some thoughts on why the liberal- left is so ineffective:
There's a young woman named Colette who began a piece in her zine looks yellow, tastes red with this:

Last year I was taking a woman's studies class. I sat there for several hours a week with the same group of people, presumably reading the same essays and texts, hearing the same lectures and conversations, etc. And I remember one day near the very end of the semester where one girl raised her hand in our discussion section and prefaced what she was saying with a very loud and clear, "Well, I'm not a feminist or anything, but..." (on to prove, to her credit, a well-thought-out, enlightened point). What?

I could proudly say that I don’t tiptoe around the word feminist. I could say that I try to be quick to point out that assuming that "feminist" means "militant, man-hating feminist" is not unlike assuming "Christian" means "militant fundamentalist, abortion-doctor murdering Christian." But I know there is a lot I tiptoe around...

My initial wisecrack response to this was, "Well, militant feminists don't really hate men anyway; they're too busy hating other feminists." But a deeper thought was that feminists, despite all their diversity and all their conflicts with each other, are something of a social category – not that they all come from the same social class or social group, but that they are a social group – "feminist" – in the way that in a high school "preps" is a social group, and "jocks" and "dirtbags" and "skaters." And a woman who's a potential supporter of feminist social and political ideas might nonetheless say, "I'm not a feminist or anything" because emotionally and socially she simply doesn't feel like a feminist or identify with feminists. And she might not want to engage in political activity with feminists if she feels different and isolated around feminists, or frightened by them, or repelled by them. If she believes that she'll have to give up important parts of herself to become a feminist, then she's not going to become one.

Anyway, substitute the word "leftist" for "feminist" and you'll see what I'm driving at: "leftist" is something of a social category, and those not in the category don't want to make common cause with the left. (Yes, and of course I've greatly oversimplified, "left" is a ridiculously vague term for disparate sets of people, etc.) The left can't overcome being a kind of counterculture; it attracts people who want to be leftists, and so the attraction only reaches so far ....

This is Frank Kogans opinon , one i think all leftists should consider .

Today in the Globe and Mail there was an article on the demorcraticazation of news . It seems like everyone has a cellphone and a still camera or a video camera . The first question newsman ask now is who has the best footage, more often then not its not a journo . The interent has been my source. Espically through bullentin boards and instant messages/email . Personal memory, speculation, conventinal news and unanswerable questions are piling pell mell. With the net there is at least some organzational structure .

That said there are gigs in Washington, New York , London

Red Cross accepts Pay Pal payments.

please consider sending something to Doctors Without Borders who are doing triage.

Side note , today the islamic students assocation was handing out buttons today. They said " We are all immigrants "

There are 1100 dead already. We do not know how many dead in the world trade center. I think Geoff Parkes. Questions are ones we all should be asking.
I will try to answer them myself later !

I know this seems petty with all that is happening. I know that 10k people have died. I know that we are living in a state of fear and panic now. I know we will never be safe. But what i keep thinking about is the art . The World Trade Center had a well curarted collection of Modern Classics. Almost 1000 peices of art will never be seen again. This is a tragedy almost as important as the burning of Alexendra.

Thanks Be To God .

Everyone i know on the net has got their act together

They have spread informtion and compassion.

In the evil and pain that this has spawned it is good to know their is a community that calls familes and makes sure everyone they know themselves and through people is safe.

I want to say a million things but my energy is low

Tomorrow

But one thing that is sort of realvent that i want everyone to know


I do telephone surveys two days a week for the eighth largest market research firm in the world. This evening, eight hours after the bombing, we did a survey on the american reaction to the bombing. The survey consisted of twenty questions. 8 of those were dealing with Bushes preformance and the republicans in general. I do not know who commiosned the survey

I may lose this job for posting it but it is odd enough to mention.

New York


I have an essay when i try to figure out how i feel. Tonight i had to conduct a survey about how americans felt concerning how they felt. Eight hours after it happened.

