The Hagfish Chronicles

CapitAl Hill - a little taste of politics

2011-07-20T06:40:00.006-04:00

By Dante DeNavarre

It's time to take back our government from double-dipping politicians and give it to the real citizens: Corporations.

What's it Going to Take?

How in the world are we ever going to fix the most dire, pressing dilemma of our time: Corporate Poverty, and the almost complete absence of Corporate representation in Washington?

Let's Elect Corporations!

Now is our chance, as a free nation, to finally eliminate the useless middleman! Now is the time to end the most notorious bigotry and discrimination in history, and proclaim from the rooftops: Corporations are people too!

Look at the time and effort, not to mention money, wasted in the elaborate pretense of campaigns and elections for a phony representative democracy. Why should We the Corporations have to pay a single dime in bribes to Representatives and Senators who already get an allowance from the taxpayers? All they do, at best, is rubber-stamp what corporations want, and at worst, try to water down corporate will with pricey bells and whistles. Why pay for that? If we could just grow up a little bit, put away our childish toys like the Constitution and accept the things we cannot change, we could save the rich untold billions more, and that is the name of the game, n'est pas?

Appoint Corporations Directly to Government!

Imagine the incredible streamlining of government operations, the efficiency, the clarity!

Ask the corporations which seats they want. Let them pick the committees to chair. Goldman for Finance. KBR for Defense. Exxon for Energy. Let them appoint cabinet and agency heads. Facebook for State. Walmart for Commerce. Bank of America for HUD. ConAgra for Agriculture. Blackwater/Xe for Justice. Monsanto for FDA. Koch for EPA. And let's not forget to allow full participation by both the Religion and Prison Industry sectors, two of the fastest growing Amerikan success stories.

No More Gridlock!

Gone would be the endless partisan bickering, the political posturing of pretending to be a champion of the poor unborn on one side, a champion of the born poor on the other, when none of those insects really matter! The belittled, embattled and embittered Legislature could finally be Free! After putting an end to all the acrimony over campaign donations, accusations of corruption and boring fund-raising dinners they will finally, gratefully, cobwebs clearing, muscles flexing, all stand together and with one clear, resounding voice pass laws like bolts of greased lightning, ending at long last our shameful dependence on domestic jobs, our spineless addiction to peace, our crippling health, environmental and financial regulations, our foolish infatuation with alternative energy, our greedy desire to tax the rich, our irresponsible handouts to small, useless people who are not corporations, the list goes on and on...

Capitol Hill can finally come out of the closet and proudly proclaim its true self, Capital Hill.

More of Mr. De Navarre's work may be seen at OpEd News

When you can't think...don't

2010-02-25T18:59:00.003-05:00

Please Click Image to Enlarge.

Compared to bitmap images, jpegs suck. This is a jpeg.

Placebo- Protect me from what I want

2010-02-23T09:50:00.002-05:00

Presented By:TakeruxN

Protect Me

2010-02-23T09:12:00.004-05:00

Click image to enlarge.

for a span
of time
thin as paper,
she believed
there was still
a reason
for hope.

there wasn’t one
after all.

in a room lit with
dying candles she
crouches, rocking
back and forth
like an ancient crone,
long given to
the means of grieving.

she chants a mantra:

protect me from love.
protect me from love.
protect me from love.

by A. Murray
February 8, 2010

By Love Posessed

2010-02-19T16:49:00.004-05:00

Presented by GOFoxy

When We Dance

Lyrics

If he loved you
Like I love you
I would walk away in shame
I'd move town
I'd change my name

When he watches you
When he counts to buy your soul
On your hand his golden rings
Like he owns a bird that sings

When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings

The priest has said my soul's salvation
Is in the balance of the angels
And underneath the wheels of passion
I keep the faith in my fashion
When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings

I'm still in love with you
[ I'm gonna find a place to live
Give you all I've got to give ]
When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings
When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings

If I could break down these walls
And shout my name at heaven's gate

I'd take these hands
And I'd destroy the dark machineries of fate
Cathedrals are broken
Heaven's no longer above
And hellfire's a promise away
I'd still be saying
I'm still in love

He won't love you
Like I love you
He won't care for you this way
He'll mistreat you if you stay

Come and live with me
We'll have children of our own
I would love you more than life
If you'll come and be my wife
When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings
When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings
When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings
When we dance, angels will run
and hide their wings

I'm gonna love you more than life
If you will only be my wife
I'm gonna love you more than life
If you will only be my wife
I'm gonna love you night and day
I'm gonna try in every way

(I had a dream last night
I dreamt you were by my side
Walking with me baby
My heart was filled with pride
I had a dream last night)

2010-02-08T13:38:00.001-05:00

Click image to enlarge.

Loving A Butterfly, Is Like Being In Hell

2010-01-26T03:56:00.007-05:00

Wings
I touch you
You are gone

It was just a dream.
It was just a dream.

1/25/10

**********************************************************************
One More Time

Vocal by Laura Pausini
Composer Richard Marx
Presented by all4lovelywomen
Link to Video.

2/04/10
**********
One More Time
(Song Lyrics)

Nothing I must do
Nowhere I should be
No one in my life
To answer to but me

No more candlelight
No more purple skies
No one to be near
As my heart slowly dies

If I could hold you one more time
like in the days when you where mine
I'd look at you 'till I was blind
So you would stay

I'd say a prayer each time you'd smile
Cradle the moments like a child
I'd stop the world if only I
Could hold you one more time

I've memorized your face
I know your touch by heart
Still lost in your embrace
I'd dream of where you are

If I could hold you one more time
Like in the days when you were mine
I'd look at you 'till I was blind
So you would stay

I'd say a prayer each time you'd smile
Cradle the moments like a child
I'd stop the world if only I
Could hold you one more time

One more time

Becoming Unemployed During Hard Times

2010-01-22T09:37:00.000-05:00

"We're letting you go..."
As if they'd been holding
you in a tender embrace.

"We're letting you go."
As though you'd
won your freedom;
as though it had been
a great struggle
and you'd emerged
triumphant.

"We're letting you go."

We're dropping you
into the chasm.

A. Murray

Adios

2009-12-31T19:18:00.000-05:00

Marine Boy

2009-12-27T11:55:00.007-05:00

I received this movie as a gift. The giver must have had some insight into my psyche of the moment, and decided I needed a jolt to get me out of there.

It worked.

Being anti spoiler, I won’t tell the story, but I will say, seeing Kim Kang Woo for the first time was a treat and a half.

For the girls: He’s very handsome (serious eye candy), masculine, and seductive.

For the boys: He can swim, fight, and successfully seduce pretty women.

This is a nifty mix of the hapless, entangled with dangerous gangsters galore, in all shapes and sizes. Lot’s of dirty dealing, lots of major violence that flips around so unexpectedly, you’ll laugh before you realize it’s funny. It’s that slick.

Being one who adores really violent explosive stuff that makes me howl with laughter for the simple reason it’s so over the top, I love this movie. It’s neck and neck with, “Running Seven Dogs”, one of my bloodiest insane favorites from Korea.

The power of horrible screen violence that is done with the slyest imaginable wit…the wild humor of madmen, who have utter disregard for the polite/prudish viewer’s sensibilities, is delicious.

I mean…look…a mouthy guy gets beaten to death by a major gangster boss wielding a dangerous frozen salami.

What’s not to love?

This is a great flick. I watched it twice in a row and found more to laugh at the second time around. It has staying power. There’s so much action, it’s virtually impossible to get bored with it. It’s as wild under the sea, as it is on solid ground, and everywhere in between. It has everything, not to mention a terrific cast loaded with quirky talent.
Available at HK Flix

Click image to enlarge.

A few new things...

2009-12-16T05:03:00.002-05:00

have been posted at Hagfish Lite. Drop in, but be warned, good taste is not in the interest of Hagfish Lite. Hagfish laughs at narrow minded sorts, so...if you fit the profile, stay right where you are. Not that good taste is abundant here either, but there are fewer photos of naked butts, and sundry other thingys.

Now I know you can't wait to get over there.

On the day of enforced rest...

2009-12-05T23:11:00.004-05:00

Lately I’ve come to a point where being precise is losing appeal. There’s a constricted feeling about my existence, something that makes me edgy, something knocking at the perimeters of my life from the outside. It whispers, “jump”.

Restlessness has me in its jaws. I’ve been working on photographs, and I realized how controlled they've been. They're so acceptably presented. Neatly cropped for the most part and contained conventionally.

I've started to feel so commonplace it makes me itch. Those pictures are the reflection of a part of my mind. I don’t like the box I find myself in.

I want that un-cleaned, imperfect, ragged non gentrified photographic howl to come out of me.

This is what I want.

Please Click Image to Enlarge.

Hetrick's Barn, and how I feel about it

2009-11-30T11:55:00.001-05:00

I hate this barn picture. I am not bucolic by nature.

Bu col ic–adjective Also, bu⋅col⋅i⋅cal.
1. of or pertaining to shepherds; pastoral.
2. of, pertaining to, or suggesting an idyllic rural life.

Give me grungy city streets any day.

It's true.

Please Click Image to Enlarge.

Old Girls

2009-11-17T14:35:00.004-05:00

They were desperately alive back then, in their late twenties-early thirties. Manic and hopeful in their relief at having freed themselves from ill-chosen men.

They were smart, funny, vital, and laughed at everything. They were shot through with sexual energy and on the make for any new encounter. They glowed with an abundance of self assurance and joy at simply being.

They plucked their eyebrows, shaved their legs, put on perfume, wore high heels, and felt like women again instead of dish washing machines with vaginas.

They made love as often as possible, choosing their partners with an eye toward continuing freedom. In other words, they were like men; on the prowl, and disinterested in anything more than a few good times.

Of course some grew weary of the game life presented. Some of them missed the old ball and chain because they forgot what it was like. They married again, and occasionally, again and again. Trial and error doesn’t always work, but they had a naïve hopefulness, for which they must be forgiven.

There are those who remained single, and decades later, drabbed down and a little tired of it all, would ruminate on the fact there was nothing more interesting between their legs than the crotch of their underwear, which in some cases was still black-lace sexy, but wasted on an audience of one.

They are like the waning Moon, and the only waxing that gets done is to the outdated furniture they inherited from their soured marriages, or maybe their rooms as teenagers, when they were flowers; restless to know life, still safe with parents keeping them in check.

When they look back, what do they see?

Rubble?

Little bits of glitter they should have picked up with reverence, to be stored against all the rainy days to come?

The glitter these days is a flash of mica embedded in the stones they tread; not to be mined by them…beyond their grasp.

What could cheer them up and on?

A cluster of rampant penis’s perhaps?

Penis’s attached to healthy males, preferably a bit younger who gave them the eye, and smiled that secret smile at a few still-pretty women. The kind of men who would adore them for a while because of their sophistication, wit, lack of demands, and in some cases, lack of inhibitions. The types who love women just because they are women. Men, who will flirt outrageously, then follow it through with a certain air of gratitude and delight.

Of course the old girls would flee these encounters, laughing uproariously, escaping the bondage of good sex.

They’d fall in a heap into a booth at a ratty diner, order coffee and giggle, while normal color came back to their flushed faces, and their hearts raced with that high feeling of excitement, which comes in part from possibilities, in part from the somnolent embers that suddenly heated up even though they were assumed to be dead.

They’d glow again from the electrical charge of being seen as desirable.

They’d go home to slow baths with bubbles and emollients, shave their legs, put on perfume, seductive earrings, a bit of makeup, dress sharp, and then go dancing.

That’s all it takes… a little genital buzz.

