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hawk EYED

May 18, 2013
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I confess (or reconfess; my old brain is getting repetitive): I have voyeuristic tendencies. Left to my base desires, I would be a blatant Looky-Lou. Instead, I am a discreet Looky-Lou–certainly more discreet than what you see when you do an image search on Ogling, which I did as part of research for this page.

People like to watch, but people also like to be civilized. It is a tug-of-war.

Here are the words to the double acrostic. NOTE: in my younger days I pronounced it OH-gulled. I now pronounce it AH-gulled.

hooded glances may disturb as much as cast or stye
aspirations and implied intent provide the why
wanton feral human WANTING makes a mind to boggle
knowledge of the Ogle-force demonds that IT be ogled

Ref-Rig-Era-Tor Art

May 17, 2013
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The invention of the Post-It has made the creation and curation of Refrigerator Art Galleries a fairly common practice, at least in my crowd. And refrigerator magnets–either the kind that hold paper to the reefer door or the sticky-fronted kind you can adhere your image to–make presentation an ever-movable feast.

Last June I co-featured at Caffeine Corridor, and gave gift bags that contained one refrigerator magnet each, and each unique. Here is the all-at-once:

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Synopsis Symphony

May 16, 2013
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Supposedly there are only a few stories, and we ring endless changes on them. I don’t think that’s true, or maybe it’s true to a crude extent only.

Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS is a cautionary tale, just as the original story of Prometheus was. Much more recently, “Blood Music” by Greg Bear takes the premise to a wonderfully horrifying extreme. An Internet search will lead the curious reader to a synopsis, and a more curious reader to the “gray goo” concept.

We are an increasingly synoptic culture. So many things demand our attention! Why, I myself am demanding your attention at this very moment! I better keep it brief!

Words:

SING, O MUSE, of summ’d-up stories
Yawners, t h r i l l e r s, allegory
Nasty fall or heartmelt gem
OMG-er: booze/buff/hemp
Parabol that’s fulla Pooh
Sappy RomCom: thrice-pitch’d woo
If/then/else in Kind or Mean
Sapience: Aye, THERE’s the key

I used “parabol” instead of “parable” to give a flavor of arc to the story.

“Pooh” does and does not refer to a certain Bear of Little Brain that I’ll always have fondness for, even though my hero Dorothy Parker scorned him and his chronicler.

“If/then/else” will be familiar to those who indulge, even to the slightest degree, in computer programming. “If/then/else,” I submit, is the distillation of Story to the barest of bones.

“Sapience” means Wisdom. Our species has the taxonomy “Homo sapiens.” Riiiiggggghhhht.

Coronation Barrenness: a Challenge Met

May 11, 2013
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coronation

This was written and performed at the {9} Gallery for the Caffeine Corridor poetry event last night, May 10, 2013. Judy Green-Davis gave me the word Coronation and I wrote it about six poets before my Open Mic performance of it. (This is the capsule version; a previous post of mine seems to be lost to the ethersphere.)

Rest In Peace, Ray Harryhausen

May 8, 2013
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Peter Jackson and George Lucas both cite this late, lamented man as the one who made what they did in LORD OF THE RINGS and STAR WARS possible. And Nick Park (hmmmm–double acrostic possibility!), creator of Wallace and Gromit, says he was “one of the true greats.”

I will never forget the fight with the skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS. What artistry! What fine four-dimensional sculpting!

Here are the words to the “Rest In Peace Ray Harryhausen” acrostic:

Reliable magic makes crowds ooh & aah
Ethereal sunbeams become Shangri-La
So sculpt a Medusa & snake up her hair
Then rattle the skeletons Jason can’t bear
Intriguing ensnaring of slow & unwary
Nefarious creatures cf C. J. Cherryh
Put Mighty Joe Young in a place like Samoa
Enjoy fleeting fortune as weird as an emu
And what kind of hope say the murmuring trees
Can memory seemingly borne on a breeze
Endure for the man who gave FREEZIN’ a reason

Here are the words to the “Stop Motion Animation” acrostic:

SpecTACular ocular transcend of medium
Spellbinding bean-counters to charm & ungreedy ’em
Sporadical life-likeness fast- or slo-mo
Tumultuous mayhem as red as merlot
Osiris and Horus and fine Nefertiti
Occulting Rosettas with sketch & graffito
Put hard work & vision in–pay as you go
Proclaim a new wonderment of the unknown
Please let us acknowledge the seeds he has sown

Rodman Edward Serling, or Remember the Twilight Zone Where…?

May 4, 2013
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A popular conversation-opener at Unit VI Elementary in the mid-60s was “Remember the Twilight Zone where…” The Twilight Zone was the gold standard of Cool TV Shows. How tragic that its creator, narrator, and author of the majority of its episodes, Rod Serling, died long before his hair turned completely gray. He would have been Serling Silver.