I have to rush off , school and all but here is a paragraph on lit !

Mishimas Patriotism

This 10 page short story expresses everything Mishima is both praised and condemned for. It features intense nostalgia for a martial nationalism that may not have existed. A subservient woman who does what she is expected to do. A thick current of blood and sex. all of this would not be very interesting if Mishima was not an expert prose stylist . These pages are not only an almost perfect ascending climax , suspense that goes so fast to the farthest extension of its logical conclusions . It is also deeply poetic. It is self contained and elegant. Only occasionally do the banalities of everyday life interrupt the tension. They are not the comic relief expected in Western Fiction. They seem to be rocks in a garden. Something to ponder instead of where the lines of sand are going. At first the blood gushing dual hari kari seems to be a shock . But there are clues. The sand lines are confusing but if your eyes are strong enough you can follow them. I have always wondered if this story was a rehearsal. But it is always dangerous to assume Autobiography even if its intentional.

Yesterday we went to the largest corn maze in Alberta. It was two twentysomething men and a score of suburban familes . The kind who Dad thought it might be fun and brought the kiddies. The families took clue sheets that told them to go left or right depending on posts throughout the maze. So every so often there was a bottleneck while everybody tried to figure out the trivia question. However we dealt with it by instinct . This way we completed the maze in a record 39 minutes.

Coming back from the maze i was at some greasy spoon. I was using the washroom and this 6 year old was beside me. He looked over at my head and said "Does it grow like that" I had to disappoint him . He then asked me how i did it . I told him and he said " I am going to tell my mom i want one !" I hope he did .

Coming home on the train , another kid (a bit younger) yelled red and giggled. His mother chastised him for pointing out the obvious . I told the mother i did not mind and i thought he would not have the guilelessness for long. It should be something admired .

What i am listening to today

The Rib- Jeanne C Riley (single)

Live at Folsom Prison -Johnny Cash

Music for Trains- Steven Reich

Stars Forever -Momus

What I am Reading
Moo-Jane Smiley (not as good as A Thousand Acres but not much could be )

The Body Electric- Edited by The American Poetry Review

The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf

My Antonia - Willa Cather

Art I Love right now
Agnes Martin

Mondrains Early Crysanthamums

Malevichs Suprematist Paintings ( the ones done between 1916 and 1918)

Jack Piersons Fuck You ( he collects discarded commercial signage and makes new phrases from them )

Last Movie I Saw
6 Kubricks back to back on Movie Central (a cable channel) ( Spartacus, Lolita , Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut)

Quotes
'Why hate artists who show America like it is, when you can hate America instead?'

Momus

Britney -- like i said that one night, it's like screwing america. and who hasn't wanted to do at least once?

Ned Radgett

Random Thing
George Crumbs Black Angels is one of the first peices of Modern Classical i loved and one that shocked me out of my complacency . I have seen his Ancient Voices Of Children 5 or 6 times this week and am afraid to pick it up because it cannot be as good as Black Angels. Weird Superstiton, i know

I was called by the Globe and Mail this morning. They wanted to know if i had a subscription. I told them i bought it on the news stand. They asked if i wanted a subscription, which would be cheaper and more convienent. I told them i did not doubt that but again, i really did not want to lose my ritual. They hung up confused. Waking up late on a saturday and walking two blocks to get cinnamon roles , coffee and both national papers then spending the rest of the day in bed reading is pure joy.

Today was good 10 books for 15 bucks in a library book sale (including an old medical text and Dianetics) A wonderful and sensuous haircutting experience. ( they lean in so close first with the buzzing razor and then over you in the sink lathering with that wonderfully smelling shampoo smelling stuff) Swimming more then i usually do (10 laps). Court Food Chinese Food loaded to the gills with msg. (Those little button mushrooms fried up, celery, beef and broccoli , shanghai noodles). I read at mass . I bought two new compact discuss ( Steven Reich and Momus ). A good mellow , low key day.

