Copied and Pasted.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
"The Adventures of 78 Charles Street" by Phillip Schultz
For thirty-two years Patricia Parmelee's yellow light
has burned all night
in her kitchen down the hall in 2E.
Patricia--I love to say her name--Par-me-lee!
knows where, across the street,
Hart Crane wrote "The Bridge,"
the attic Saul Bellow holed up in
furiously scribbling "The Adventures of Augie March,"
the rooftop Bing Crosby yodelled off,
dreaming of Broadway, the knotty,
epicene secrets of each born-again town house.
Indeed, we, Patrica and me, reminisce
about tiny Lizzie and Joe Pasquinnucci,
one deaf, the other near-blind,
waddling hand in hand down the hall,
up the stairs, in and out of doors,
remembering sweetening Sicilian peaches,
ever-blooming daylilies, a combined one hundred
and seventy years of fuming sentence fragments,
elastic stockings, living and outliving,
everyone on the south side of Charles Street.
How Millie Melterborne, a powerhouse
of contemptuous capillaries inflamed
with memories of rude awakenings,
wrapped herself in black chiffon
wher her knocked-up daughter Kate married a Mafia son
and screamed "Nixon, blow me!"
out her fifth-floor window,
then dropped dead face first
into her gin-spiked oatmeal.
How overnight Sharion in 4E
became a bell-rining Buddhist
explaining cat litter, America, pleurisy, multiple orgasms,
and why I couldn't love anyone who loved me.
And Arhcie McGee in 5W, one silver-cross earring,
a tidal wave of dyed black hair,
motorcycle boots jingling, Jesus boogying
on each enraged oiled bicep, screaming
four flights down at me for asking
the opera singer across the courtyard to pack it in,
"This is N.Y.C., shithead, where fat people sing while fucking!"
Archie, whom Millie attacked with the pliers
and Lizzie fell over, drunk on the stairs, angry
if you nodded or didn't, from whom, hearing his boots,
I hid shaking under the stairwell,
until I found him trembling outside my door,
"Scram, Zorro, I'll be peachy in the morning."
In a year three others were dead of AIDS,
everyone wearing black,
but in the West Village everyone did
every day anyway.
Patricia says, The Righteous Brothers and I
moved in Thanksgiving, 1977
and immediately began looking for
that ever-loving feeling, rejoicing
at being a citizen of the ever-clanging future,
all of us walking up Perry Street,
down West Tenth, around Bleecker,
along the Hudson, with dogs, girlfriends,
and hangovers, stoned and insanely sober,
arm in arm and solo, under the big skyline,
traffic whizzing by, through
indefatigable sunshine, snow, and rain,
listening to the Stones, Monk, Springsteen,and Beethoven,
one buoyant foot after the other, nodding hello
good morning happy birthday adieu adios auf wiedersehen!
before anyone went co-op, renovated,
thought about being sick or dying,
when we all had hair and writhed on the floor
because someone didn't love us anymore,
when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit,
or joined anything, before there was hygiene,
confetti, a salary, cholesterol,
a list of names to invite to a funeral...
Yes, the adventures of a street in a city of everlasting hubris,
and Patricia's yellow light
when I can't sleep and come to the kitchen
to watch its puny precious speck stretch
so quietly so full of reverence
into the enormous darkness,
and I, overcome with love for everything so quickly fading,
my head stuck out the window
breathing the intoxicating melody
of our shouldered-and-cemented little island,
here, now, in the tenement of this moment,
dear Patricia's light,
night after night,
burning with all the others,
on 78 Charles Street.
--Phillip Schultz
featured in The New Yorker, April 24, 2006
has burned all night
in her kitchen down the hall in 2E.
Patricia--I love to say her name--Par-me-lee!
knows where, across the street,
Hart Crane wrote "The Bridge,"
the attic Saul Bellow holed up in
furiously scribbling "The Adventures of Augie March,"
the rooftop Bing Crosby yodelled off,
dreaming of Broadway, the knotty,
epicene secrets of each born-again town house.
Indeed, we, Patrica and me, reminisce
about tiny Lizzie and Joe Pasquinnucci,
one deaf, the other near-blind,
waddling hand in hand down the hall,
up the stairs, in and out of doors,
remembering sweetening Sicilian peaches,
ever-blooming daylilies, a combined one hundred
and seventy years of fuming sentence fragments,
elastic stockings, living and outliving,
everyone on the south side of Charles Street.
How Millie Melterborne, a powerhouse
of contemptuous capillaries inflamed
with memories of rude awakenings,
wrapped herself in black chiffon
wher her knocked-up daughter Kate married a Mafia son
and screamed "Nixon, blow me!"
out her fifth-floor window,
then dropped dead face first
into her gin-spiked oatmeal.
How overnight Sharion in 4E
became a bell-rining Buddhist
explaining cat litter, America, pleurisy, multiple orgasms,
and why I couldn't love anyone who loved me.
And Arhcie McGee in 5W, one silver-cross earring,
a tidal wave of dyed black hair,
motorcycle boots jingling, Jesus boogying
on each enraged oiled bicep, screaming
four flights down at me for asking
the opera singer across the courtyard to pack it in,
"This is N.Y.C., shithead, where fat people sing while fucking!"
Archie, whom Millie attacked with the pliers
and Lizzie fell over, drunk on the stairs, angry
if you nodded or didn't, from whom, hearing his boots,
I hid shaking under the stairwell,
until I found him trembling outside my door,
"Scram, Zorro, I'll be peachy in the morning."
