From A, Awake in the Dark, his wonderful collection of film essays, to Z, Z-Man, the unforgettable character in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which screenplay Roger co-wrote with the equally unforgettable Russ Meyer–Roger Ebert lived an exemplary life. Much of that is thanks to C for Chaz, his other half. Yesterday Chaz described his passing as a Transition. Roger, I so hope it suits you. Farewell!
The reproducible human being has been in the literature at least since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was written in 1931. Most of the humans in his imagined future were not born, but decanted from a vessel whose chemical mix and hospitability depended on the caste of its embryo. The lower caste zygotes were subjected to “Bokanovsky’s Process” which cause the fertilized egg to take twinning up to as much as 96-fold.
Much later there was a richly imagined story by James Tiptree, Jr. (the nom de plume of Alice Sheldon, who kept her gender a secret from the science-fiction community and fooled even Isaac Asimov, who corresponded with “him” and referred to “him” as Tip), entitled “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” This was a future without men, and very few distinct women, who had to repopulate the Earth with their clones. Then three guys from three hundred years ago, time-warp slingshotted by the Sun, show up…
I’ve had a brief go at a clone story. The one new thing I was bringing to the party was the notion that if extensive human cloning was taking place, there would be a process called Twisting that would afford every clone something absolutely unique to her- or himself. The clone would then choose a unique name. I imagined, among other things, a Gary, Indiana populated entirely by Garys, who would jet off to wild weekends in Helena, Montana, poplated entirely by Helenas…
I have a feeling that DNA preservation is going to be big in coming decades; and, legal or not, high-profile folks (such as Mohandas K. Gandhi) might, willingly or not, be cloned, perhaps over and over again. Thus a semi-doodle of a person in lotus position bloomed into this weird Cirque du Soleil of cloned Gandhis.
Here are the words:
GreatSoul–Bapu–some roots vedic
All recordings are not vinyl
New-found tech from Chi to Vilno
Darkest dreams of Saint & Villain
Here we walk a gene-pooled vale
In our quest; seek verities
Would a cadre of Gandhis be helpful in saving civilization? I can ask that question, but I’m not arrogant enough to think I can answer it.
I have known Jack Suda since early grade school. He was the first Asian person I ever saw, live; and my unknowing kid-brain thought there was something terribly wrong with him, just as it thought the air had been let out of my ninety-year-old great-grandmother’s breasts the first time I saw her. But back to Jack. He was a raconteur before his teens, which seems impossible; he could talk about the most pedestrian thing and infuse it with storytelling magic. Several times I had the privilege of sitting in the afternoon at Glendale High School, waiting for the late bus to come, listening spellbound to Jack spin the tapestry of recent days. And all I can clearly remember of all that talk, forty years later, is the phrase “Coke bottle.”
The photo source of this page is from shots taken at a mini-high-school-reunion a couple of weeks ago. Since we last saw each other Jack has been a bodybuilder and a resort-level chef. His vitality, and his face a little, reminds me of Keye Luke in the classic TV series KUNG FU.
This is not a page decrying Protest, but a particular category of Protester. Genuine Protest–as practiced by Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and other fine folks who put themselves at risk for a greater good–makes the world go round. But the “protester” who wouldn’t have anything to show John Lennon when he sings “We’d all love to see the plan”–stop wasting your time and ours, is my advice.
The other side of Protest’s coin is Advocacy. It’s fine to Naysay, IF you can Yeasay as well.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get down from my ivory soapbox–and Actually Do Something. Thanks for listening!
It has been fun and frenzied, Friends. But today I decided that enough was enough, and that the one-time-a-day posting would end today. Hail, Farewell, and Goodby to that.
(NOT April Fool! in the traditional sense. I ended the one-time-a-day posting by posting TWICE, for the first time, today. Ain’t I a Stinker.)
Instrument/Expression
Ideas love to live–give them de Luxe
Nestiferous environments for flux
Suspend your mind in trans-galactic soup
To raise it from a flattened-worldly stupor
Refect, reflect, refract, rephrase, re-lase
Usurp a surface with that scribe which flays
Mount bold campaigns upon a sturdy chassis
Elongate meatafours unto kolbassi
Nu AveNews WILL, O PEN, up a rho
Tend rouse of crabbage till your crop is grown
Notes: “Kolbassi” is much better known as Kielbasa. Nu and Rho are letters of the Greek alphabet. Ave is Latin for Hail. A Google search of “nestiferous” yielded 23 results this morning, while “pestiferous” clocked in at over 136,000. “Crabbage” is in the Urban Dictionary.