I would like to mention how much pleasure the almost abstract super close up engravings in medical texts. They always remind me of other science illustrations. Nerves like the effusion patterns in deltas or synapses like atomic diagrams.

As well Dianetics is as unreadable as the Book of Mormon . I never thought i could find a book i could said that about.

Radical Simplicity

its a gift to be simple , its a gift to be free

I guess i have to introduce this piece. These are artists i consider outside the usual traditions of the twentieth century and who think radically about the spirit or make comment on the Mystery . I think there is a shadowed tradition of somberness and severity that is missed when people make the modernist cannon . Some of these people are in the cannon but i think they are all iconoclasts.

Cezanne

In the last years of his life he retreated to the south of france. He gave up his naked woman and sensuous fruit. He painted for close to 20 years endless ( okay maybe 100) variations of Mont Sainte-Victoire .
It is what he saw from his cell like room . These seemed to move from explicit realism to radical cubism. The still lives with pairs fucked up perspective enough to leave clues. But the later landscapes seemed so broken, they still challenge . It is not the erotomania inherent in Picassos minators or Warhols almost autistic playing with icons. It is a slow and ardours progression towards a illogical conclusion.

Malevich

Malevich once replaced an ikon found above the doorframe of Russian Schools with a black square. Later propaganda claimed this was an atheist move. It wasn't. Malevich was a spirtulast who believed that spirit could have no form . His early work , his single squares of non colour indicated a belief in rejecting image. Furthering the revolution, similar to early Christians and Muslims. He mellowed out as the October Revolt solidified. His work just after the Revolution was almost crowded and extravagantly coloured but with the same geometric rigidness. It is a disappointment near his death he reverted to fairly banal genre painting . The iconoclast lost .

Mondrian

Mondrian started painting trees and flowers. Lovely and delicate and almost as light as the snow ; they betray and almost best his japanese icons. He worked as well on trees and a pier and ocean series. All of these he would later reject them as inward or indulgent . His mature work involved the three primary colours and right angles. The lack of Mans interference and right angles equalling right morals seems important. He was in Holland when the Nazis invaded and he made his way by subterfuge to New York. The paintings he painted here are his most energetic. His least monastic and obsessive. Not with the colour (that remained primary) but the form. The thick lines moved closer together and the colours piled on top of each other boldly. Much less less radical then Maleviches change it can be viewed as similar .

Martin

Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan . She moved to New York after college and felt stifled and scared. She fled to Venice and then New Mexico where she has been painting for 30 years. There is a similarity to Saskatchewan , Venice and New Mexico that shows in her work. Her work is simple and luminous. It is often lines in grey shades on variously hued paper and canvas. The similarity that i see in these three places and her work is a holy light. A beauty that slips quickly from your fingers. It is the dawn on sand or ocean or grass fields. A hymn to somber reflection .

Rothko

There are three telling anecdotes concerning Rothko . The first is he is one of the few artists to have a chapel in his name filled with his work. The Second is that he demanded the lighting to be dim and the spacing to be wide when you viewed his work. He considered all of his paintings intimitly connected.
The third was that you took off your shoes when you visited his studio. Often in his paintings there are two colours in the same ranges bleeding, melting , melding into each other and a third colour providing a contrast . It seemed to be a metaphor for finding a way outside of the world. A distancing.

Serra

Serra bisects spaces. He makes the land his own. His early work consisted of almost toppling towers or pell mell piles of Cor Ten. His most famous work was removed because it was inconvienent to office workers. They had to move around a swerving 15 foot tall piece of steel. Serra guides you to awareness. We are blind, we walk with one foot in front of the other to our usual places. Being made to move by 20 tonnes of steel is a fairly obvious shake out of complacency. It does not seem simple but the grace in which he presents it is surprising.