Dedicated to Carlos, one of those men.

Mark Morford Today

2009-10-28T19:59:00.002-04:00

Mark Morford has a very excellent piece today in the San Francisco Chronicle. Their archives are not permanent, so I'd suggest getting onto it if you're interested in something bitter and depressing, but REAL, unlike the news you may usually read/see/hear. Click anywhere on this post to be transported to Wonderland.

In the eyes of the beholder...

2009-10-28T05:35:00.002-04:00

See This. It's a link, CLICK it. It's good.

Fragility

2009-10-25T09:17:00.010-04:00

There are times when she feels like old lace curtains that have hung in a window for too many years. They appear to be intact, but if touched, they will disintegrate.

So much violence has crept into her life over the decades, it staggers the mind. It came through the portals of direct information conveyed generally by phone, though sometimes the messenger arrived at the door.

There were trickier means also. For example, discovery of a murder, no, make that two, were via the Internet. If one could simply set the world to System Restore, go back, and never enter those names, never click on “search”, never read those pages, never dig for the outdated news articles….

The ringing of the phone. This is not the perky telemarketer announcement of an earnest broom or vacuum cleaner salesman, wanting to enrich your life with greater efficiency when it comes to the beloved American cleanliness fetish, anymore than the knock on the door is a delivery from the Chinese restaurant. The Internet information is not due to a misspelled name typed in haste, allowing one to exhale again.

Oh no, it is not benign data. We are indifferent to the benign. This information is of too much import, we are not indifferent here.

At this moment, the sky is gray and white as though all color had been erased from the world, leaving only a photograph in gray scale. It is Limbo, the place between Heaven and Hell of the heart gone away from average days, where the soul waits for good news, if it ever comes.

In theory, Limbo is temporary. It is there for the convenience of the gods. A storage bin filled with things to be decided upon, but not immediately. The gods do not appreciate being rushed.

But I digress where this tale is concerned. Forgive me.

Decades ago, an infinity it seems, the phone call came from a doctor announcing the anticipated death of her mother.

She was sedated by spirituality; buffered by belief and weariness. The howl came later. The grief, a river rushing toward a wall of stone, came later. Vestiges remain always, like stray hairs tickling sensitive skin, they cannot be ignored.

Her mother’s death was of natural causes, likewise, her father’s death.

The other deaths are the ones she counts on worry beads used as an abacus to keep track of violent unnatural events. She holds a cluster and counts them off. Four suicides. Another cluster…two murders, no…three actually if she counts the man she didn’t like, but did admire.

Then she hits a sticky area.

Does the accidental shooting of her young husband, many moons ago, count as murder or mishap? Shall she call it “uncategorized”? Now, if it’s murder, that would make four.

Four feels right.

Two fours equal eight. Eight is a fated number according to the study of numerology. Her name number is eight, as is her address.

Don’t try to tell her she’s not fated.

What could be more fated than a bullet from a small antique firearm which only holds one shell, tearing through a twenty-seven years old lung, leaving its owner waiting days for the rescue of death in a small hospital in a far away country?

She hates the uncategorized. At heart she is a file clerk in a narrow room fretting about a lack of order.

She could go mad from the weight of these folders containing so much intensity.

She could become Ophelia, pulling petals from flowers, keeping count, finally drifting in the waters that would claim her.

But then another would need to count off her beads, and add to a category. She doesn’t trust others with her record keeping. She doesn’t trust others, period, and exclamation mark.

The knock on the door is the worst. The parties on the other side know you are in that house, they will not go away. They will pound until the door too, disintegrates, and they will announce the uncategorized death while looking into your eyes to see if it is really true, or are they in a nightmare? Are we all in a nightmare?

Or it will be a single individual on business, announcing, after much cat and mouseing around in the name of said business, the fact he, she, or it, is not permitted to divulge the circumstances that led to this visit, but will pass on a phone number which will open the gate to another circle of Hell.

The man with the blue and white umbrella committed suicide early in July of 2009, taking her with him to Limbo. They are discussing things, and waiting for the wheel of karma to make another click.

Dear Reader,
Do not be misled by the apparent calm the above statement re the man with the blue and white umbrella implies. She is stuck together by a weakening will, and is not fully herself these days. She is being barbecued, turning on a spit over fire which does not cauterize, does not kill pain, as “normal” burning does.

It’s a messy business, full of anguish polite society can’t bear to witness. Her mother raised her to save face at all times so as not to divulge the inner heart, which would display weakness. Frankly, she would prefer to run through the streets screaming and tearing her hair out.

Suicides and murders are horrific happenings. She will skirt the recent awareness of a murder too close to the bone to think about.

For the benefit of polite society, she will be politically correct. She will state she suffers from overexposure.

What a strange circle she traverses.

No one knows her.

Rachmaninov Had Big Hands

2009-10-24T15:13:00.002-04:00

This gem came to me from my sister, Alma Rands, jewelry designer and maker extraordinaire. Blessings on your head sistah!

Enjoy!

Presentation by:HirnW

Midnight Cop - A Hagfish/Hyacinth Review

2007-04-18T04:25:00.000-04:00

I love this movie.

It's funny, cynical, and a nifty spine-tingler. It's also very European with good reason, it was made in Germany. It doesn't reflect an American sense of humor. Its wit is lost on many.

It’s got nice a gritty quality, with moody evocative night filming making a fine point from which to view it. It isn’t a lighthearted comedic venture, but it has its moments.

Speaking of visuals, the cop shop workplace is pretty good too.

The core of the story has to do with the horrifying accidental wounding/disabling of a young child during an attempt to arrest a major drug dealer by the lead character, Inspector Alex Glass, played brilliantly by Armin Mueller-Stahl, a man in wretched condition as the story opens.

He is sleepless, rumpled, irritable, and lacking in any kind of hope. All his life is sour, and he is being beaten down by the one terrible event of his existence, that has caused him to nearly lose himself.

Music is one of his few outlets.

Then, there's the job.

He has a new assistant, Shirley May, played wonderfully by Julia Kent, and a concerned friend, the District Attorney, played by Michael York.

Alex is a man quietly thinking out the case, as it escalates into a surreal nightmare, with nude bodies being found, abandoned, and smeared with grease; a profoundly obscure touch, which because of its very oddness causes a chill of disgust and discomfort. We know we’re not in Kansas anymore. A dark thinker is afoot, and his victims are giving no clue as to his identity.

Concurrently, Inspector Glass is also engaged in impossible attempts to break through the wall erected by his vengeful ex wife, between him and his daughter. He begins to unfold, and display himself for us: A sleepless man who spends nights tossing in bed while the neighbor on the other side of the wall has gleefully noisy sex. His answer is to pound futilely on the wall until he is called a pervert. It brings out the sneaky voyeur in me, making me wish I could see through plaster and paint to watch the couple wallow in sybaritic splendor. (see note*)
In trying to hold himself together, he finds more strings of himself unraveling until eventually he becomes involved with Lisa, played by Morgan Fairchild, an apparent bimbo, who manages to become another drop of the glue of life that keeps him from disintegrating entirely.

I was not impressed by Morgan Fairchild the first time I watched the movie. Like most others making hard comments, I thought she was an absurd choice. That is, until I thought it over for a while.

It dawned on me, she was perfect for the role; when she threw her head back and laughed in one scene with Mr. Mueller-Stahl, I fell in love with the character, and with the actress. She was funny, sexy and pretty as Lisa; and she was brave. Good for her!

Alex is older than she. So what? We should all be so magnetic and well-preserved as we grow older. They're a rather odd couple. This does nothing but lend a spicy, amusing and rather sweet atmosphere to a very gruesome and sometimes terribly sad tale.

Frank Stallone as the villain, makes me wonder how on earth the kid brother got so famous, and eclipsed him. I loved Frank as Eddie, the pugilistic, hot pistol ladies-man bartender in Barfly. Sly couldn’t have done that part with Frank’s panache. Sly gets kudos, Frank gets too short a role in Midnight Cop.

The way the cookie crumbles I guess. There ain’t no justice.

This is a movie that cries to be viewed with a sense of humor, and a little stretch of the mind, because it isn't for dummies.

It's a spoof on American cop pictures, where the hero never misses, and sex as audience bait, takes the place of acting.

Yes, there's sex in it, and most of it is hilarious. However, there's never a glimpse of action on-screen. That's a nice change from all the sweating and heaving that goes on here in the U.S. for the purpose of keeping our limited attention on the movie.

There is nudity, but unless you're into necrophilia, it's not going to tweak you.

While the story deals with a serial killer doing his thing, it isn't full of gore and splattered brains. In fact it's an excellent flick, in part, due to what you don't see.

Three great points:
Armin Mueller-Stahl stuffing a lettuce leaf into his pocket.
Armin Mueller-Stahl’s underwear.
A beautiful rendition of A Lighter Shade of Pale, which opens the film.

See this movie. And use your brain. Have no expectation, either good or bad, and you'll be pleasantly surprised!

*note: “wallow in sybaritic splendor”, swiped from the online dictionary. Thought it was overblown and funny.
BEST PRICE: AMAZON

The Zippered Man

2007-02-16T09:38:00.000-05:00

Once she had a dream lover. She would lay in his arms all night long, feeling safer than she had during most of her life. She thought at times, it would be nice if he had a zipper running the length of his body. There was a good deal of comfort to be derived from the idea of climbing into him, and zipping him up with her inside, hidden from the world. The world is a dangerous place in the best of times, and deadly in the worst.

Of course she was crazy.

That was a frequent judgment.

She was adjudged to be amoral a few times too, by quizzes applied through several authoritative online sites laden with expert analysts for the benefit of hungering masses in quest of an answer as to who they actually are.

Armchair psychologists and dilatants plastered to television sets, tend to enjoy these sites.

The experts gave their opinions which nothing could sway. They were based on ironclad courses taught at various universities noted for their pompous conspicuously moral wisdom-dispensing professors.

It seemed a feather in her cap to be amoral. It meant she was running against the odds, since the “average” were generally moral according to the rules.

Morality in her opinion, amounted to a collection of regulations laid down by the elite for their own convenience. Therefore, to be amoral was to shake free of them and their iron fists.

She thought there should be something for everyone...many sets of rules, without religion connected to them.

The word regulations had too militant a connotation for comfort.

She thought religion tended to complicate things unnecessarily. An entire collection of esoteric regulations plagued many religions. Far too many regulations would need to be remembered if they involved religion too. Also, people sometimes killed each other because of conflicting attitudes stemming from religion. So perhaps it was best to keep religion and guns separate from each other.

Guns would be secular in their nature.

Therefore, all rules laid down outside of religion, should never contain even a whiff of sectarianism.

There was one universally applicable rule everyone would have to obey. Just one: Only the most reasonable and responsible secular leaders could have anything to do with guns.

They would be very reluctant to kill anyone, since everyone obeyed their own rules; there was little, if any, major discord. Eventually they would realize how stupid it was to have guns, but never shoot at anything. So why bother to have them?

Of course though, she was crazy.

In thinking it out on a deeper level, if there were too many sets of rules, anarchy might ensue.

Anarchy seemed so exhausting.

The zippered man was her best idea in the long-run.

February 15, 2007
A. Murray

Bertha, Ella, Sid, and the little green apples...

2007-02-09T20:54:00.002-05:00

a peculiar little tail.

Bertha shoved the broom across the kitchen floor, muttering to herself, "damn filthy little bastids, makes me want to squash their little heads with the heel of my boot…"

The mouse sat in the entryway of his apartment complex, whiskers twitching, eyes shining like new shoe buttons, and ears turned to the sound the giant was making.

