and clean whistle of the growth of the weeds in the neighbouring rooms. Many times they were awakened by the traffic of the dead. They could hear Úrsula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and José Arcadio Buendia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and they they learned that dominant obsession can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after another species of future animals would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man.
Ω
The simple and sad reality is that in most of the South American nations that have over the past decades voted "socialist," the democratic ideals of Jefferson-and the humanity of Jesus-are now more important dynamics in the social equation than they are under President Obama, or would be under President Romney. We're all in this together, and it's more important-and beter-to heal each other than to shoot each other in the ass, or weiner.
10 June 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110606/wl_nm/us_japan_fukushima_retireees
Heroes of the week. I would love to believe that some day I would be able to make such a selfless offer. These guys are serious samurai.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-politician-admits-sending-lewd-photo-230303797.html
Unfortunately, a certain congressman from the previously proud state of New York is not.
OK!...Congressman Weiner sent some unfortunate women pictures of his....um, weiner...but it was allegedly clothed in some, if apparent. This is why it's even funner in heaven than here. Can you imagine what John Belushi (as Weiner) and Gilda Radner (as the recipient) are doing with this?
Apparently before the...incident(s)....Weiner was a frontrunner for Mayor of New York City or something. Well, why can't he still run? As a former spin-doctor type, I demand that he turn this to his political advantage: I foresee giant and leaving-nothing-to-the-imagination posters splendoring that proud city...emblazoned with slogans like "THIS Weiner's got balls!...and has proved it time and time again!!" and "Weiner Fever! Catch It! (cures available)!!!" And so on...
This is, incidentally, only my second all-time favorite scandal involving a (ahem!) gentleman with an unfortunately appropriate name. My all-time fave is when one of the great managers in baseball history....well into his '70s at the time...chose to wander off into a hotel hallway and....erm... reveal himself to a somewhat but not entirely bemused maid. And that great manager's name was.... Dick Williams.
Aaaaah-hahahahahahahahah!!!!! (sorry)
On Nazis and Dogs
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/25/how-nazi-scientsts-tried-to-create-an-army-of-talking-dogs/
The Nazis thought they trained dogs to talk?! Hahaha, what idiots!
Der Führer, deep in conversation with his most brilliant advisor...
It has-strangely to me, in a culture universally and supposedly in favor of free speech-become impossible to say anything nice about the Nazis. "They had funky hats?" Racist, terrible! Ugly hats, not funky! "The autobahn assisted in the post-war economic revival?" Horrid, racist, awful!! Didn't help! "They sure were assholes, but the trains ran on time?" Indescribably distasteful, a horrid lie and an affront to trains. "Hitler had a funny moustache?" Nothing funny about it, string up the faschsimp!!!!! "Volkswagen was a clever way to get automobiles into the hands of the common folk, kind of like the Model-T Ford?" He just said Hitler's the same as Roosevelt, hold me back before I throw up all over the entire world!
And so when Lars von Trier tried to say something, anything....about Nazis...at the Cannes Film Festival he was immediately dismissed and sent home as persona non grata . Having tried to make any sense out of his comments, and knowing something about the man, I would suggest that what he was trying, very awkwardly, to say, was something like: "In post WWI Europe the Germans got a terrible deal. All historians now recognize this. It was made impossible for their economy to recover. Instead what little wealth there was, was all squeezed by the bankers, which naturally made the country rife for extremism...of any sort. It's actually a bit like what Wall Street is doing to Western Civilization today." The conservative wing of the French government-which as we all know rolled over for the Nazis so quickly as to appear desperate for companionship-and is again in power-was, of course, horrified, horrified, appalled, like the French cop in Casablanca.
I don't have anything nice to say about the Nazis, on balance. They were arguably the biggest assholes in the history of the world. Holocaust deniers notwithstanding, they murdered somewhere along the lines of eight to eleven million entirely innocent civilians...for reasons including but not limited to being Jewish, gypsy, gay....or merely suggesting that a better form of government might be preferable. I wouldn't have lasted a week. So it's not something that I'm for. They would have done weird experiments with my brain, to figure out what's wrong with it...arschlochs!
But I do think that there is some merit in excising the twenty year or so history of the Nazis from the thousands of years history of the Germanic people, and comparing and contrasting a bit.
Having moved to Germany at the age of two (less than 20 years after the fall of the Third Reich), and living there until the age of fourteen, all but five of those years living in small German towns, I do know something about the German people. I like them. The stereotype of aggressive is not unfair, rude not terribly unfair, but passionate and full of life absolutely on point. As a stereotype of course, individuals will vary.
One of the main things I liked about the Germans-including the older ones some of whom were undoubtedly-like the current pope-at some point Nazis, was that they were very kind to dogs. Dogs were welcome everywhere, in every shop, in every restaurant, in every Gasthaus... In fact, even when we happened upon a restaurant where, for whatever reason, they hated Americans (more often Vietnam than D-Day, I think), they would bring our dog Rebel a big, wonderful plate of food. And water, every dog, every need. They would stop and make a big deal out of him, then turn and snarl at us.