Marfa
flavin and judd

Donald Judd bought an abandoned army base in Marfa. It had mysterious lights that came from the heavens on lucky nights , as well as sun baked prairies amid huge hangers that were beautiful in their concrete and glass utility . He filled it with art that undercut and commented on where they were. Flavin made serial boxes ( often stacked one on top of the other ) painted garish colours or made of galvinzed steel or glass. Flavin makes work out of neon and fluorescent light. He lives in his space and finds ways to distort and shine through it . The colours he uses provide odd shadows which are as much a part of the work as the objects themself. . Judd and Flavin were best friends but had a fight and had not talked in 15 years. When Judd died , Flavin was asked to do a major project at Marfa. He chose to light hallways , entrances and stairwells. The dark dank places where people go for utility now have human created recreations of those Unearthly Lights.

outside my window i am seeing two teenagers in lust. it is sweet. They are dancing in the grass, falling over , giggling. They have been doing this for maybe two hours. I do not think they noticed how long they have been doing this. i have had a really aggravating day. I want something that would make time stop like that. Maybe foregoing cheap nostalgia. Back to eating rice i guess.

Yesterday Saint Isadoire of Seville was made the patron saint of the internet. This is useful but considering I just lost an essay i spent 4 hours on today, why can there not be a Patron Saint of regaining lost work. It is one even non Catholics could find reason to pray to .

Today i am being publsihes. Its a pissant little zine but its good to know my poetry is going out into the world. I have to get to school but i might post something later today.

Henry

The above link is a record of every important day in a 4 year olds life. complete with pictures. sometimes it is what everyone would consider an important day. Like a birthday or a vacation or halloween. sometimes it is moments of everyday pleasure like baking or watching movies or taking a bath. It could have been cute and overly precious. It isn't, it is seet ansd so moving i am almost in tears. Henry is my new hero . I want to eat pancakes and cuddle up to watch Pee Wee and the Powerpuff girls.

www.10newsongs.com">see if this works

I worked on this for an hour. It has been on the web in a message board i frequent but i liked it enough to blog it

Cohen and his new album , sort of , since i have only read the lyrics


I find power in how he views G-d as both mysterious and obvious. His religion and his sex are both immediate and eternal. They come with the waves off Hydra or in the curve of a woman's breast. That it seems all of his debauchery ends up in the white room with the hard wooden bed. How he swings wide between being depraved and being aestiec (sp) . How he expressed the archetypes underneath Judaism , Buddhism , Catholicism and Capitalism.

He does not abandon a belief system when he embraces another one. There is this marvelous story about these Rabonovich Jews coming to rescue Cohen from his sanctuary at Mount Baldy. He brings them to his room. He finds Whisky and Crackers. They drink and talk long into the night. At the end they become frequent visitors to Baldy.
As well i am reminded of his novel Beautiful losers with that great Cree saint Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. She is at a formal dinner the white factors are holding . She spills a glass of wine . Everyone talks to her, tries to comfort her like you would comfort a child. But the wine does not sop up. She weeps and the wine permeates the linens. No one sees the symbol.

That seems to be the essence of Cohen , the politics and tragedy of simple pleasures. The way a "very sweet companion, an angel of compassion , can rub half the world against her thigh. " or that martial introduction to Democracy.

As well there is that voice. The resigned sigh, the lone wolf howl, the wilderness keening. He talked recently about the holiness of domestic chores. I expected the lyrics to this album to reflect that . To be severe . But it does not seem to be that way at all. . I thought it would be an album where he put the whiskey on the shelf and said he was an old man , with out much use for woman. But seeing the lyrics, it seems the opposite. The holy man is down from the mountain, He is going from Israel to Babylon to experenice the pleasures of the flesh before he dies.

Its like these ancients are returning to their sources and making the most powerful work of their career. Bob Dylan is telling us how much he fears impotence and death. How being virile is so important to him. Merle Haggard is telling the young folk not to be stupid. Imparting his wisdom with bitter chastisement. Johnny Cash sounds lonely . Desperate to break something apart and run.

But Cohens album seems to hip and modern and as sexy as ever. Look at that digital cover. ( side note he designs all elements to his CDs and Books , often taking the photographs , as he did in this occasion) They smile slyly and close their eyes blissfully.