The mouse spoke minimal English, but enough to get by on. He was hungry and tired. He'd been travelling for days to get to the place where he would spend the winter this year. The last house was drafty and immaculately clean. He'd caught a cold at Thanksgiving, and kept it until spring. And because of perverse hygiene on the part of the farmer's wife, he'd nearly starved to death during his stay there, emerging a mere shadow of his former self. He shuddered to think about it now.

A vicious swipe of the broom too close to the molding nearly knocked him off his feet. Considering this to be a portent of doom, his own in fact, he decided to crawl back into bed for a little nap. It was early, and dinner wasn't on the table until some time around five-thirty. There was plenty of time to rest before the job of harvesting from the floor, where some of his favored delicacies were generally plentiful, thanks to the smaller giants who ate there on occasion.

He understood the salient points of the conversation the giant was having with herself, and it's not so underlying rage, was enough to breed caution even within such an adventurous soul as he. So he turned, and to his undying regret, missed the most interesting thing of the day. He heard about it later, but would have given an especially fine whisker to have seen it first-hand

All in all however, at that moment, life was good again. At last….

"Next time I catch them little rats thrown' food across the room, I'm gonna break an arm first, and answer questions later…spoiled little crap-heads, killin's too good fer 'em."

A disembodied voice floated near enough to halt Bertha's fury laden diatribe. "What on earth are you nattering about Bertha? Milk gone sour again? Sorry if it is, I can never get those damn incantations right."

The disembodied voice grew nearer…the house was so cavernous, it was an echo chamber. Whispered conversations could be eavesdropped upon conveniently from what seemed like miles away if one was aware of all the strategic positions for doing so. The speaker was.

Bertha managed to pull her act together with effort. She wasn't in the mood for the "lady" of the house. Last night had been terrible; and she was tired, hungry, perplexed, and crotchety.

The voice drew nearer.

"So what's wrong today Bertha?"

"Nothing special Missus, just them kids hurlin' food across the room like it was a game a that Frisbee stuff instead a supper…little savages…. At least a damn Frisbee thing is made outta plastic and it don't shed crumbs an' muck all over the damn place."

"Ah, is that all? I thought a spell I was trying out last night had backfired again."

The disembodied voice became full bodied and astonishing in it's appearance. Bertha did her best to act tactfully, and disallowed her jaw to drop in an impolite rube-like manner.

The "Lady" of the house was standing in the doorway with the usual disreputable plaid bathrobe gaping open to reveal one of a collection of the worst nightgowns Bertha had seen before coming to the Big House as a charwoman/raving lunatic/superstitious native, and half-assed friend. Floppy slippers adorned large feet, which were also encased in purple socks. The entire costume shrieked "BAD FASHION SENSE".

But that wasn't the cause of Bertha's jaw struggling with gravity. It was the hair.

It was green, and huge…like a gigantic fern that had grown from the top of the woman's head.

"Oh good lord," Bertha said to herself. "The poor thing."

"What was ya tryin' last night", she asked tentatively.

"Eggnog."

"Oh, of course, eggnog." Bertha couldn't tear her gaze away from the apparition standing in front of her.

Ella, for that was her name, reached up as though to fluff the atrocity, but instead whipped it off her head, much to Bertha's relief, and shook it like a recalcitrant fuzzy animal.

"Dynel," she said, giving it another vigorous shake. "Wash and wear! Don't you just love it?"

"Well, it's certainly differnt," Bertha stated, with as much diplomacy as she could muster on short order. "D'ye you care for a cuppa tea now? I feel the need a one myself at this very moment." With that, she turned toward the kitchen, and to the safety of sane company.

Sid sat in the Kitchen window seat, moodily staring out at the landscape stretched endlessly before him. He noted with horror that every tree within his view was full of lovely little green apples. This would have been wonderful if they had been apple trees. Alas, they were not.

"Uccccmmmpphhh", he sighed, shaking his head with a certain weariness that bespoke of long practice at it, as he wondered aloud, "What in hell did she do THIS for? I can't leave her alone for a single evening without coming back to yet another bloody fiasco. The woman needs to be kept on a leash. A short one at that!"

He bent to wash his tail, which usually restored his spirits, and increased his pleasure in contemplating the fresh bagel sitting on the table, waiting to be devoured by the she-beast, which was how he was perceiving Ella at the moment.

Dropping nimbly down from the window seat, he meandered across the kitchen, and jumped up onto the table. Ah, good…the bagel was still warm. He gripped it in his teeth, then leaped off the table, and dragged it to his favorite rug in front of the fireplace. There was never a better breakfast in any kingdom, than a fresh toasted bagel with cream cheese.

Bertha clumped into the kitchen. " 'Mornin' Mister Sid," cuppa tea?"

"Why yes Bertha, that would be nice." Sid licked cream cheese off a paw, then said with the sarcastic chuckle that had become ingrown over time when discussing Ella's fiascoes, "I assume Bertha, you are aware there are green apples growing on the blue spruce, the oak, the maple, and every other damned kind of tree for miles around this misbegotten village…that is since you did walk here from your home, and had to have noticed…"

"Oh yes Mister Sid, I noticed indeed."

"So tell me Bertha, have you a clue as to what she was up to?" Sid sat looking at Bertha as though she had all the mysteries of this complex corner of the universe, tucked under her bandana, waiting for her to whip out the answers to life's most perplexing questions, no matter what they were about.

"Eggnog."

"Ah! Eggnog. Of course I should have known. How silly of me. She's up and about I assume?"

"Yes Mister Sid, and headed this way," Bertha said, eyeing Ella's half-eaten bagel on the rug beside the scraggly long bodied cat.

Sighing in resignation at the inevitable screaming match about to begin, she set about preparing tea.

September 27, 2004

One of the worst old stoner jokes

2007-02-09T20:36:00.000-05:00

so why am I laughing?

The Monkey and The Lizard

A monkey is sitting in a tree smoking a joint when a lizard walks past and looks up and says to the monkey, "hey! what are you doing?"

The monkey says "smoking a joint, come up and have some."

So the lizard climbs up and sits next to the monkey and they have a few hits.

After a while the lizard says his mouth is dry and is going to get a drink from the river. The lizard is so stoned that he leans too far over and falls into the river.

A Crocodile sees this and swims over to the lizard and helps him to the side, then asks the lizard, "what's the matter with you?"

The lizard explains to the crocodile that he was sitting smoking a joint with the monkey in the tree, got so stoned he fell into the riverwhile taking a drink.

The crocodile says he has to check this out and walks into the jungle, finds the tree were the monkey is sitting, finishing the joint. He looks up and says, "hey!"

The Monkey looks down and says, "man, just how damn much water did you drink?"

Rivi's Dog

2007-01-16T21:41:00.000-05:00

Rivi’s dog went missing. She was gone for two days.

Rivi was upset and sad, and also afraid that something terrible might have happened. He didn’t sleep well with her gone. When he woke up because he thought he heard her outside, he was happy for few moments until he realized she was still gone.

In the morning, his eyes burned, and she was his first thought. His heart was heavy. He felt an enormous empty place inside. She’s relatively small, how could she leave such a huge hole in him? It was a cavern.

He felt tears stinging the way they do when you first feel them, some fell, and he brushed them away. Perhaps he had alternating feelings of anger for a moment because she was so inconsiderate to leave, then desperation and worry, and guilt because he had been annoyed. Hours were days, and always, there was the listening for the familiar sounds she made. Her tags, the click of her toenails, the doggish vocalizations…

Then she was back. Pure joy and celebration. So many strokes and congratulations for having returned, and so many words telling her how loved she is. A few admonishments…she must never do that again. Not ever. All that relief, the lifting of the heart. The eyes not able to be filled with enough of her little face, her color, the shape of her ears, her tail…her self.

And her? What was her return like? Did she have good drink of water first thing? Did she flop down in a favorite spot, lying there with her tail thumping on the floor when anyone spoke to her?

Did she have that mysterious dog expression? An expression that said, “I know everything. I had an adventure. I’ve been to secret regions, and smelled things you can’t imagine. I have slept in new places. I have looked at the deep sky filled with more stars than any human could possibly count, and I was there when the sun decided to come out for me to see. I know where the sun sleeps now.”

Litany Three

2007-01-14T18:32:00.000-05:00

Almond eyes
Skin of ivory
River of hair
Taste of a woman
Taste of a man
Scent of heat
Curve of an arch

How beautiful
How beautiful

Eyes of earth
Black silk hair
Mahogany skin
Curve of a cheek
Voice of a bell
Voice of a gong
Scent of passion

How beautiful
How beautiful

Eyes of blue water
Hair of golden curls
Skin of snow
Dimpled elbow
Rose lips
Curve of a hip
The call of doves

How beautiful
How beautiful

Crinkled hair
Black sky skin
Eyes of night
Flashing smile
Full lips kissing
Feet of a dancer
The length of thigh

How beautiful
How beautiful

How beautiful
How beautiful

How beautiful you are
Humanity

January 14, 2007
A. Murray

Oh Ji Ho - A New Year

2006-12-30T11:22:00.000-05:00

This,

NOT this.

The sun rises at the Unification Observatory in Goseong, Gangwon Province. The year comes to a close with tension between the two Koreas following the North's missile and nuclear tests, and suspension of inter-Korean dialogue. [Kim Myung-sub/The Korea Herald]
2006.12.29

Peace, Health, and Happiness to all.
Hagfish

Dedicated to Michael J. Sakara

2006-12-15T21:54:00.000-05:00

Please Click image to view full size.

Your Death

Was an ignominious act,
performed by a madman.
Allowed through an error in judgment
by the gods who look after souls like yours.
They failed to see the future on that night.

I stared at the computer screen
that brought me the news,
years old, and quite
incomprehensible at first.

A friend came by to see me
bringing me a nicely wrapped gift.

It’s Christmastime now and
I can’t tell anyone you’re dead
because if I do I will begin to sob
with sounds that come out as
short barks, like laughter, and
if they love me, their day will be ruined,
since the entire tale is so off-the-wall
horrendous, and so filled with
unspeakable images for the prudish,
it’s too tawdry for their tender sensibilities,
and so agonizing to the wild hares who move
among the allegedly normal,
disguised as shop clerks, and waiters,
and plain looking people who live
alone in small apartments, and read
esoteric literature, and date librarians…
the ones with empathy, who will immediately
understand the entire thing, and shudder,
and momentarily go faint with the horror of it all.

You are so out of place Michael.
Can you hear me?
You are so out of place.

You belong somewhere else. You’re supposed to grow old.
You’re supposed to love life until the last possible ancient breath you draw comes out in a sound like a rattling windowpane.

The friend who dropped by wanted me to look at the present, but I had only known where you are now for less than an hour, and I was shaking too much, and I cried like a lost dog that was broken in half, while I pressed my face into her soft winter jacket, and suffocated in her well-meaning platitudes.

For Michael J. Sakara

A. Murray
December 14, 2006

Michael J. Sakara, one of an endangered species.

2006-12-13T20:12:00.002-05:00

DESPERATELY IN SEARCH OF VIRGINIA D. PLEASE CONTACT ME. DIRECTIONS ON HOME PAGE.

Michael Sakara was my friend. We lived a couple of blocks apart in New York City. We met in 1969 around the time my mother was dying. The circumstances of our meeting were awkward and highly charged. They are not relevant to anything that will follow here.

In time, after we met, we had a few conversations, and found ourselves liking each other a lot in spite of a rocky beginning. We became friends. I became one of a group of his friends that would get together, usually at his place, for a few drinks and conversation. I enjoyed his other friends, and we became a circle of sorts. My feelings for Michael deepened, as his did for me. We talked on the phone a couple of times a week at least, and got together very often. We were only a sneeze apart.