In a year three others were dead of AIDS,
everyone wearing black,
but in the West Village everyone did
every day anyway.
Patricia says, The Righteous Brothers and I
moved in Thanksgiving, 1977
and immediately began looking for
that ever-loving feeling, rejoicing
at being a citizen of the ever-clanging future,
all of us walking up Perry Street,
down West Tenth, around Bleecker,
along the Hudson, with dogs, girlfriends,
and hangovers, stoned and insanely sober,
arm in arm and solo, under the big skyline,
traffic whizzing by, through
indefatigable sunshine, snow, and rain,
listening to the Stones, Monk, Springsteen,and Beethoven,
one buoyant foot after the other, nodding hello
good morning happy birthday adieu adios auf wiedersehen!
before anyone went co-op, renovated,
thought about being sick or dying,
when we all had hair and writhed on the floor
because someone didn't love us anymore,
when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit,
or joined anything, before there was hygiene,
confetti, a salary, cholesterol,
a list of names to invite to a funeral...
Yes, the adventures of a street in a city of everlasting hubris,
and Patricia's yellow light
when I can't sleep and come to the kitchen
to watch its puny precious speck stretch
so quietly so full of reverence
into the enormous darkness,
and I, overcome with love for everything so quickly fading,
my head stuck out the window
breathing the intoxicating melody
of our shouldered-and-cemented little island,
here, now, in the tenement of this moment,
dear Patricia's light,
night after night,
burning with all the others,
on 78 Charles Street.
--Phillip Schultz
featured in The New Yorker, April 24, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
Environmentalism as per Penn & Teller
"Basically they are using sensation, misinformation and scare tactics... The environmental movement was basically hijacked by political and social activists who came in and very cleverly learned how to use green-rhetoric or green language to cloak agendas that actually had more to do with anti-corporatism, anti-globalization, anti-business and very little to do with science or ecology and that's when I left. I realized that the movement I had started was being taken over by politicals basically and that they were using it for fund-raising purposes."
--Patrick Moore, founder & former president of Greenpeace in an interview on Penn & Teller's Bullshit
--Patrick Moore, founder & former president of Greenpeace in an interview on Penn & Teller's Bullshit
Sunday, April 23, 2006
"My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" by The Decemberists
My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist
In pre-war Paris
Smuggling bombs for the underground
And she met my father
At a fete in Aix-en-Provence
He was disguised as a Russian cadet
In the employ of the Axis
And there in the half-light
Of the provincial midnight
To a lone concertina
They drank in cantinas
And toasted to Edith Piaf And the fall of the Reich
My sister was born in a hovel in Burgundy
And left for the cattle
But later was found by a communist
Who had deserted his ranks
To follow his dream
To start up a punk rock band in South Carolina
I get letters sometimes
They bought a plantation
She weeds the tobacco
He offends the nation
And they write,
"Don't be a stranger, y'hear Sincerely, your sister"
So my parents had me
To the disgust of the prostitues
On a bed in a brothel
Surprisingly raised with tender care
Until the money got tight
And they bet me away
To a blind brigadier in a game
Of high stakes canasta
But he made me a sailor
On his brigadier ship fleet
I know every yardarm
From main mast to jib sheet
But sometimes I long to be landlocked
And to work in a bakery
--from Five Songs
In pre-war Paris
Smuggling bombs for the underground
And she met my father
At a fete in Aix-en-Provence
He was disguised as a Russian cadet
In the employ of the Axis
And there in the half-light
Of the provincial midnight
To a lone concertina
They drank in cantinas
And toasted to Edith Piaf And the fall of the Reich
My sister was born in a hovel in Burgundy
And left for the cattle
But later was found by a communist
Who had deserted his ranks
To follow his dream
To start up a punk rock band in South Carolina
I get letters sometimes
They bought a plantation
She weeds the tobacco
He offends the nation
And they write,
"Don't be a stranger, y'hear Sincerely, your sister"
So my parents had me
To the disgust of the prostitues
On a bed in a brothel
Surprisingly raised with tender care
Until the money got tight
And they bet me away
To a blind brigadier in a game
Of high stakes canasta
But he made me a sailor
On his brigadier ship fleet
I know every yardarm
From main mast to jib sheet
But sometimes I long to be landlocked
And to work in a bakery
--from Five Songs
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Demian by Herman Hesse
"We talk too much," he said with unwonted seriousness. "Clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise."
-from Chapter 3, Among Thieves
-from Chapter 3, Among Thieves
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
"The Prairie Grass Dividing" by Walt Whitman
The Prairie-Grass Dividing
The prairie-grass dividing, its special odor breathing,
I demand of it the spiritual corresponding,
Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,
Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,
Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and
command, leading not following,
Those with a never-quell'd audacity, those with sweet and lusty
flesh clear of taint,
Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors,
as to say Who are you?
Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain'd, never
obedient, Those of inland America.
--Walt Whitman
The prairie-grass dividing, its special odor breathing,
I demand of it the spiritual corresponding,
Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,
Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,
Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and
command, leading not following,
Those with a never-quell'd audacity, those with sweet and lusty
flesh clear of taint,
Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors,
as to say Who are you?
Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain'd, never
obedient, Those of inland America.
--Walt Whitman
Demian by Herman Hesse
"Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.
Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average person this is the point when the demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth--which is our fate--only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise--which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams."
--from Chapter 3, "Among Thieves"
Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average person this is the point when the demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth--which is our fate--only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise--which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams."
--from Chapter 3, "Among Thieves"
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