Honey

huni huny
huhni huhknee
hunni hunne
huhNY Hun knee
huhnnie huhney

etc

Juris Prudence

We sought the Law, and the "law" won.

What this country needs is a good 5 (or more) William O. Douglases on the Supreme Court.

Moonglow

Agglomerate this:

The scene from Scorsese's The Aviator where DiCaprio gives Blanchett the control of his plane and he drinks from a bottle of milk as she lifts the nose gently above a ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains: Benny Goodman's "Moonglow", Hampton on vibes.

The scene from Josh Logan's Picnic, where William Holden and Kim Novak come together dancing under the strung lanterns -- a scene my sister-in-law said she re-enacted at parties with her first husband when they were married at that time.

They dance to "Moonglow". Two 'wounded' people try to salve one another. (Of note, Roz Russell wants Holden, too, but is deeply frustrated and then scornful, drunkenly tears his shirt; Susan Strasberg wants him, too, but is a precocious teen and comes to mope at not being able to vie with her beautiful sister; Kim herself wanting to be valued for something more than only her 'dull-minded' beauty-pageant looks).

The 45 RPM recording of this, from the movie, was overlaid (as was the scene) with The Theme From Picnic (you remember, ". . . on a picnic morning/ without a warning . . ."). Did Steve Allen write that theme, those words? I bought it on a lark, way back when, but not more than a handful of years after the movie. Summer. May Company. Second Floor, to the north of the escalators.

Let's Get Lost

You and I are here to cull through gossip and look for intrigue or maybe just 'get a good buy' -- and wind up merely saying 'goodbye'. And to sing.

Why is it worth our while to do this? If this is an electronic artifact for later on, how do we know it's worth anything? That we're worth anything?

Here's one take: I'm both best judge and worst judge. Worst, because I'm tied so very close and find importance in both the matter on which I write and the style in which it comes to be written. That precludes any response from anyone else. I suppose the fact that what I write is being written diaristicly and would not be bought even if it were for sale is a prima facie case that it is worth little, at least from our modern commercial perspective.

But best judge, I am, because I'm nearest the vibration of all the strings, I'm feeling all the nuances (sounded aloud or not) of the music that plays through my system. Only a solipsistic virtue, but not negligible.

In writing for the 'whoever', even though we're lost, we last.

Zench'anyabyumDharmabum

Me dit tacite? Non dans. Pas. In Portland, soon, the store opens and the merchandise pointing to New Age ways sells. This man walks and browses and prices. Should there be a meditation cushion, something for a quiet room, its price gets eyed.

The point to meditation, if I may tentatively say, is to remove us from the complex mental tasks that frustrate our physiology built for rest and only once-in-a-while immediate fright-resolution.

We butt against mental irresolvables. Against such nagging are constructed peace virtues. Simply to become aware of that which is immediately, naturally, happening around one's seated person. Noticing it all, but not 'rethinking' any of it. Catching the whole of it, but regarding it only for its passingness. Handling none of it, phenomenally noting the entirety of it.

Since internal legerdemain is our forte, breaking with it comes with great difficulty.

Work, love, home: all these come with 'responsibility', meaning as much complex burden as can just reach the edge of confusion.

SF, by day and by night, shaped thoughts for me, yet despite its Far Eastern overlay, its Beat bruises, its comfortable history of hip layback and Dharma rejection of commercial mindset and blanched-out conformism -- despite that, my mind works at near-paranoid chessmove expectation rates that require a Dalai Lama's worth of meditation.

O, My! Ohhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . . . . .

HUMAN ACT

Where opportunities rise
opportunities open

Given portals
threshold to pass

Love: the give-and-take of politics
politics: forced love

The Boomer Way

Listening as I am to a couple of Puppini Sister virtuoso-styled 'retro standard' albums -- and not being a drinker, but remembering that dreamy, boozy, self-satisfied fullness reachable toward the end of a six pack chasing down dinner's two or three chardonnays and knowing that a bold Amontillado would stare me down, my face to its hutch -- listening thus, nothing called out more loudly than the megaphone of the game Cheer Squad on the alumni website.

While the school site yielded maps and a few archaic photos and a shard or two of recognizable visual cues of 'Beatles Spring', the alumni site produced gold the envy of the Sierra Madre. Permit me to go a bit statistical?

'MEMORIES OF' PER GRADUATION YEAR (1960s)

Year - 'Memorials Noted'

60-47

61-21

62 -34

63 13

64- 3

65 -4

66 - 1

67 - 2

68- 1*

69- 6*

*Person memorialized in 1968 also appearing for 1969

It could simply be a reflection of school spirit that explains the higher reported numbers in the early block.

One might note, though, that those graduating in 1960 attained age 65 somewhere around or before last New Year's Eve. Were one imaginative to visualize a graph based on these figures, a slope would rise the farther back in time one went, angularly sharp beginning with those age 62 this year, with modest plateau before gazing at the sun on its decline in the west, just where your uplooking eyes meet the worry of your wrinkled forehead.

.

QUIET MICKEY

reclining mouse on floor slab

my lungs caught in a small cold
 
why did it die there on its back
 
the cough coming up with minor phlegm
 
not age, not cat bites or tears
 
my kleenex downward catching it
 
the gravity of its non-motion
 
the gravity of my stare


.