His other friends were all far above me in education, and mostly in economic status also. I may have actually been the least solvent of the group. They were mainly involved in the arts. Music, theatre, writing…. They were fascinating, warm, accomplished individuals.

I met an opera singer there, who has since become well known. I will not name her because I would prefer to have her permission to do so. But I’ve heard her sing on recordings, and she sang for us once while another friend, Stewart, played the piano. Michael’s shiny black grand piano sat at the end of the living room in front of large windows. It was a beautiful scene, with her singing against a backdrop of New York lights and big potted plants.

I liked all those people. They were so intelligent, clever and funny, and they accepted me immediately as one of them. It was a new experience for me, being at the center of that much intellectual energy and wit.

So many years later, I am finally aware that I had some talents myself, even at that fledgling level of my development. One of his very close friends, a composer (this man is well known in the field of music, and again I don’t have permission to name him, so I can’t for the sake of his privacy) published a poem I’d written in a local paper, another, a writer sat in my apartment one night reading my poetry, brutalizing it, but found the pieces he felt were good, and told me why they were. Today I think I love him for it.

Michael was aware of my ugly-duckling, un-dated, un-courted existence of the time, and began taking me to dinner often, always picking up the tab. We would dress up, and go. It would be like a date, and it made me feel happy. I was in mourning for my mother, and he understood that I needed some cheering up, some getting out and away from it all.

We spent so many days, and even nights together, when I’d fall asleep on his sofa, because we had talked until we were nearly unconscious.

We played chess. I never won. I’m not a player, but it was such an elegant game, and Michael was an elegant man. It was a classy thing to do together. I loved it. He never criticized me for playing poorly.

Michael loved good food.

The first time I ate escargot, it was with Michael. He gave me one to try, and I loved it. The first time I ate frog’s legs, it was with Michael, I tasted his. The first time I had Banana Flambé it was with Michael. My first glass of Cointreau…. There were so many sophisticated adventures between us. I felt as though I were being groomed in a sense.

He gave me good wine, and we smoked good grass together. We listened to good music, and I learned to become me. He was the only person I knew who would lie down on the floor wearing headphones to hear music, while feeling the vibrations of it through his body. I got a pair of headphones as a gift eventually, and almost always listened while feeling the music through the floor. Michael taught me about good electronic equipment, and to this day I buy the best I can afford. He showed me quality in places I wasn’t aware of before knowing him.

It was with Michael that I took my first hit of mescaline, and he pulled me across the divide toward recognition that I was in fact, safe and sane in his arms in spite of my terror of the moment. He held me until I got back to the world uninhabited by nightmare visions. I have never regretted that first hit. We both learned that I would do better on a half tab, and hysteria never devoured me again when I was tripping. I almost always did it with him. When I was alone, it was never fun. Together, the world was hilarious, music was something divine, and introspection was sacred.

No matter what the attitude of these times may be, and no matter how comfortably I might be viewed with distaste for my drug ventures, I will challenge any critic to reach the places of deep understanding I reached when under the “influence”.

I would never have gone there without Michael being my guardian and guide. I will always be happy that I went on those mind journeys with my friend.

I will also always remember the sun rising across the water as we rode the Staten Island Ferry back home to the City during my first trip, as the drug’s effect wore off. I will always remember the flowers I bought at a sidewalk stand, and carried with me, just to look at the color of them all through the night. I will always remember the early breakfast at The Brasserie on 53rd St. as we made our way back to so-called real life. I can taste the coffee, I can hear our laughter at the night we’d passed as strange wanderers, and I can see his smile…. He had a cheerful absolute smile.

Michael was murdered in July of 1993. I found out about it during one of my searches on the web, looking for lost friends. He was cut into seven pieces after he was eviscerated. He was left here and there in plastic trash bags. He was thrown away.

I discovered it just a couple of hours ago, and I am going mad from it.

Writing this isn’t about me and this terrible grief that is eating my heart. It’s about Michael, and maybe someone you love.

Michael died because he was gay. It’s just that simple. He was gay. He loved men instead of women.

But he loved me, and I’m a woman. I was his friend. He loved his sister, and I suppose his mother, and I know he loved the women friends of the little charmed circle.

He could be difficult, who can’t? But he was a giving friend, and a kind one, and he could be very comforting to a newly orphaned 29 year old. He had great beauty within, and he shared all the good things about himself. He was often the center of a group, but it was always okay that he be so.

Years after I left New York, I spoke with him. I called him out of the blue. My marriage had fallen into ashes, and I was moving to a new place. I bought a small dwelling for myself, and wanted to tell him. He was sorry about my marriage, but very happy for me about my new home.

Things didn’t go too well for me right after that, and there were many economic woes and close calls to deal with, and everyone from yesterday faded in the face of new disasters.

When I finally got a computer in 2000, I discovered eventually that I could find people on the web, but his number wasn’t listed anymore. He had moved away it seemed. I’d tried to call but the phone was disconnected. I figured he’d been gone too long for a forwarding intercept. So I kept trying the Internet.

I never quit looking, but I didn’t do it obsessively. Every couple of years I’d search for one friend or another. Search engines weren’t what they are today, and today I got a taste of high technological excellence when Google dropped two old New York Times articles from the sky into my brain.

When I searched this time, I just typed in Michael Sakara, no initial, and there they were…two articles about the murdered Michael J. Sakara. I knew there was no mistake in identity when I saw the middle initial. It was him.

And now my bookmarks contain a lot of things about it that I can’t deal with at the moment.

When the righteous among us revile gay people it makes my stomach turn to a bile filled sack. Who are they to judge anyone else? I hope I don’t hear any anti-gay rhetoric from anyone soon, because I’m liable to become very vehement and vicious, and maybe even physically unwise. This would serve no purpose whatsoever.

My friend will never call to invite me to dinner again, or to rove the midnight streets just looking in store windows. The family he left behind will feel his absence at the holidays, and on his birthday, and on the anniversary of his death, and every time they recall something he said that was funny, or kind, or even hateful. If he left a lover behind, that man will always feel the pain.

When we love deeply, I think it tends to stay with us in one way or another until we die. And there’s always a time that comes when the light is a certain color, or a breeze touches you with a familiar scent that evokes a shade of melancholy, and we mourn for a moment for the lost loves…child, sibling, parent, grand-parent, uncle or aunt…spouse, lover…friend….

Michael, I know I hurt you a long time ago. I was too dense to ever tell you how much it bothered me. So I want to say here, I am so sorry my friend.

If you, the reader have a gay person in your life, please be aware that they are always in potential danger because lunatics prey on them the same way they prey on children, or defenseless women.

They beat. They rape. They hack. They slash. They shoot. They pulverize. They drown. They dismember. They torture. They do it all, and they are out there in the guise of the respectable. The man who murdered Michael was a surgical nurse for many years at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. He was working there when he killed Michael.

Yes, a very respectable man, just having a drink in a quiet gay bar, just having a conversation with another man he didn’t know. Just a serial killer
who cut my friend up and threw him away like garbage. My friend was not garbage; he was a human being of worth.

The murder, Richard W. Rogers, got life in prison. If he’s still living, I hope he suffers every single day of his miserable existence, and if he ever gets out, as they often do, it would be nice to imagine a fate of an ugly unexpected nature awaited him. But I am not such a dreamer. All I can do is curse him in my razor sharp rage, and call hell down on him. He’s getting old now, if he’s still alive. I can’t find anything that indicates he isn’t. He’s an old murderer.

I am a newly minted mourner. If my hatred can reach into his heart like an ice pick, I send it his way.

See this man at once!

2006-05-17T21:07:00.000-04:00

I found a good one. Very smart and funny. Too perceptive for comfort. Who needs comfort?

A Numpty Speaketh

Also see The Scots Word of the Week

Don't be shy, click on the links.

Swordfish Reviewed - Dreck Meets The Matrix

2006-05-14T11:06:00.000-04:00

Swordfish (2001)

Wowie kazowie, what a lousy movie.

We have The Matrix's flavor and style to thank for this ugly flick, which at .75 cents brand spanking new, was over-priced.

The Matrix was a classy one-of-a-kind movie, that used ugly drab coloration to make a point. It succeeded brilliantly in this. Brilliantly enough to bring about a long horrible spate of doofus-like imitation everywhere. TV ads were copies of it, people aped the style of dress and presentation ad nauseum, like chimpanzees conditioned by Pavlov…the whole thing was tiresome beyond belief.

And then there is Swordfish.

Since many other souls, 492 of them at IMDb (as of 05-14-06) have already written about Swordfish, I don't feel it necessary to add a synopsis. If you really need one, go there.

It starts out at the very beginning, as merely annoying visually, and goes downhill from there. The influence of The Matrix is unpleasantly obvious in the drab color scheme, which goes so far as to turn people green upon occasion (OUCH), and all the twiddly computer jazz we're supposed to be awe-stricken by.

Give me a break.

I have two names: John Travolta. Don Cheadle.

While I would by far prefer to see Travolta cavorting about as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, it still must be said that he's always fun to watch. He's larger than life, and in his youth, was a very pretty boy. I respect his ability to work hard at a role, and he consistently gives me what I want. Entertainment. He is not a great actor. He’s an entertainer. That’s good enough for me.

I do not seek depth and profundity in movies (especially those coming out of Hollywood). And I am always pathetically grateful when, unexpectedly, I find it. In the main, I want to be amused and entertained. I want the nepenthe a movie can give me without any harmful side effects. Done, and done, time and time again by Travolta.

Don Cheadle is so solid, so good, and so competent, it breaks my heart to see him in this piece of tripe.

Also, honorable mention must be given to Rudolph Martin as Axel Torvalds.

That having been said, I will remark that Halle Berry's gratuitous semi-nudity, and excessive camped up performance as a manipulative sex goddess was so over the top in terms of bad acting, I was amazed enough by it to be able to stay awake 'til the bitter end. She must have had some steep bills to pay or an eye on a luxury yacht that would look nice with her on it. Maybe something more practical, like a new mansion. It has to have been for the money. What else could make a woman willing to demean herself so thoroughly in mainstream cinema?

The transparency of her character was offensively obvious; I knew what she was about within seconds of her first appearance. Only the village idiot would have been tricked into imagining she was one of the "good guys".

This is a terrible film. There was a 12-minute short at the end, with alternate endings, and standard producer-director enthusiastic drivel thrown in for good measure. They were possibly the least tiresome 12 minutes of the movie.

The elected ending was weak and stupid. Holly, (Camryn Grimes) the daughter of the hero, who had been through unimaginable hell emerges sane, unscathed, and even able to be strong for Papa, remarking that, "it's going to be alright..." Oh yeah?

And let's not forget Hugh Jackman, who grimaces, furrows his brows, and occasionally smirks his way through as the desperately devoted papa. Ho boy! Is this guy an actor, or a movie star?

Movie stars are not necessarily required to be good actors. What they need is "IT". A dedicated coterie of swooning female, or drooling male followers never hurts, and can catapult a salamander to stardom. Studio heads are not aficionados of great art. They are businessmen sitting in the counting room counting up their money.

Oh feh. This is an old flick, already forgotten. No need for it to be battered into the ground any further by one who, incidentally, tends to be the Devil's advocate, and champion of underdogs where heavily panned movies/actors are concerned.

A. Murray
January 31, 2006

Mi in (La Belle) A new review

2006-05-06T22:28:00.001-04:00

La Belle (Mi in)
Commentary by A. Murray
April 27, 2006

What a much discussed and often misunderstood movie!