The sad fact is that Rod Serling was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes and work, work, work. He died in a hospital of a different kind of broken heart. But his family life, as described by his daughter, Anne Serling, was rich with love and high good humor. I’ve just read an advance copy of Anne’s memoir, AS I KNEW HIM: MY DAD, ROD SERLING, and good Heavens, I wish I had met and known him. Read the book, which is heartily endorsed by Carol Burnett, Robert Redford, and Betty White, and you too will wish my wish.

Appropriately for a page dedicated to the six-Emmy-award-winning creator of The Twilight Zone, I write this at 4:14 AM local time.

At the upper right is an ersatz Twilight Zone intro, which, if you’re a fan of the show, you will not be able to read without hearing Mr. Serling’s unforgettable narrative voice.

Here are the words to the acrostic:

Risky business, television–hey, ask a man who knows
O those censored teleplays–the jerks would predispose
Dimwits dumbing down unto a low denominator
Mangled messages with wounds so often proving fatal
Ah, but this man persevered with WORK fulfilling wishing–in
Noting his sad passing we must add that he’s gone fishing

National Rationale

May 2, 2013
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In grade school they hit us with Nationalism, and they hit us hard. We pledged allegiance to the flag, and then we marched in place to “You’re a grand old flag/You’re a high-flying flag/And forever in peace may you wave/You’re the emblem of/The land I love/The home of the free and the brave…” The song later boasted “where there’s never a boast or a brag…”

Miss Heath, the pouter-pigeon of a Chorus teacher, wasn’t done with us yet. Here’s one she played so many times I still remember it 50 years later, though I’ve never heard it since:

This is my country,
Land of my birth;
This is my country,
Grandest on Earth.
I pledge thee my allegiance,
America the Bold,
For this is my country
To have and to hoooooooold!

So what’s wrong with a little patriotic zeal? Well, it perpetuates Us as opposed to Them. And, folks, we’re all of us on Earth in the same leaky boat right now. We have much to do, we world citizens, or, say most climate scientists of repute, things are going to get tipping-point uninhabitable before this century’s end.

My modest proposal, implied via my latest journal page, is that we change focus.

Here are the words to the acrostic:

Notorious illusions make us fear
And nictitate our vision–make unsclera
The blinding process yields an idiot
Invading Homeland’s soul & presidio
Oppression strikes peones y patrón
Nulls personality with harsh persona
And M I C R O —L O C A L I Z E S commonweal
Let’s focus on Cassatt & Ming & Schiele

Lacrimal Ductwork

April 29, 2013
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This page has an odd provenance: I’d just eaten French toast. There was a puddle of butter/syrup on the plate. A bagel was available to sop it up (Goodness GRACIOUS, what a Glutton), but the puddle didn’t want to cooperate. Then I remembered that magic of physics known as Capillary Action, and set two bagel-quarters inside-down and waited; lo, they did absorb. This led me to read up on Capillary Action via Wikipedia, and that led to lacrimal ducts, and acrostic compulsion led to Lacrimal Ductwork.

The acrostic defies pure rhyming, but the first thing that occurred to me was that “you” rhymes with the “goût” of the French expression “chacun à son goût,” which may be translated to “each to his own.” Then the first line sprang to be, but the third line could only be near-rhymed, and, Heaven help me, I could not resist trying “hermaphroditic.” This led to thinking about how Man’s Inhumanity to Man might be cured with androgyny (anyone under forty read THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. LeGuin?), and then the poem pushed me aside completely and wrote itself.

Here are the words:

LIQUIDITY may not need Liquid
And TRAGEDY may not need U
CAUSALITY’s hermaphroditic
RIGHTEOUS? Chacun à son goût.
IDEALLY we’d never kow-tow
MISANTHROPY makes us so do
ANDROGYNY’s a higher power
LUCIDITY unkinks a Kook

I don’t think it’s too much a stretch to relate all this to Lacrimal Ductwork, which involves Crying.

Here Abby, or Near Abby

April 28, 2013
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Here are the words to the acrostic:

Happily en route to Appalachia
Evergreen Adventuress’s job
Raconteuse with nary wail nor sob
Earning fine time being gently-laughin’-ey

It was unusual panhandling. Most often I’ve been tapped for money; sometimes I was hit up for a bus pass or transfer. This is the first time I was asked to purchase and donate multiple vitamins.

I am not an easy touch. My younger brother had more than one bout of homelessness, and had his HOMELESS/HUNGRY/PLEASE HELP cardboard sign; yet on at least one occasion he told me NOT to give money to some cardboard-signers unless I wanted to enable their continued hard-drug use. Also, I am congenitally stingy–might as well own up. But here I had an opportunity to get something in return. The vitamins were $12.99 plus tax; I think I got my money’s worth.

Anybody in the Etherverse want to render their opinion about panhandling, this one in particular or generally? Here’s your chance!