The Grit Catching In The Spaces Of Space

Wisdom party. Packet of gurus. Thoughts into the ether. Force them into the field. Kinship with the invisible. The 'Other': shadow within Oneself. Racket of diary, all for one, is one. The impetus of 'nature' the desire for self-differentiating. Looking into the face of the All, carrying It with us each step. Take this, rationalist: you've stepped too far, too fast. And irrationalist: you dive without looking, a bit like this. All's advance; retrogression's logically impossible, since it's been OUT, and coming back, RETRAVELS.


Nonsense, you say? Poetry gets us nowhere but deeper into the feel of the question.

William F

I watched him, as you did, over the decades -- surely an American fixture. Superb writer, and I suppose, one of the most dangerous debaters of the 20th Century. I loved the intelligence, the unrelenting drive to win, the vocabulary, the imitatable quirkiness, the glimpse of unrepentent Eastern Seaboard wealth, the mental world -- that love of Idea.

But note: his rich soil provided the fields wherein were planted much that should not have been cultivated.

As a devout, conservative Catholic, he could brook no compromise with 'progressive' ideas because they harbored secular -- and routinely, materialist -- assumptions. As a rich man, he saw freedom first as a libertarian, economistic distancing from any centralizing control: in America's case, the Federal Government.

Before I mist over too much about him, I do have to consider that, even in Charlie Rose's clip-tribute to him, Buckley, conceding the errors of McCarthy, still -- still, in his 80s -- maintained that those who demonize McCarthy now are worse.

Yes, the George Will quote from the 80s does tell it: before Reagan, there was Goldwater, and before Goldwater, there was The National Review, and before that the idea gleaming in Buckley's mind. If we take that provenance forward, we come to the opportunistic formulizations of Bush Senior, the crackpot manipulation of Newt Gingrich, the proto-fascism of Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Coulter, and the Messianic reactionary mess of Bush Junior and company.

There. I've dried my tears. Ready to face the world. It now needs re-orienting.

A 'Synoptic Problem'

Which is redacted from which?

Text A: "This is how we elect the fools."

Text B: "This is how we the fools elect."

Modo PoMo, Un Poco

The feeling of being observational and out-of-sync now becomes an almost blushingly fashionable sense of my life experience.

What brings this to the fore? The mulling over on not only the country's current mad policies, but on the mad policies' forced reassessment, like a dope-slapping followed by a cold water spritzer tossed into a moments-before-placid-dinner-party face, by our international friends of what we really may have been all along.

Now it doesn't take 'commie' adversaries to slather on 150 years worth of analytic to make the challenge. Everyone notices the drunk in the department store. All the kids avoid the barking dog. No one can but resent the sour man in a tuxedo who calls you 'you'.

So, the review my sweat-waking naps find themselves pulsing to is the review of my miscresting with the wrong wave, misevaluating as heartthrob a slavish flattery, mistaking as adoration the buckle of weakened knees and the pucker of resentful lips.

Am I the American Baby all the rest made true goo-goo eyes at? The feeling had pride to it. Strong, but clean. Tough, but good. Victorious, but kind. This last go-round has gone toward sobering me and the rest. Is there no 'force of good', no 'force of evil'? Am I myself, as it would seem now, both, contending through agencies for which I am responsible? How much of the 'forces of the universe' am I in their entirety?

If we begin to read our own footnotes, we may see where to read further. To a culmination or to even deeper notes.

KOKOSCHKAMENTO

I hope you didn't think the misunderstanding foolish on either your or my part.

I hope you didn't lose any sleep or fidget or get up and puzzle your dog with your pacing and sitting under a lone lamp with some inert milk.

The smartest student in my night class said, "This isn't what I expected," and talked around what he came to think was sounding like an insult to my ears as my arms crossed and my hand went up to protect my lips and hope, just keep the hope at a distance, because I didn't really need it, did I,

That he wasn't critiquing the prof to the face of the prof

And he wasn't, no, he wasn't, his eyes insisted, widening in the unneeded apology he wasn't really making.

So when the room closed everybody out, and I stutterstepped to my car and gassed the 15 home, and blinked the TV

And jawed old food, and fell to bed,

I didn't think of it again. No, not even now.

.

Songbird A Capella

They talk about the great Jazz Ladies: Ella, Sarah, Billie, and Carmen. Well-chosen. If we keep to the rich world of the African-American, I would nominate other voices quite arguably on their par: Nina Simone and Nancy Wilson.

I've been sampling Ms. Wilson and wandering, seeking the right collection, and, you know? There's But Beautiful, and there are the separate collections with Cannonball Adderley and with George Shearing. The rest are laden with the over-orchestration of the Late 50s/Early 60s.

Why did the musicians go that way? Well, why did the era go 'Rat Pack' and Vegas and Hef? For those younger than the mountains I watched grow in the distance, America once had a sense of legitimate triumph, of being the 'good guys'. We 'earned' big sound, intrusive harmony. So, it seemed right to 'overdo'.

That's not so truly felt today.

Here's my humble suggestion: produce an album of Nancy Wilson sans other musicians altogether. Would that sound too bare? Or give us real music, real greatness? The Lark ascending?

Damnatio Memoriae

Once the new power takes its hold, its grip firm and uncontested, then true criticism begin!

I voice that in the subjunctive, for it is too soon to know what courage we have, what sense of history, what sense of honor and especially justice.

It might be that, once seen for who they are, they will be renamed, and the names they did use be no longer evermore wanted.

That is the psychology of melodrama and legend. We will live with the names and the personages, and they will still have vocal defenders.

Some hour I will walk into near desert and hold turquoise.