Because there is frequent nudity and apparent sexual activity, untold numbers of people have labeled it either as pornography or soft-core pornography whether they’ve seen the film or not. Korean law prohibits full frontal nudity in movies made there, so you see breasts and buttocks, nothing more. The sex in La Belle is definitely not the real thing.

The movie is NOT pornography. Hard-core pornography deals with very explicit sexual acts. Pornography consists of displaying intimate parts of the body during sexual activity. It relies greatly on tiresome close-ups that usually resemble pink machine parts hammering into other pink machine parts. I will not stoop to a critique of porn flick background music, or the moaning groaning vocal overlays.

La Belle does none of this.

Something a lot of people don't seem to understand about La Belle, is the fact it’s surreal. When recognized as surreal it reaches a level where it must be processed through intellect first. Surrealism demands that of the viewer. Because it is abstract, it keeps you saying to yourself, did I really see that? Do I understand this, or am I totally off base?

In this case, it's a frequently surrealistic erotic story that could be simply told. Journalist meets woman. Woman is a nude model.

Woman loves a man who cares very little about the fact she exists, other than using her for sex.

Journalist becomes obsessed with woman to the degree that he no longer functions in his professional capacity as a writer. They both go down the tubes.

End of story.

But...

Seeing La Belle is like being submerged in a pool of sensuality surrounded by beautiful imagery. The director, Yeo Kyun Dong, has a fine eye when it comes to line, and gives us an uncluttered elegant framework for the film. Dancer, Ahn Eun Mi, contributed her talent as a "body choreographer", working with the stars Oh Ji Ho and Lee Ji Hyeon for a month, teaching them how to move fluidly. It is this kind of attention that makes La Belle something very special.

The vision of the director, the talent of the choreographer, and the abilities of composer/pianist, No Yeong Shim, who wrote and performed the music, acting in concert with each other, gives us a beautifully crafted view of sex and love in their many variations and tones.

The film opens with a shot of a writing desk and chair. The camera approaches slowly, finally showing an open book with a fountain pen lying across the page. The doorbell rings several times. We hear the voice of a man. He says, “she’s back”. And so begins the tale of a journalist, and a model….

The man (Oh Ji Ho) is obsessed with the woman (Lee Ji Hyeon) with whom he is having an affair, while at the same time wanting to be free of her. He is filled with self-loathing, seeing himself as weak. The relationship is mainly sexual in nature, devoid of any real connection, and therefore, ultimately frustrating. The gratification of the act of sex dissipates quickly, and both are left empty.

Click on photo to enlarge.

While he wishes his love were reciprocated, it is not. He fantasizes about her being the woman he wants her to be in apparent real-time scenarios woven into the actual scene being played out, as he copes with the truth. She is not who or what he longs for her to be.

She wishes for the man she can’t have...the lover of her choice, the abuser who beats her and uses her in an offhand way. She waits for calls from him, and lives with one ear tuned to her cell phone. When he does call, she leaps into action, racing to dress, put on make-up, and leaving as fast as possible to get to him.

This is witnessed time after time by the writer, whose home she has moved into since she seems to have nowhere else to go.

These afflicted lovers have terrible emotional scenes. When the woman returns after a visit with the other man, either drunk or beaten physically, the writer is always there and takes care of her in spite of his desire to be shed of her. They both seem to sink deeper and deeper into a swamp of inner disgust and driving sexual desire.

Director Yeo Kyun Dong uses visual clues throughout that may or may not be picked up by the viewer. In one scene the couple is out walking, one on either side of the street, although they are theoretically walking together. What could describe the separation between these minds and souls better than such a simple device? He also did interesting things with audio, other than merely supplying us with a remarkable musical background.

The very sounds in the film--the clattering departures of the woman, her slamming of the door, her frequent shrillness, her noisy occupation of another's space…is jarring. All this, opposed to the introspective silence of the writer and his isolation when he is alone or quietly writing as his lover sleeps, is calculated and clever, simply because it works on the subconscious, and tells us so much about the characters, without saying a word.

Click on photo to enlarge.

When viewed through the intellect first, without expectation, but with the mind open to the surreal, this becomes a little gem in it's own right. The majority of gems taken from the earth are flawed. It goes without saying that it is a most beautiful film physically, but also that it is flawed.

Some of the flaws lay in the acting ability of Oh Ji Ho who was relatively inexperienced at the time La Belle was made. He was widely criticized for this by online critics, and it took some of the bloom off the rose. Fortunately, he is a doggedly stubborn individual, who doesn’t quit or let go easily, and has made remarkable strides in his work. What he did have then, and still has, is beauty.

In my opinion, he was simply too young for the role even though he looked older than his twenty-four years. In the love scenes, he was exquisite. I have never seen any to compare with them. Where some of the film is done with voice-over narrative, Oh Ji Ho shows his stuff while reciting the lines. In this, he exonerates himself. He reads beautifully. His voice is like honey. His tempo is flawless.

Lee Ji Hyeon, on the other hand, is unquestionably excellent as the desperate woman filled with longing for the man she loves so futilely, while living with a man she eventually feels nothing less than disdain for, a man she uses as a sexual soporific to quell the pain of her life. Her acting ability stuns, as one would be stunned if dropped into a vat of ice water. She takes your breath away. Seeing this talented dynamic woman at work causes you to fall under the spell she weaves. She’s a powerhouse of phenomenal magnetism and energy.

Click on photo to enlarge.

Oh Ji Ho and Lee Ji-Hyeon are good-looking people. Both have nice bodies. They are agile and graceful, and totally believable in the love scenes, which are incredibly sensuous and caressing. This is where the choreographic expertise of Ahn Eun Mi shows brilliantly. Even so small a detail as the positioning of the actors’ hands during the love scenes comes into play with a huge payoff. The physical aspects of the love scenes are stunningly beautiful. They are always riveting.

So, one might say the film is choppy in a sense. When it flows it’s divine, when it stalls it becomes awkward.

Since the reader may not have seen this movie, I will refrain from divulging more of the plot, or the events that take place. I suggest you see it.

Technical Note:
My copy is the Spectrum version from Korea. Generally, Spectrum does a fine job, with excellent picture and sound quality. This version has both. Unfortunately though, it has the worst subtitles I’ve ever seen. They confuse rather than clarify.

I’ve watched the film three times, the last time without subtitles since I'm now familiar with the story line. I was able to enjoy it a lot more without reading the titles. Because I enjoy hearing the Korean language, I kept the volume on.

***Brought to you by The Hyacinth Papers.***
The Hyacinth Papers is a blog I opened to accommodate my appetite for Asian film. I felt it was a good idea to do so, rather than to allow The Hagfish Chronicles to lose it's original tone and content to a new, possibly fleeting, interest of mine. (Being the fickle creature I am....)

Octavia E. Butler

2006-03-03T16:48:00.000-05:00

Octavia E. Butler
June 22, 1947-February 24, 2006

I was unaware of Octavia Butler until less than an hour ago.

I heard her being interviewed on Fresh Air. It was recorded several years ago, and I realized how eerie it is to hear the dead speak with so much warmth.

I was in the kitchen, at first, only half listening. They said she had died this week after a fall in her home. I thought, head injury. It seems it is still not known whether she’d had a stroke, or, if indeed, she did hit her head with so much force that it would kill her.

But now it’s too late to do anything but think about the interview, the sound of her compelling voice, the warmth she projected. I listened carefully because I felt there would be something very important coming from this woman. And I was not disappointed.

She was beautiful. Her voice was rich, and her speech was measured, the very sound of her was magical in it's resonance. The words that came from her were wise, and full of practicality, but you would know her poetic side after hearing her for a few minutes. What a delicate touch she had, yet you’d feel it, she wasn’t delicate herself, but the touch….

I feel terribly deprived now. I miss her already.

This is an era where many are, speaking quite frankly, stupid, blissfully undereducated, lacking in imagination, and devoid of genuine compassion. Vast numbers of people who don’t give a tinker’s damn about anything outside their own petty sphere overwhelm us with their brutishness.

In such an atmosphere, it is infinitely painful to suffer the loss of this exquisite intellectual. She has gone, taking her brilliant light with her.

Peaceful journeys Ms. Octavia.

Oh Ji Ho Did It-

2006-02-17T20:58:00.000-05:00

An Asianflickophiliac is Born
What do you mean there’s no such word? You just read it, didn’t you? So there it is.

If you’re going to get fixated on something, try something new, unusual, or exotic. Or, live big, go for all three.

Asian movies qualify for me on these counts, with a little bit of cheating where new is concerned. I had seen Chinese movies in the past. Only two I think. It’s been a long time.

I went to dinner with my friend Sybil, and her friend Morty. We were in Chinatown in New York City. We ate fish-head soup, complete with fish-head, and I confess here…it was so delicious, I wish I had some now. No lie. I did not vie for the pleasure of the fish’s eyes, but was pleased with the cheek I was offered, as I was a guest. Sybil got the other one.

After this excellent repast, we walked to the movie theatre to see my first, and Sybil and Morty’s probable millionth Chinese movie. I really liked it. People were flying all over the place throwing dangerous looking interesting things at each other, and the women were very tough. The theatre was packed with Chinese people eating wildly out of take-out containers, and cheering on the heroes.

What a great night.

Fast forward to the present where I languish in the midst of unbearable mediocrity, and dullards supreme. Am I discontent with my existence? You betcha.

Enter Oh Ji Ho.

This is Oh Ji Ho.

Click image to enlarge for full impact.

To get into the tangled trail that led me to his presence in the world requires another confession. I have always been attracted to men I considered exotic, or at least unusual in some way. I had a long time love relationship with a man from Haiti. I married a man from Colombia SA. Had a brief affair with a man from India, and friendships with people of many ethnic backgrounds throughout my life. New York is Mecca. Everyone goes there. If you want to meet incredible people, pack your bag and go to New York. It’s one of the greatest cities in the world.

One day, while cruising around the web, I did a search for Asian men for a piece I was going to write. I stumbled over the link for a forum titled Dedicated to the beauty of Asian Men, I clicked on it, and discovered a totally delightful thread that is now a mile long I suspect. It never seems die off. There’s always another one to rave about. I started looking at the men, and thought, “gee, they are beautiful”.

Curiosity drove me on. I’m never satisfied with handsome faces. I want to know about the people behind them. I got the idea to search image files and to follow up from the sites I’d find. Lo, and behold, within a couple of pages of thumbnails, I found the above photograph.

It stopped me dead in my tracks. I could only say to myself, this is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my entire life. His name was posted there, so I did another search. I came up with a little bit of data. Discovered he was a fashion model, and that he has moved into the movie/television area. It was through this means I found La Belle, the movie I reviewed in the previous post.

La Belle was my first Asian DVD. I had a VHS copy of Shadow of China, which is a Hong Kong made pan Asian effort, that is in English, and produced for the western consumer. By the way, it’s excellent. The music is phenomenally beautiful, and I wish it were available on DVD. It stars John Lone, a talented Asian actor who unfortunately has been used poorly by American filmmakers through type casting. I believe he’s moved on to directing these days. He’s also a choreographer.

La Belle was the real thing. Pure Asian. I got a taste of Korean work, and liked it. I liked it enough to go in search of other movies with Mr. Oh, because I was familiar with him, and let’s face it, he isn’t exactly chopped liver. I ordered my next DVD, which was Love Trilogy. (Commentary on that to follow.) L.T. was on back order, and it was a long time in coming. I had almost given up on it, but one day I got an e-mail telling me it was on the way, and within a couple of days, it was here. And so began the love affair.

