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TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007 After two weeks of gloomy cloudy drizzly days the sun came beaming out like a molten cannonball of energizing desires which I hastily subdued by applying myself to the woodpile with chainsaw and maul in order to keep the wood stove happy, we aren't out of the cold days yet. Then onto the tractor to hook behind it the harrow to scratch the back of the pasture and break up that moss getting a hold on the ground. Now I must spread grass seed in those scratches for I was voted most likely to sow seed and have to either live up to my expectations or else wallow in a nap. No time for that. I bought an Imac on Craigslist for my wife, to bring her up to OS 10 at home just like she has at work where she teaches high schol younguns the nuances and requirements of English literature and composition. It means moving all the files and some programs from her old computer into the new one and it's tricky business to bring over the Eudora In and Out boxes, not to mention the Netscape bookmarks. But enough of this technical jargon. The forecast is for rain tonight and I gotta sow that seed.
-- kapnken
Librarians at their most creative here:
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Poem for the Safe drop-in center of Springfield, Oregon
by David RogersIt's a warm retreat from the winter freeze,
It's a drop in center for the least of these,
Fresh out of jail or the crazy ward;
For those who are hungry, or just down and bored,
For exchanging old clothes, or swapping stories
Of tough survival and underdog glory;
For those who have been living out on the streets,
A chance to get warm or just sit and meet;
Who escaped from forced confinements and drugs
Only to be rolled by unscrupulous lugs;
For those who hear voices, with limited choices,
For those who see visions, with meager provisions;
A safe kind of haven for those who are different,
From the wayward sage to brain-fried insufficient;
Shouting their slogan to all who may care:
'We're all in here because we're all out there!'
In the current Mother Jones magazine ( not as yet posted online ) there's an article about a heroic little 16 year-old Alabama girl who for her sixteenth birthday held an anti-war rally/birthday party on the Capitol's steps. Other than media it was ill-attended. It was on the same day that Auburn and Alabama had football games! Ava Lowery is a home schooler whose anti-war blog gets 30,000 hits a day!
The lack of people at our MoveOn "You're The Decider" event was a little disappointing, but just think how Ava felt with her pink- frosted birthday cakes spelling out "bring"..."them"..."home" with three bands playing and just a handful of people there!
Her site:
http://www.peacetakescourage.com/page-home.htm
Check out her super videos!
-- John E.
The Parts Left Out of "Chicago 10"
by Paul KrassnerIn 1967, Abbie Hoffman, his wife Anita and I took a work-vacation in Florida, renting a little house on stilts in Ramrod Key. We had planned to see "The Professionals." "That's my favorite movie," Abbie said. "Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin develop this tight bond while they're both fighting in the Mexican revolution, then they drift apart." But it was playing too far away, and a hurricane was brewing, so instead we saw the Dino Di Laurentiis version of "The Bible." Driving home in the rain and wind, we debated the implications of Abraham being prepared to slay his son because God told him to. I dismissed this as blind obedience. Abbie praised it as revolutionary trust.
This was the week before Christmas. We had bought a small tree and spray-painted it with canned snow. Now, we were tripping on LSD as the hurricane reached full force. "Hey," Abbie yelled over the roar, "this is powerful [bleepin'] acid!" We watched Lyndon Johnson on a black-and-white TV set, although LBJ was purple-and-orange. His huge head was sculpted into Mount Rushmore. "I am not going to be so pudding-headed as to stop our half of the war," he was saying, and the heads of the other presidents were all snickering and covering their mouths with their hands so they wouldn't laugh out loud. This was the precise moment we acknowledged that we'd be going to the Democratic convention in August to protest the Vietnam war. I called Jerry Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting when we returned. The conspiracy was beginning.
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CHICAGO 10 FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2007
NEAL CASSADY'S BIRTHDAY
Neal and his son, JohnNEAL CASSADY BIRTHDAY BASH
Last year at this time, we planned a little birthday celebration in honor of Neal Cassady's 80th birthday. People are still talking about it. This year you can join us!Friday, February 9, 2007 - 7:30 PM
NEAL CASSADY BIRTHDAY PARTY
Where: The Beat Museum, San Francisco
Special Guests: Jami Cassady, John Allen Cassady, Al Hinkle (Big Ed Dunkel from On The Road)
And many more to come!
Free!The one last year was a huge success with people lined up in the street trying to get in. We have more space this year, and plan a jam session and party. It would be great to see you again.
STUPOR BOWL SUNDAY STUPIFIED FOR SIX HOURS, EASY
Super Sunday was a foul gray day in Chicago. first there was snow, then freezing fog, and finally a long subzero night with icy winds off the lake and a wind-chill factor at midnight of 44 below...but none of this mattered to the natives: They ripped off their shirts and spit beer on women and ran wild in the streets like hyenas, to celebrate another great victory......I had my own problems and most them had do with gambling. They were many and varied, but the nut of the matter had to do with the fact that I came awake on Sunday morning with the uneasy knowledge that I had taken New England and 13 points, which was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I had done it on the advice of Rev. Desmond Tutu, the Anglican bishop and Nobel Peace Prize laureate from South Africa, who made a speech in Chicago on Friday...The problem with Tutu is his accent, or perhaps his feeling for emphasis. He had warned me, I thought, to stay away from the Bears, which disturbed my basic gambling instinct and ran counter to all my analyses. Until I spoke with Desmond I was taking the Bears and not worrying too much about points......There was no shortage of good places to watch the game on TV, but the best one for my purposes was a 40 foot high Diamond Vision screen in downtown Daley Plaza, where a huge and essentially goofy iron statue by Pablo Picasso looks down on the jabbering crowds who have been flocking all week, from places like Cicero and Galesburg. They pressed in on the plaza like lemmings, despite the unholy cold and winds that swept in off the lake like some nightmare freeze-out of the Cremation of Sam McGee.