Germany's changed a bit since I left in '77, but dogs are still far more respected than in the states. In Europe, generally. When Kasmira got to manage her first pub one of the first things she told me was that "dogs are welcome, and people bring them in all the time!" She knew that now I would know it's a good place, and be proud. I am.
The Nazi leadership was-let's face it-absolutely nuts, and their followers desperately led wrong. So it should come as little surprise that somewhere in some semi-elegant, wannabe Roman office in Berlin someone would come up with the idea that dogs were incredible beings that could help the war effort. Even the Allies, remember, deployed a much lesser species, pigeons.
And at the highest levels the Nazis (and let's not dismiss their later role in assisting the United States in transforming the little league OSS into the mega-meddling CIA) were extreme mystics. They thought all kinds of weird shit, tracked down holy relics they thought had mystical powers, thought they were conversing with Aryan spirits bigger than...you know, Cyclops, or Bigfoot, or even the Ghostbusters (which says something about why they lost the war, though it should be also noted that they were hopelessly outnumbered in the first place).
My earliest memory of religious dissent was when I was maybe six, and the good reverend said something along the lines of "Humans have souls, unlike dogs and refrigerators and sofas." I was horrified, and informed my parents in no uncertain terms, from the back seat of our black Cadillac on the way home, that he had no idea what he was talking about, and that I was much more certain of Rebel's soul than the reverend's. My father was choir director, and I got a public apology from the pulpit the following Sunday.
But the Nazis were right...dogs have incredible senses, and so, I bet, do lots of other creatures, though not nearly like dogs or dolphins. My dog Laural doesn't speak-of the kaiser or any other historic figure (even though he's a Rottweiler/German Shepherd mix)-but he does make a lot of different noises, which express varying feelings in different contexts. It alternately amuses and annoys the other family members when he lies down on the floor by my side and initiates a conversation. I make similar noises, we alternately repeat each other or change things, for up to like ten minutes at a time, and I do get a sense of how he's feeling, and, I believe, he of how I'm feeling. It's largely "what a drag it is getting old" stuff, but there's this sense of moving through it together.
So you know what? I'm fucking sick and tired of every single little thought the Nazis ever had being automatically stupid and racist. They were probably better to dogs than we are, collectively; and same with Corporato-the policies Reagan/Thatcher put into motion may ultimately kill far more than the Nazis (maybe already have), but a world economy that can really do good IS in place because of them (if we can get the greediest bastards off the controls); and Congressman Weiner: sure he shared more than he should, but at least he was trying to share and bring joy....and actually, he did, to millions more than he could have possibly imagined...none of 'em are doing much good anyway, and there's no denying that Weiner is funny...I fully endorse him for lee-erection, I mean re-election...
If this was Saturday Night Live in the good old days, Dan Aykroyd would step in right now-to the relief of all-and say, "Clayton, you ignorant slut..." And there'd be something to that; even though I'm neither entirely ignorant nor a slut, I am at least a Clayton. So there'd be something to it.
Personally, I think there are a lot dumber ideas than "talking dogs" coming from every corner of congress and parliament.
yeah, yeah, fuck you, nazicat!
Great Recent moments in legal history
I don't practice law. I just sue the government, on occasion. It's not so much that I hate law,mainly lawyers and judges. Hanging out with people like that on a regular basis corrodes your soul. Courts always rule for the government, so you have to appeal (at least ten times in this particular case, on various issues). Last week I found myself appealing the ruling of a pretty good judge-on a transcript before the same judge-on appeal, before an excellent judge (believe me, there aren't many). So I was explaining...
ME: And so, I was explaining to His Honour Judge Smythe*, as diplomatically as possible-
JUDGE: If I can interrupt, Mr Trapp, and quote the transcript, you said "It's a horrible omission. I mean it's spectacular. But it's there and so we need to look at what really happened instead of what you recorded happened." I wonder if "diplomatic" is just the right term here...
ME: Well, your honour...one of the things that I've noticed in this life is that we are all endowed with the many and wonderous virtues to varying degree. Diplomacy hasn't always been one of my long suits. Perhaps I could characterize my comments as "without profanity," and we might all move forward in full concord and agreement...
JUDGE (barely able to contain himself): Yes...we might...
(I won)
*not his real name, protecting the guilty, but worthy of more than guilt
3 June 2011
[apologia for the scant offerings in this weeks dish-to be read in John Belushi "no Pepsi, Coke" voce]
NO! NO DISH THIS-A WEEK!! FILM REVIEWS. good. NO TALK, BUSY BUSY!!! COURT, HALF TERM-family run all around me, NO TALK!!! You WAN'....NAZI DOGS? I GIVE YOU NAZI DOG!! NEXT WEEK!!! AND MANY FUNNY THING! Republican, too. NO!!! NO CHEE-BAHGUH, HAMbuh-gah...NO PEPSI, COKE!!!!! NO DISH-a WRITE. MOVIE REVIEW, MOVIE REVIEW, good one...go read...YOU!!...go read...come back NEX' WEEK! Nazi dogs, you see...funny ones...you come back.
and so my friends, we're eating lite this week. But here's a little film update, in order of how enthusiastic they make me.
Archive
2010
2009
Dish empty ! Now go home