I found a great supplier in HK Flix. I bought more movies. I signed up for newsletters from HanBooks, and also, HanCinema. As time passed, I began to explore other works not just from Korea, but also China.

I now state here that I am a hopeless addict. I mainline these DVDs. If I could afford it, I’d spend thousands on them, and on the best possible equipment to play them.

And it’s all Oh Ji Ho’s fault too. I accept no blame whatsoever.

More to come on the subject of Asian delights of the silver screen. In my next post I will tell you where to go to find Asian movies on DVD, and talk a little bit about the ins and outs of shopping for them. I will also periodically comment on the flicks I’ve seen and liked.

Bronze Water

2006-01-14T22:48:00.000-05:00

To my dear Rivi, whose heart has been an illuminated flower for me, always reminding me that light exists, no matter how dark it seems. I love you my friend.

Strange Country

2006-01-14T22:42:00.000-05:00

To my beloved Rufus, a man with a suitcase, and an impending journey on his hands. I dedicate this to you, from whom I stole the title, certain you'd understand.

May the trail be a happy one. Keep the Moon in mind. She plays hard tricks, you know....

In honor of the season

2005-12-22T21:01:00.000-05:00

This photograph is of a total eclipse over Africa. Photographer unknown. Our world is very beautiful. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to realize that. In this season of sharing, I wish all of you, peace, good health, and prosperity in the coming year.

My warm regards,
Hagfish

Click on photo to enlarge.

My Love Is Like To Ice

2005-12-19T20:14:00.000-05:00

My Love Is Like To Ice

by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

*******
It seems that we have always burned,
And frozen within icy glance,
Yet reach for love as fools will do;
Ever hungering for the dance.
A. Murray

Please click on image to enlarge.

If I...

2005-11-29T18:53:00.000-05:00

were to lean toward you with unknown intent, but with a look that has implications, what would you do?

Would you bolt deep down into your hole like a rabbit scenting a fox on the prowl, with it’s glorious tail a plume of certain victory, and wait in trembling silence for the wind to say I am no more?

Would you slither snake-like into a rocky crevice to watch me in action? Safe and invisible, a stalker of the reptilian order…sssssilent, and amused, finding old warmth in the stone, settling in for the duration, and hoping for the beast to best beauty.

The word slither is so unsexual.

Sometimes.

Or would you lean toward me with a look of your own, and watch me fly away in alarm?

Ah, but we think too much, and vaporized heat dissapates in the chill of this room too soon for contemplation to bloom, while rain pounds at the place like a giant's tears of rage because his hand is stuck in the chimney, and he hungers for me as a snack.

The bitch goddess has her way with me tonight. There is no moon to guide me, and random thoughts are full of error and eros despite the cold draft that reminds me of impending doom, or an empty bed.

Images of dangerous anti-heroes, and mythic monsters full of warm breath and flame flood the mind with perverse pleasure.

A twist of something not quite right in absinthe, please. I need some oblivion to settle the ashes of yesterday.

To My Friend Ara

2005-11-17T19:08:00.000-05:00

Querida,
Te amo.

In my eyes, you are strong and beautiful because you continue to live with such an immense stone across your soul, across your heart, and across your mind. You carry that which would break the so-called strong who are never so challenged by life as you are.

I make this statement publicly.

You are my beloved loyal treasure. You have understood it when I have fallen from grace. You have cared enough to send me Neruda, and to give me your gentle loving hand to hold in my own darkness.

Humanity lives in blindness Querida. They only see what is safe. You look into the pit of hell, and come back scorched to tell the story of what you have seen.

My sister Ara, I salute you. You are my honored friend.

Always,
Ann

Fantasy Shoes

2005-11-12T22:39:00.000-05:00

Reality makes me sick.

After coming to that conclusion, I decided to quit reality. Reality on the other hand, likes me and follows me like a dog.

So, I started watching movies I've seen before, while waiting for a shipment of more movies to come by mail from a half.com dealer. Thirteen new ones to watch over and over.

Last night it was Bram Stoker's Dracula. I fell asleep just before they chopped Lucy's head off to give her peace, and to prevent her from eating more children than she may have eaten already. Coppola glosses over how many children she may have eaten before decapitation, which probably makes sense for the sake of theatre. We're sup
posed to feel sympathy for poor Lucy in spite of her shallow nature.

At 5 AM today, I chose Mississippi Burning. I stopped the tape before they found Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. I remember that day. Too much reality. So next I'm on to Wayne's World if I can find it. Not much danger there.

If movies aren't the answer, maybe I need fantasy shoes.

Fantasy shoes are colorful. A woman came to see me yesterday wearing green shoes. It was St. Paddy's day, so of course they fit in with some sort of reality. She assured me she only wears them for St. Paddy's day, which means that she might well be buried in them if she happens to die near the 17th of March, even 50 years from now. It all depends.

The fantasy shoes I concocted today are in shades of blues and greens. The greenest being chartreuse. They can take me anywhere away from all this, away from all that, all the way over the rainbow.

I can't think of any solution for the world as it stands on such shaky ground. Fantasy shoes have become the answer. You put them on your feet, and turn four again. You never have to leave there.

When I was four, I knew there was evil, but I believed in good.

[Original publication date March 21, 2004
at The Dream Tigers]

A. Murray

Click on image to enlarge.

Whisperer

2005-10-27T14:13:00.000-04:00

Solitarius

2005-10-20T14:28:00.000-04:00

In the best of situations, we do not belong to each other. There is no tinge of ownership, of thralldom. Each is separate and apart. This is essential to clear thinking and rational relationships. It is also Utopian, and not easily achieved.

Convention has caused so many mismatches in marriage. They are the answer to an overabundance of heat in the loins. They are the avoidance tactic of the tribe that has no wish to raise children resulting from too much heat. Ergo, promote the family unit as desirable, and at times inevitable, lest scandal ensue. It is financially sound.

Humanity reproduces itself and an endless supply of mismatches.

Occasionally though, like a streak of light passing through the early leaves of spring…a minor miracle of life occurs. A good match comes to pass.

But because life tends not to be kind, things happen, pieces that do fit very well get broken. Important words fall into dark cracks and are muffled by disapproval, covered by small stones, and twigs dropped by birds. Lovers dissolve, and invisibility is the fate of the glowing vision of forevermore.

So, this had come to pass, it seemed, in her life.

Time moved like a balloon filled with water, incapable of speed. The cheap clock on the wall ticked away seconds.

Tick

Tick

Tick

Tick

She played Solitaire.

Have you any idea how long a game of Solitaire can last? Oh, you think you do. A few minutes, you say. There is a game that involves four suits of cards laid out in ten rows. Lunatics and widows play this game. And what a strangely non-apropos term. Play. It is not play, it is the second-to-second quest for oblivion, and were it possible, it should measure itself out in moments which are uncountable, therefore making it last forever.

When involved deeply in moments of Solitaire, it is almost impossible to think of anything else but the Red Queen seeking the Red King from so great a distance… resolution is very difficult. A difficult pastime dedicated to smoothing out hours. The removal of jagged hours being the ultimate goal. Many hours become days, although some get lost in the shuffle and are never found again.

The jagged hours come though. No matter how many Red Queens find a Red King, no matter how many black nines find their black ten, the one that fits perfectly…the jagged hour of that day will come.

This is the time of the rusted knife, the scimitar gone too dull to perform, that succeeds only in letting one know they will live in a mangled half state. No clean surgical assassination. It is full of blood and howling. It is performed in the secret places of the heart. It is life extended to massive proportions, to be plodded through one thick step at a time, via the process of thought.

The question that is not asked for fear of the answer rings like a bell.

What an incongruous sound.

The loss of a good match leaves one halved like an apple cut cleanly down the center, the perfect symmetry of seeds on either side of the core, beautiful, but irreparably altered, and soon corrupted by the inevitable oxidation that spells ruin.

Solitaire n. 1. a game played by one person alone, as a game with marbles or pegs on a board having hollows or holes, or any various card games. 2. a precious stone, esp a diamond, set by itself, as in a ring. [L. solitarius - alone]

My Captain

Oh my Captain, you went so quietly,
I never heard the sound of your
step as you crossed the threshold
to that door I left hanging open
in my idealist's distraction.

There's a mist of sadness
that clings to me like the fog
I got lost in that year, when
the world became a
precarious pile of teetering
bricks that I tried to catch
when they fell without
warning.

I miss you my Captain.

My Captain, my shipmate
of the long life sea we
cross over in our fragile
boats---separate, and
saying little in the
long run,
after saying so much.

Captain, I thought I
could change things,
I thought I could matter
somehow on this troubled
Earth. I thought some
word I spoke would
turn a tide, save a life,
make the lunacy stop.

It was futile Captain,
and I lost you in the trying,
and I fall silent now
beneath the swollen
waters of too long
a time wasted.

A. Murray
For Alan Bok
September 21, 2002

Flower in Winter

2005-10-16T17:09:00.000-04:00

Flower - Brooklyn Botanical Garden - New York
Taken in a greenhouse during a very long cold winter.
Outside, there was deep snow.
Click image to enlarge.

The Mystery Solved

2005-10-16T07:49:00.000-04:00

More or less…

I owe more than a passing explanation to those who cared enough to keep checking in, so here goes:

This is more blog-like than my usual posts, and it’s a thing I tend to avoid. At this time though, it seems appropriate, as I am still not really up to writing personal letters. Please bear with me here.

Most specifically to Ara, Don, Rich, and Rivi (Listed alphabetically.)

Directly after the earthquake/tsunami, I fell into a deep, almost fog-like depression. I believe it was also in a good part due to my reaction to the election results here in this country.

I have long held the belief that it is far better for me to cope with my depression without resorting to medications. This is for myself only. I do not think that all depressed people should follow that dictum. I realize that in many cases psychiatric/medical help saves sanity, and perhaps life itself.

In my case, I have viewed my depression as a time of rest and introspection, since withdrawal is the rather extreme symptom for me, and was the strongest symptom of the recently past bout.

Depression is a demon. I understand that. It is not poetic, or romantic. It is a good idea to avoid it when possible, but there are times, for me, when the overload on my mental circuits becomes so great, I have no clear way out but to remove myself from the cause(s), through the means of slipping into the mental void of depression. I don’t elect depression consciously. My subconscious does that. The causes themselves do not go away e.g. the tsunami victims are still suffering horribly although they now lack the glamour to attract the news media here in America, and the election results…oh well….

In order to flee the causes, I shut my life down. I stopped listening to newscasts, and I also stopped reading news on the web. I stopped reading any blogs because there was always the danger of too much reality hurling me deeper into my private abyss.

During this stage of my mental obliteration, I suffered from a physical condition that made it very difficult for me to sit for any length of time at the computer, or anywhere else for that matter. There was a lot of swelling and pain in my legs, and wisdom dictated that I stop all harmful activities, such as prolonged, almost obsessive computer devotion. (Computer devotion is a chronic disease.)

In defense of my body and soul, I left the world of the computer. It was only turned on briefly every couple of weeks, and the web barely accessed at all. This explains such deep silence on my part. I didn’t have a pen to write with.

In early May (the 2nd to be exact) I had an accident here in my home. I fell and hurt myself very severely. I injured my left knee so badly, I was unable to even think about walking, or sitting, or doing anything other than sleeping when I could. The pain involved was beyond description.

I injured my upper body also, and as a result of this, there were other very unpleasant physical situations that developed like dominoes falling, involving my shoulders and arms/wrists/hands that made typing unbearably painful.