There is nothing quite like the cold that you feel on a bad winter day in Chicago. It is a genuinely frightening pain that is like being plunged into ice water, or feeling your skin on fire...But pain meant nothing to these people; they tore off their clothes and raced around the plaza like slam dancers, totally ignoring the game. Later that night, I heard a radio news bulletin that said they were all transvestites, giddy drifters who lived off the land and sold industrial ether for a living and whipped their own dogs at night to relieve the terrible tensions that come with the life of the bullfruit...
-- HST''s "Meat Sickness" Super Bowl Sunday in Chicago remembered
Kapn, cheeze, I din't know Harry Truman was a Bears fan and a writer, too? Sheesh, wotta guy.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2007 Kiss your January goodbye and it went zooming and no sense in trying to figure out what got accomplished. Only thing to do now is put the nose to the grindstone and the ears to the ground and the feet in the mud and keep grinding plodding and muddling along.
Lots of newbies coming up this month so stay attuned.
I asked for forgiveness and sealed up the house to keep out the stray cat but what happened was one of our own cats was under there sniffing around and I locked it in and last night we heard it scratching and it took all of us: our other cat and the dog sniffing at the heating vents, my wife and I going under the deck and opening a hole through the mesh to make a spot for the cat to get out, then call and coax until it decided okay, I'll co-operate, and little miz queenie waltzed disdainfully, the way cats do, out the hole and up to the house for a big big dinner.
The interloper has took a hike.
-- KanpKen
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2007 The holey days aren't over till the fat lady sings the national anthem at the super bowl. That gives me reason, or at least an excuse for being so worthless all month. Someone said, all this talk about global warming, what about global cooling? He was talking about the cold snap we've been weathering, fifteen and twenty degree mornings, but blessedly sunny in the afternoons, making for good firewood cutting, a heartening necessity when you keep the wood stove roaring.
Then there's that stray cat been hanging around, making me feed our cats inside the house, instead of on the porch, so, to spite me, the stray cat found a way under the house and clawed into the heating ducts and at night caterwauled through the heating vents, until I finally girded my lion loins and crawled under the house -- a hateful task, needing a mask and full body coverup-- and repaired the heating ducts and plugged the leak.
I set a have a heart trap for the cat and it bit on the bait and I gave it a free ride across the river to another friendly cat location, don't report me to the Society, please.
I finally made it over to the University of Oregon campus and checked out the flag display (which is covered down below on this page). A truly awesome display, without the need for any kind of spin or extraneous point. It is simply a graphic illustation of the many lives lost in Iraq since our invasion, made manifest by the sheer size of the display. Easily covers two or three city blocks inside the campus, on every piece of grassy ground. Pictures and words don't do it justice.
-- KapnKen
FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 2007 xiao yi xiao
bai nian shao
smile once, you smile for 100 years-- Chinese idiom Kapn,
I sent Kirko a picture of my gin and tonic glass and asked him if it was half full or half empty. I got this great reply.
-- Skypilot Pil
the glass does not burden itself with petty philosophical arguments.
its goal in life is to provide pleasure and only asks that when truly empty it be filled again, and again and......
that is the circle of life.
-- kirko
MONDAY, JANUARY 22, 2007 Flagscape puts toll in perspective: UO grounds host the visually stunning Iraq Body Count Memorial
photo: Paul Carter, Register GuardBy Andrea Damewood
The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon
Published: Monday, January 22, 2007From a distance, it looks as if an early thaw has arrived on the University of Oregon campus, as hundreds of thousands of red and white flecks stand out brilliantly like new tulips against the green grass.
Hundreds of volunteers stoop, planting bright colors like nymphs creating a spring landscape.
Some passers-by on Sunday smiled as they came upon the vivid scene, stretching between Alder and University streets, and from the Knight Library to East 13th Avenue.
But their smiles evaporated as they learned that each of the 120,000 white flags symbolizes six or seven dead civilians since the start of the war in Iraq in 2003. And that the patch of 3,000 red flags represents the 3,055 U.S. soldiers killed as of Saturday.
The flags are the Iraq Body Count Memorial, started in October at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in an attempt to make abstract death toll numbers more real to the public, said Monica Vaughan, a 24-year-old graduate student who helped bring the weeklong exhibit to the UO.
"We're trying to drive home the impact of the real cost of war, which is human lives," Vaughan said. "It's not necessarily a protest, it's a memorial."
Volunteers from the university and community began planting the markers at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, neatly placing them in the wet dirt in tidy rows. They finished just before 5 p.m.
Vaughan said several student and community groups worked together to bring the exhibit to Eugene after some had seen the display in Colorado.
Creators hope to take the memorial on a national tour - with Lane Community College, Reed College in Portland and the University of California, Berkeley, already having expressed interest in hosting the flags.
PRIME GREEN by Robert Stone I've know Bob Stone since the early sixties and he is on heck of a guy. He is also one heck of a writer. What people don't realize he is also one heck of a droll humorist. He sent me PRIME GREEN and I have been doling it out a little bit at a time because it is so enjoyable. Not only perceptive in its take on events and attitudes and mores, but also funny as hell. A great read.
-- kapnken
From the book:
"...a cross between a Stanford fraternity party and an underfunded libertine writers' conference..."
"We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us."
My old friend, Robert Stone, the novelist, has written a memoir about his life with a focus on the Sixties and the characters and places. Of course, Kesey and the pranksters are in there.
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