The Lyrics suggest a resigning but it seems like that has always occurred in his work. His best songs are in the past tense ( I remember you well in the Chelsea hotel or So Long Marianne). These ones deal with true love slipping past the "sentries of the heart" ( Alexandra Leaving ) or finding soberness in a daze of alcohol . Koanic as always.
I have only read the lyrics but it seems like he has done it again.

A couple of side notes

I chose Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha as my patron after Beautiful Losers

The website for the lyrics is www.10newsongs.com

Two short peices about writers :

Salman Rushdie

So this weekends National Post had an evisceration of Rushdies new novel. I love Rushdie , he is one of my favourite writers. One of the very few who writes with grace and intelligence about Diaspora. His writings seem to travel through time, space and location w. acrobatic ease. He has written both about the lonely consequences of abandoning your homeland ( Midnights Children) and robust satires about being too attached to your homeland ( Satanic Verses ). The latest one, as far as i can gather, is about murder, sex, class war and New York and (more importantly )Ellis Island as a trope. It has a Lolita doll that has made a great intellectual more money then God and the suppression of abuse that made the doll needed . Now the ideas sound exactly like something Rushdie would write about brilliantly . I have not read it but the last one that was savaged (Ground Beneath her feet) is my favourite , so i am excited .

The other interesting thing was that this thread of envy about Rushdie that seemed to permeate the piece. The First column described his troubles and how American Writers have written American Epics . It also mentioned his friendships with Martin Amis, Tina Brown , Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag. Nothing that has anything to do with the book reviewed. The photograph that illustrated this reviews was Rushdie in a tux at some fab event with his new nubile girlfriend . This probably has something to do with the slaughter of the book.

Ginsberg

I am rereading the collected poems of Allen Ginsberg as well as his essay collection. His later poems seem boring, drug addled and self congratulatory . I am desperate for one line that matches the Yawp found in his 5 famous ones from the 50s ( America, Kaddish, Sunflower Sutra , Howl and A Supermarket in California.) None does, as it gets closer to the end, it reverts to this embarrassing sing song dirges. Is this a case of putting away childhood things.

That said his essays his witty, bitter, funny and conversational. He convinces you in a very clever and forward way. Maybe he will be remembered like Gertrude Stein, not as a writer but curator and scenester . Not a bad reputation to die with .

Today i was watching WGN , an LA superstation. It was nothing special and i was using it as white noise while multitasking.Then I saw the the funniest and perhaps saddest juxtaposition since Michael Jackson lectured Oxford about kiddie welfare ( a whole other rant that one)

Disney is Reviving the Electrical Parade . It showed a bright lights and happy children in a jumpcut 30 second Triumph of the Capitalist Will . I thought to myself about Californians Energy Crisis. Perhaps this was not the wisest move from at least a pr point of view . They must really need money.

The next add was a PSA telling Citizens of California to turn off appliances to save money and the mighty infastructure. This caused me to collapse into giggles. How stupid do they think we are that we cannot jump that gap.

I went to another funeral today. I wanted to cry but i could not. Obliged emotion meant someone else was using the thick hankie. Everyone got up and said nice things about the dead. When i die provide bitterness and anger. I don't want cheap tears and false piety . Maybe i will regret saying that in a week. *shrugs*

A little paragraph on my favorite Nick Drake song.

My mother played folk music on her School Issue Record Player. She played Nick Drake and Fairport, The Carthys and all the American Folkies. I am saying this to establish cred, though if the musics good if you heard it on your mothers knee or a VW commerical it doesnt matter.

Nick Drakes Cello Song
The hand drums and the acoustic guitar provide a gentle rythym. His english voice snakes around them, all he says is comfort. Lyrics seem secondary to this lullaby coo. Then at the 2 minute mark to provide a edge of oddness in complacencies lap the cello cuts through things, like barb wire surrounding pastorals.