Since the subject was Instrument/Expression, I threw in a whimsical review of two pencils I used recently. One is the Staples store brand, the other the Dixon Ticonderoga (Yellow in this case; I prefer Black, though, just because it looks more Darth Vaderish). The two cats and their surrounds are drawn by the pencils they’re labeled with.
This page came from the notion that since oceangoing vessels have traditionally been named after women, and thought of as women, and that airplanes are vessels that go into the ocean of atmosphere, those airplanes are women. Three terms specific to flight arrangements are therefore seen in a different, skewed perspective.
Layover
Low means a Moo
Air is to move
You’ll be a groover
Overflow
Olga put the Off in Scoff
Vera put the LOL in Maillol
Ella got a boff way boffo
Rita went in heat at Heathrow
Overbook
Ouches w/Job
Voices like lobo
Emulate mayo
Rye is OK
Every year a subset of America goes a little crazy-with-the-flow in a phenomenon called “March Madness.” This is the sixty-four best college basketball teams engage in an elimination tournament so that they become thirty-two, then the Sweet Sixteen, then the Elite Eight, then the Final Four. Alas, the team of my alma mater, the University of Arizona, just got eliminated.
But at least the tragedy was fodder for a journal page, and a deeply allegorical one at that. Even the acrosticization reflects March Madness in its wild interlocking of names and conditions.
When I was a kid there was a show on Saturday called “ABC Wide World of Sports.” Each show had an opening montage with an overvoice declaiming “The thrill of Victory…the agony of Defeat.” (RIP Jim McKay, who was really James Kenneth McManus, host of the show, who was at the 1972 Olympics in Munich when the brutal slaying of Israeli athletes took place. Not to digress, but I think MUNICH is every bit as important a movie to see as SCHINDLER’S LIST.)
This page is in two disproportionate parts: DAYBREAK (The Thrill of Victory) and UPDATE (The Agony of Defeat). Here are most of the words.
— D A Y B R E A K —
UnDEFEATed is my college
EYELASH batting carnaL knowledge
LOTTEries are won & lost
Battles grim; IMPASSES crossed
Craft REENTERS atmosphere
Gazes STEELY show no fear
Phoenix/TEMPE/Mesa leer
— U P D A T E —
Buzzer-BEATen was my team
OLEO has smudged a dream
BoOKRAcks filled w/tomes of woe
cast aSIDE the Place & Show
Heartbroke horns of DiESEls blow
I’ll be okay in a few days, honest.
expenditures
i spend a piece of paper
arresting vagrant thoughts
that soar and drip and caper
and sleep on Army cots
i also spend attention
on getting them undense
on aiding their ascension
on helping them make sense
but they’re so argumentative
that everything’s a joke
my editing is tentative
and thus i end up broke
sore sour crow came eros (quintuple acrostic)
saints & their eclectic mercies share
old metaphors that bring a cross to bear
recursion’s curves so sinners may then go
enjoy their shadows where they’re apropos
i mist you
i drop a fog
of passing days
on what we had
to give a glaze
to soften pain
and angst to blur
and make the harsh
ness disapurr
Breasts are many things. They are definers of mammals. They are enablers of the continued existence of human beings. They are life-threatening catchers of rogue cells. They are distractions, enticements, modified sweat glands, fabric stretchers, objects of desire, objects of derision, objects of adiposity, curiosity, virtuosity–but let’s get on with this post. Here is the page I made yesterday, which is about a specific type of breast, the enhanced breast, and about the instrument of its enhancement, the silicone implant.
Here are the words to the tricky, brain-busting quadruple acrostic:
Stuff cabbage–check! Stuff sausage–yes! stuff silicone? Ten-four
Quick-bobble will make wobblers with more perk than neoprene
Unlike that I Love Lucy star with monogram VV
Implanteds get invited to the finest posh soiree
Some grace a this-month centerfold or ad in social media
Help adolescent boys get off and make a Grandpa swell
Enduring fame may not be hers but O the current melee
Delights that ditzy Jersey girl whose bra size is DD
For the most part I am against breast-enhancement surgery. It seems invasive, dangerous, and barbaric to me. But for a wonderful friend of mine, subjected to a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and various other tortures of the damned, it may provide a semblance of normalcy and rebelonging, and I’m all for that.
One with Clay, Image and Text 