I did not tell anyone of this, with the exception of Rich, who is a deeply personal friend, and who had a good working knowledge of my situation since I tend to complain to him about nearly everything. He is to be lauded for his infinite patience with my vapors. My notes to him were extremely brief because I could do no more than that.

It seemed ridiculous to burden others with this information. They could do nothing to help me. I was off the web. And please understand that depression distorts the process of thought to an astonishing degree. We believe we are irrelevant a lot of the time; that we could disappear without leaving a single ring on the surface of the water we sink into. There is a major obliteration of basic ego.

I am tired now. I want to state that I am recovering at last though, so that you will stop being injured by my silence, so that you will feel better knowing that all this was deeply personal, and that I was alone in it, as I needed to be.

I know I was very rude by being so silent, but when you’re crazy, you really don’t see anything too clearly, and depression is a form of madness for me.

I do not ask for forgiveness. That is a matter of personal choice for you. If I ever told you I loved you, I did, and I do today also.

More when I feel a little better. My arms are beginning to hurt now. I don’t want to start the problem(s) up again.

For Rivi - With My Heart Full of Hope

2004-12-27T18:29:00.000-05:00

By one count, 22,000 are dead, by another, 23,700. Nature's fist slamming down on the earth, making a massive display of a point that will be lost in the shuffle of petty concerns, greedy enterprise, political wrangling and meanness.

We will memorialize September 11th, 2001 until we as a people, are so tired of the words, we will finally tune it out.

For this extraordinary display of power we have only tasted slightly through the hurricane season, we will have instant amnesia as long as our lives are not directly affected. What an infantile nation, full of self-indulgent children who don't want to learn any lessons from what life brings us.

When the towers fell, I had the thought that one slap from the planet could take entire countries out with a single event. And it has nearly done so.

Will we learn anything from this might, which in the eye of a rational beholder, reduces humanity to the importance of dust? Isn't it time to begin the long journey toward adulthood and perspective? Isn't it time for us to be a little bit kinder, a little less interfering with the happiness of others?

I have a friend whose family is in Sri Lanka, another whose family is in Malaysia. What can I say to these people? So much grief may await me in my mailbox one day in the near future. What consolation can be offered? This from only two friends, two individuals. Think of the hundred thousand lives that will have been so badly torn and damaged, and add a potent quantity of grief.

This is the world. America is not the world. It is merely a fortunate place.

We should be in mourning for the losses of others, but I doubt many of us will do that. It's far away, and we are safe...we think. We will turn to a TV station that amuses us, and we will still hate blacks, and gays, and whoever else has the nerve to disagree with our politics or religious views. Not one iota of open heartedness will result from watching a genuine tragedy of unthinkable immensity as it continues to unfold, hour by hour, day by day.

We will fight insane wars for the purpose of financial gain, we will call strangers enemies, and we will kill them. We will keep on keeping on.

Meanwhile, nature settles into a quiet phase, and builds up it's rage for the next time. Is it trying to teach us something? Ask yourself that question. I do.

Path - Dedicated to Ara

2004-11-27T16:17:00.000-05:00

I do understand.

Click image to enlarge.

Blind Love - Tom Waits

2004-11-15T08:00:00.000-05:00

Blind Love

Now you're gone, and it's hotels and whiskey and sad-luck dames
And I don't care if they miss me, I never remember their names
They say if you get far enough away, you'll be on your way back home
Well, I'm at the station, and I can't get on the train

Must be blind love, only kind of love is stone blind love
Blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, oh it's blind love, stone blind love
It's your stone blind love

Now the street's turning blue, the dogs are barking and the night has come
And there's tears that are falling from your blue eyes now
I wonder where you are and I whisper your name
The only way to find you is if I close my eyes

I'll find you with my blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
The only kind of love is stone blind love
The only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, oh your blind love, your stone blind love

It's your blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
Stone blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
Stone blind love, stone blind love
End

Were it not for blind love, some might never be loved at all. Is it because they are unlovable? Or because they are unseen, kept safely invisible to those who only see what they recognize as being proper to love? An eternal question in the game of life.

What?

2004-11-13T23:53:00.000-05:00

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

The Razor

2004-11-11T17:10:00.000-05:00

She has a black razor, a gift from a Prince who stands high in her estimation. The Prince arrived long ago, in the dead of night, bearing the gift. He laid it upon a small marble-topped table in her living room. He said little, since the gift was so laden with implications one might derive from past experience, or from dreams, or sometimes, from terrible realities.

Each morning she stands looking at it before starting the day. It is always close to her in thought, as though there were links of fine chain connecting them.

The black razor is mysterious. It speaks it's own language. It tells tales of nightmare landscapes, and of flying on wings that sprout from the shoulders of some who drink a secret potion, unafraid of the result. It speaks of escapes that are accomplished not by going outward, but going inward instead. Interior magic is heavy, dense and powerful. Its potency can not be diluted by exterior sound and fury.

She loves the black razor with a peculiar intellectual twist. The flame is not dampened by this, but fueled instead.

She is perverse.

At times, just after nightfall, she kisses the blade, imbuing it with her spirit, and breathes upon it, leaving a film resembling smoke. When it clears, the eyes of another look out at her.

Communion.

She loves the long sleek lines of it, and finds a deep, almost erotic pleasure in pressing the flat of the blade to her cheek, feeling it's cool surface warm to her own temperature. It becomes a part of her. Ever dangerous, ever mesmerizing, never sheathed.

It is the constant reminder of life as it might trickle away through a cut across a vein.

Or, of a close elegant shave, leaving a sensuous silken surface behind.

On certain nights, she is awakened by the presence of the moon. It sits squarely centered in the window.

There was a fine crescent moon in a dark sky. It was the colour of ivory. Small clouds moved slowly across it. It was the magic vehicle of witchery, which enables peculiar loves to fly toward each other soundlessly. Speaking in ancient tongues too arcane for others to know, thoughts are exchanged.

The palm of her hand promises either genius or madness. Is there a difference between them?

Hagfish straight up...

2004-11-09T14:40:00.000-05:00

...no water, no ice, no twist. First person singular. No artifice.

Time to talk. My house. I do the talking.

Link Policy: Links from this site exist because I have found some merit in the places they lead to. The meritorious are things perceived as funny; profound; poetic; of intriguing content not necessarily understood by me, but recognized as good stuff; brilliant minds reflected; fine photography; great graphics-non photographic-as in fractals etc; or the deep and tortured-which I am qualified to recognize. This is the spice that gives me life without terminal ennui.

I do not like stupidity, self-congratulatory puffery, reliance on dumb sleaze and/or profanity to attract/keep an audience, or hearing about the new pink sweater someone just bought. I will not link to these sites. I cannot promise you the links I have will lead you to Wonderland, in fact, some of them might just lead you into hell. One man's Hell is another man's sweet spot.

I do not suffer fools well. It is my hope, that I don't send you to the house of a fool. All of life is subjective. So is taste.

If a site I've linked to starts to bore me, I will delete it. A piece of advice--if you use a link from this page, bookmark it for yourself. My level of tolerance may be different from yours. This advice is given as a courtesy.

Reciprocal links are appreciated, but not required.

Anonymous Comments: While your input is appreciated because it shows you've taken an interest in my work, there is something sorely lacking. It is personalization. A name would be the acceptably polite thing to attach. A first name would do nicely. (Not looking for the strawberry birthmark here.)

Content: Please bear in mind that I am a writer first and foremost. No writer worth his or her salt will deliberately bore the reader. Embroidery makes the cloth more interesting. I have the intention of doing that. If I fail you...what can I say? Nada. If you want meat and potatoes I suggest a cooking site. They can be loads of fun and full of horny innuendo too.

Here you get nepenthe, hemlock, sensuality, the occasional aphrodesiac, sarcasm, and sometimes, stiletto sharp nastiness..maybe like today. Plus, horny innuendo. In the mood for "lite"? A word I hate incidentally--trip on over to Hagfish Lite, a name chosen in sarcasm. Stupid (but not always stupid) humor is another facet.

It is appreciated that some of you would like to advise me. If I show distress and angst, it is part of the process of my life. Please understand, you do not know me. You don't know anything about me.

You only know of me, that which I choose to tell you. Take it with as many grains of salt as you need or wish. Above all, don't let me bring you down.

This is a book, slow in the crafting. It will never be published anywhere but here. You are in a gondola, lying back on the cushions. I am the gondolier and the storyteller.

Sometimes I weave, sometimes I spin. There is always a center of truth in what I tell you, but whether the truth is mine or not, is only for me to know. Your perception may be based on your own imagination, not mine.

Storytellers carry you away on their breath. If you open your eyes and look down to realize only a breath is holding you, you might fall on your head. You wouldn't want that, would you? Drift, I won't land you someplace unfriendly. Maybe.

New Places: It is with pleasure that I introduce you to some new places I've found. Starting at the top -
World Through My Eyes
This is some of the most beautiful photography I've seen . The photographer is sensitive, but also very much aware of line. A combination of inherent mathematical consciousness, and soul-beauty. Visit. You won't be disappointed.

In alphabetical order...new minds to explore.

blacktooth
Within the layers of this place, if you look carefully, you will see struggle, honesty, intelligence, striving, nobility, sorrow.... One human being making the best of some of the hardest days. A musician, a writer, a worker...a man self-described as, "a wormfood man applying unaccepted philosophy to this crapshoot called life - or something." Walk gently here with good intention. You may come away humbled. You won't be the same, as you leave, closing the door softly behind you. Remember...there are layers. You must seek.

The Vault of Buncheness
Oh my, how I love this guy. This is a man one would find described as killingly funny. The description would be true. And he's a food maven. Better yet. He's irreverent, so smart he makes my toes curl, because I'm an intelligence junkie, and he's living in my old home town, well...almost. Close enough for me to smell the "dirty hot-dog man" wagons. And I can hear the screech of the subway.... He would ask why I wanted to hear that. I would tell him, try this place for a while, friend.

To the invisible man, C. W.

2004-11-05T14:56:00.000-05:00

You did not enter my life. I entered yours. You are twenty-five years old, and you are almost as cynical as I am. Almost as cynical as S. J. Almost, only because it takes time to perfect that patina which is a sign of longevity.

I sniff at you, and the scent is too familiar to walk away from. You remind me of someone I love. You are beautiful and frightening in your reality. You are terrible in your reality. You cause me to cringe in your reality. Your reality is a honed razor poised at the jugular.

I have maintained for many years that I do not fear death, only the means through which I achieve it. Am I lying to myself? I believe death is the surcease of all pain, and that it brings with it absolute termination of consciousness. The burning...heh...fizzling question that floats ectoplasm-like through my atmospheres is then...do I fear obliteration?

Answer: No.

Reason: Obliteration ends comprehension. Comprehension is required to allow fear to exist.

And you? You speak of dying. Do you fear it? I do not think you fear it. Not at the intellectual level. Perhaps at the cultural level you might. But you are intellectual first.

You hold life in a death grip. You continue to breathe in, breathe out, even on the worst days.

Through words, you are immensely powerful and provocative.

My greedy indulgent side says, stay, live, write more. I am already addicted to the recounting of your harsh life, and your contradictory self that speaks a million languages.

Live. Who am I to request that?

I said you remind me of someone I love. He is a tree filled with dark flowers. I hunger for the blossoms he sheds, that fall upon this strange virtual paper, and leave their indelible mark and scent on my life. And you are like him. You both tell true and naked horror stories.

Yellow Moon

2004-11-03T22:19:00.000-05:00

Yellow moon like butter
Sitting on a dark plate.
Warm moon says love
Who ever pleases you,
And even some that don't
But love, because I am
Followed by cold skies
Distant and unattainable,
And you are a distressed
Bitch goddess who needs
A little softening up, like
Butter on a dark plate
Resting beside the sun.

