22 april 06 - MK 19 podcast

Greetings,

Yes, MK 19 is available for your listening bewilderment.

"The Priest Confesses," is a novel excerpt. It occurs during deliberations and dialogues on the Iraq War.

Knights of the round table party with generals, scientists, mad dogs, orphan children released on bail, and an Arabic poet as they share their wisdom and satirical insights. Flaming hellfire missiles destroy a killer grizzly bear in Alaska. A priest breaks down and begs for mercy.

Peace.

16 april 06 - General Discontent Tells Bumsfield to Take a Hike

(editor's note - this is an amazing, true excerpt from A Century Is Nothing)

“Where does The Wasteland end?” said Elliot.

“The end is the beginning,” sighed a mystic.

“The inside is the outside veiled in mystery,” laughed a child playing with DNA building blocks.

“We need to make sure, absolutely sure we connect the dots between 9/11 and Iraq,” said a military analyst. “If we are successful the politicians will get out of the way and give us a ton of money - maybe even a glorious $250 billion or more to rebuild what we’ve destroyed. It’s our way or hit the heavily mined highway of death. You’re either with us or against us is our message to the world.”

“Yes,” barked a general, “these malicious vermin are the obstacles that stand between the Iraqi people and security. They are terrorists - no, they are rebels - no, they are freedom fighters, no, they are guerillas, no, they are...insurgents...”

“Whatever. The road through Babylon is endless. This campaign will be well received. We will liberate the oppressed,” said an old white haired man named Regime wearing a pacemaker. He loved a girl from Wyoming with a big spread.

Esteemed well qualified and duly elected members of a House on Main Street and their colleagues from a Congress seeking another term and automatic pay raises looked at him with contempt, disdain, incredulity, suspicion, amazement and pure terror.

“We ain’t in no fucking jungle on this Jack,” sneered a nautical seal looking for approval from his ringmaster. “This war is on track jack.”

“Collateral damage is a sorry fact of life,” said a man with a whip. He cut through red tape and everyone got out of his way.

“Bring them on I say,” yelled Bumsfeld. “Our God is bigger than their God for God’s sake. This is a crusade. Look, it’s easy, here’s what we do. We know the United Nations is useless, so, we’ll create false claims of nuclear and biological threats which plays into the 9/11 fear.”

Curveball came in for short relief. “I know where it is.”

“Where what is?” asked Bumsfeld.

“All the Iraqi mobile labs full of toxins and nerve agents.”

“For an alcoholic spy and fabricator you have a lot of nerve,” screamed the Tenant. He used to be Lew but now he was just a plain Jane Tenant from a housing project. He was on a speaking tour making big bucks when it happened.

“Look,” said Curveball. “I gave the Germans the high hard intel stuff. But they don’t understand the American pastime. They said I was past my prime. They co-opted me with women and booze. A hell of a lethal combination, let me tell you. They grilled me over a hot flame. I was beside myself. I became a double agent.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Bumsfeld, “and your mother wears combat boots. Anyway, then, we distort flimsy evidence from a worthless intel source saying the dictator is an immediate and direct threat to our national security. He’ll attack us in 45 minutes.”

“But,” said the President, “that won’t give me time to finish reading the story about goats to the elementary kids.”

“No butts sir,” said his spokesperson. “You’ll just have to skip a few pages.”

“Isn’t this strategy too vague and deceptive?” asked a garbage collector.

“Vague and deceptive stuff happens all the time,” said the man cracking his cool whip.

“What planet are you from, amigo and where's your green card? We have the national media eating out of our filthy hands with all this flag waving patriotic bullshit. So, we con the world with these fictitious stories about the dictator as a threat to us with his weapons of mass distraction and start a war to remove him from power.”

"Can we have yellow cake from Niger and eat it too?" wondered a baker.

"Why not," slobbered Bumsfield. "Just don't get any on 'ya."

(to be continued)

14 april 06

Greetings,

New images in the March-April 06 Gallery are available for your visual perusal. Hunting down the days, wandering, discovering neighborhoods. Documenting how people survive. The arrow advertises an internet cafe. Just what he needs now. Bandwith or without.

"Let's appreciate all the cruelty and beauty without hope or fear."
Peace.

13 april 06 - Samuel Beckett

Greetings,

Howdy doody a bunch of letters dreaded to be threaded as word pearls reveal appeal soft light vapor clouds feeling compressed between warm and cool air dancing around emerald forest mountains, caressing their invisable formless form in a Chinese watercolor painting filled with delicate brushstrokes?

Where less is more...the gulf between our desires and the language in which they find expression. The absurdity of human existance.

Samuel Beckett's 100th year anniversary, April 13, 1906.

"Personally, of course, I regret everything."
"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
"We are all born mad. Some remain so." - Waiting for Godot
"The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle." - Molloy
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Worstward Ho

So, we went to lunch (after the initial blog post) and opened our writing/sketch book at random to page 98 and wa-la! discovered 4 jottings on Beckett - fragmentary personalities in the unconscious stimulated his sense of characterization (Jung)...Wilfred Bion's "Grid System" - group therapy and schematic structure of his writings...Beckett took his sense of structure, synthesis and abstraction from chess...alienation, untruth, justify unhappiness...existential and the futilty to desire a state of paradise.

"Endgame" by Beckett. Commentary by Andrew Hugill, 1992.

"Chess is habit-forming and played to the exclusion of all activity: a kind of custom and excision. In this it parallels the work of these two masters of the art of silence.

Most commentators remark that the play, with its few characters, references to past struggles and sense of weariness, resembles a chess endgame. A few mention Duchamp and Halberstadt's book, others ignore chess altogether. The precise character of the position, in which Black cannot win but only delay, is never discussed, perhaps because of its rarity. Duchamp commented:

"The endgames in which it works would interest no chess player...even the chess champions don't read the book, since the problem it poses only comes up once in a lifetime. They're end-game problems of possible games but so rare as to be nearly Utopian."

(From the NYT - 26 March 06)...The most elaborate and upbeat theory came from Ms. Paula Vogel, director of the M.F.A. playwriting program at Brown University who declared that "Beckett enabled women to become playwrights."

"I wonder what would've happened had Beckett existed as a colleague, or a contemporary, or even as a forerunner to Virginia Woolf," Ms. Vogel said. "What would've happened if she had seen the ability to dramatize stasis, where drama was no longer about the conflict of men in action, but was instead a conflict of perspectives? I think Virginia Woolf would've become a playwright.

"The huge gift that Beckett gave to theater, to women playwrights in particular, is our notion of dramaturgy: a non-Aristotelian, nonapocalyptic sense of time, sheer chronicity that stretches to eternity."

Samuel Beckett

10 april 06 - MK 18 podcast

Greetings,

MK 18 features some thoughts on a great reference book - "The Arabian Nights, A Companion," by Robert Irwin, - framed stories, motifs, history - and a note on "Wolf Totem," by Jiang Rong, a Beijing writer. It'll be published this year by Penquin.

We also mention Wu Man, a Chinese Pipa player who recently performed in NY. Her style extends from traditional to jazz based free form. She's recorded with Yo Yo Ma and the Kronos Quartet.

Lots of thunder and lightning here recently. The Gods and Goddesses were bowling and making images using high intensity strobes. Illuminating.