Novemberata

2004-11-01T22:53:00.000-05:00

High-tension-wire days and nights. Sleep is more fitful than ever and silence seems an odd course to take, but it is taken. Against whom or what, to protect whom or what?

Unanswerable.

If we are silent we do not inflict too many deep wounds, only the wound of silence itself. If we practice silence, we inflict the wound upon ourselves also, and so it goes, round and round.

The moon hangs in clear skies, and the same moon covers all the silent ones with the same light. Is this communion? Is this the kiss in the dark?

A breath is caught in the cold of night, hangs as visible mist, then is gone. An exhalation that says the word "sigh", but if there is no one to hear it, did it really happen?

When the eyes are closed, darkness covers all things except reality.

She kisses the arch of a certain distant foot. Not in humility, for she is never humble, unless it's part of the worst game in town.

She displays the palm of her hand.

Evening Descends Over Hanover, PA

2004-11-01T19:40:00.000-05:00

Click photo to enlarge.

Dream Tigers

2004-10-25T03:14:00.001-04:00

Dream Tigers

The Dream Tigers came again last night.
They breathed on my face, taking my air away.

Their feet are so huge, they never sink
into the featherbed.

Some nights I don't know they're there,
but on the nights when they feel hungry
they nibble at my fingers, swallowing
the tips like cherries. I can't ignore them then.

I smell them when the air is heavy with fog or mist,
and I try to lie so still they'll pass me by as they
prowl, searching for something new to eat.

My cherry fingertips grow back. The Dream Tigers
know this, timing their voracious night walks to
coincide with a fresh crop. I tried sleeping in a tree,
but they climbed better than I, and knocked me to the
ground to teach me a lesson. They reminded me then
of my evil stepmother, who beat me black and blue,
but never where it showed.

The Dream Tigers know the cherry tips of my fingers
are ignored by others, and laugh at me for caring
so much whether I can push a button to light the room;
or write a letter asking to be rescued from them.
They know they are supreme in the Land of Night,
where Anything can happen, and sometimes does.

I want to run away from the Dream Tigers, but
they're faster than I am, and I fear that if I annoy
them too much, they'll eat my legs instead, and I'll
be there, smelling them, and listening to them
rumbling as their appetites sharpen, finally eating
until I never grow back again.

A. Murray
Based on a dream told to me by Richard Sellers.

Autumn Sunday

2004-10-17T15:44:00.000-04:00

Sunday. A day that has always carried with it enforced rest, in the back of her mind.

And what's worse, it's autumn, the least enjoyed season, and the most challenging when it comes to skirting deep winter induced depression.

Everything that could happen in the way of bad events seems to happen in the fall of the year. The word, fall, itself, conjures up grim memories of bygone days and hours. It was in the fall that she fell, never to walk properly again, and it was in the fall the forced separation from her mother when she was seven years old took place, leaving a bitter segment behind itself that never sweetened with time, and it was in the fall she'd made hard decisions concerning other lives that depended on wisdom she was unsure of, and on and on...

The sun shines with a defiant brilliance, while swarms of birds shriek and complain of the upcoming trip south. They are everywhere, cacophonous and repellent. Starlings, the accidental natives, with little to commend them as birds go, perch in the trees all around her home. They make it impossible to ignore the cold northern air that has settled over the region. They are the harbingers of discomfort.

They fall silent as suddenly as they had begun the discussion of flight plans. It is eerily quiet, save for the music coming from the living room. From the same window through which she watched the disappearance of the blue and white umbrella, she sees the flight resume. A mass exodus.

When the geese begin their journey to a more amenable clime, the vision of their chevron flight which invokes poetry so easily in many, strikes her with great deep sadness, while at the same time, thrilling her with it's perfection, and more so when they break ranks and engage in a chaos of design.

Their cries across evening skies that are often shot through with outrageous sunset colors lining charcoal clouds, say less of abandonment than invitation to come along.

Come…fly with us, we know the way to escape from this, and as you like us, we like you. Come be with us. You will be one of us; you will be a kindred soul among us. We will alight near friendly waters, and we will coast on the winds, and warm air will caress us into a sense of continuity, and safety.

But she has no wings.

The Plume

2004-10-12T20:23:00.000-04:00

He was standing on the corner, just strumming his guitar….

That was the first time she saw him, but she was too involved in buying a feather to pay attention to a skinny raggedy man, playing for dimes and quarters, while the reality was nickels and pennies…and not too far you can get on that.

It was weeks later that they crossed again, she with a bruised face, maybe a broken nose and a fifty in her pocket. The air was damp from the night and the river, and she was beyond caring. She came toward him like a moth approaches flame, full of wondering what the hell it is, and unable to decipher any answer at all, and equally unable to break the hold of the light. It was the music.

The john had grudgingly given her the fifty after she'd gotten shrill and loud about the sum since she normally got a hundred…he had been unceremoniously brutal, slapping her repeatedly across the face while he stroked his cock. She figured it came to two dollars a slap. Deduct the cost of the torn jacket and the panty hose, and she was in the red, with no prospects until the bruises healed.

When she'd started the shrill complaint about the money, he grabbed her by the arm and swung her toward the stairs, letting her go flying so she rode down them on her back. The jacket just one more casualty, having caught on a protruding nail when she brushed against the wall as she slid.

And now she was standing in front of a loser without a hope or a dollar bill. The music was soft, as if it was being played for the musician only, and she was being allowed to eavesdrop on a private conversation. She reached into her pocket, and fished out the fifty. Blood money. She dropped it into the case at his feet. He finally looked up at her. He was smoking a joint, and offered her a hit. She took a drag, sucked it in, holding the smoke deep in her lungs, while staring out across the street…still disconnected.

He waved the joint away when she passed it back to him, bent over the case, laid the guitar in it, paying no attention to the fifty, clicked the locks on the lid and stood, all in one motion. He offered her his arm, and said, "where to?"

As they reached the second floor of the apartment building, he grew aware of the tapping of her stiletto heels on the small black and white tiles of the floor…the way she seemed to be a beaten drum in an echo chamber. Just before the third floor he stopped her on the stairs. Standing behind her, looking at the torn nylon encasing her legs streaked with blood, he reached down and took one of her shoes off, held her foot so she was standing there like a crane, and placed a kiss in the hollow of the arch.

On the fifth floor, she turned to a door, took the keys from her purse, and walked into the apartment, without looking back at him. She heard the click of the lock, and the security chain slide into place. He was a quiet walker, and she felt him behind her before he spoke, asking if he might take a shower.

He came into the kitchen naked and un self-conscious, seating himself in front of one of the plates full of eggs and potatoes. They ate in silence, and didn't look up at each other until he finally raised his eyes, assessing the damage. All he said was, 'better put some ice on that."

After a while she rose from the table, and took his hand, leading him to the bedroom. He lay down on his belly, stretched so long and thin, like a white stripe on the red sheet. He heard her in the bathroom running the water, and he thought he caught the sound of a muffled sob…a woman crying into her bath towel…classic scenario.

He was half-asleep when she came back, and stood beside the bed. She carried a long ostrich plume, soft as a cloud. She ran it slowly down the length of his body. Over and over she slid the plume down his back from neck to feet in one direction. He slept.

Somewhere around three in the morning he came out to the living room with a towel wrapped around his waist. He reached toward her and said, "you'd best come to bed now, it's late." She followed him, and folded herself down beside him.

In the morning, she wakened to the scent of his skin, and his long warm arm laid across her like a shield.

Years later, after his songs had begun to sell, he bought her a fur jacket, and a pair of silk stockings.

For S.J.

*fic*

Falling Away

2004-10-11T16:38:00.000-04:00

She thought about the falling away process. She recognized it came in clusters. Several people close to her, all dying within a short time, several friends leaving her sphere at the same time, whether they were acquainted with each other or not. It left a strange veil of cold over her to think about it.

Things are presaged by dreams in her life. Some so distorted, she only recognizes them by a remote similarity of color or design in a waking incident, and often put this down as déjà vu, until memory forces itself upon the conscious mind.

The other dreams though, are starkly real, They play themselves out in the conscious and aware mind with a jolting adherence to fidelity. Those dreams give her a sense of having lived too long in the present time warp, and a desire to escape through a small opening, if she could find it. The truth of it all is that searching for the entry/exit of a particular time is futile. Time wraps itself around some, and force-feeds events into their lives no matter how valiant their attempts to escape might be.

She pulls her wrap closer around herself, staving off the chill of knowing too much at times. The affliction is coveted by the uninitiated, who imagine it as a magic carpet ride...this ability to understand.

There were times she tried to tell them what it was like, but it was a waste of breath to explain how it felt to recognize the horror of phantom pain in a limb severed in an accident, or to know the emptiness of the bed of the widow, or the hunger for a gentle touch the leper lives with, even as the flesh loses it's capacity to receive sensations.

Or how it is to feel the fear of the cancer victim, waiting, terrified of death, knowing his kiss will come. Or of how she sees the deadened eyes of the newly hopeless, recognizing the echo of the moment before the heart ceased looking for a solution.

The chill passes over her again. She knows it comes from within. The room is quite warm. She calls it by its name. It does not leave, but dogs her steps as she crosses the room, lifts the dark green watering can, and gives continued life to the hanging plant.

Later, as she leans back in a chair not designed for lounging, she sees a spider making it's way across the ceiling, and wonders, if it fell onto her tongue, what it would taste like.

Slip-Sliding Through a Mad Mind

2004-10-09T19:11:00.000-04:00

Oh, how I wish you were close by, so that I could sit with you, talk with you, letting it all spill out like suspicious fruit from a dangerous cornucopia, telling you my strange not so strange ideas of grand conspiracies that will bring down the world.

I would talk on and on perhaps concurrently exhausting you and your patience with me.

I do know you love your silences, the absence of other humans in the same room, your ritual solitude. I love these things myself, but for me, too much of a good thing can be poison, and I may settle for the wrong companions in a moment of weak loneliness, or jump from a high place.

What if I was to allow the words to escape the chamber of my mind where they are safely locked away, and one of them heard me? You see? You see? How close I get to the breaking point….

And I fear you’d turn away from me in disgust because I talk too much. You would say, "listen to this, have you ever heard of this band?" as you put on a loud piece of music whose appeal escapes me, and I blurt out, "got any Satie?" and ruin it all.

Oh, and I think of our writing. Yours is careful and under control. You know just where to put the punctuation marks…oh, god, it does make me wish I’d been a scholar instead of a dreamer in school. All those little rules utterly escape me and you know all of them. I feel in awe of this.

I have a crazy indifference to sounding sane sometimes when it’s flying forth, and don’t care how it comes out. You, on the other hand, construct. I spew like a fountain, or a girl caught unawares by a friend telling a joke, when she has a mouthful of soda pop.

You build.

When you tell me about something you’ve read, you’ve understood every word on the page. You’ve given it deep thought. I pluck data haphazardly from inelegant sources, the Internet, tabloids and pulp fiction, often imagining I know the meaning of it all. Your comprehension puts mine to shame, I sadly confess to you here. You are the intellectual; I merely act the part.

"All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances; each man in his time plays many parts."

Oh, I could sit at your feet staring up at you like an adoring hound, and learn so much, with an air of innocence disguising my abysmal ignorance. But if you uncovered the sham, if you found me out…. I can imagine the cold withdrawal coming down over your face like a curtain that may fail to rise again. Oh dear. Oh dear.

Perhaps I should eat this little orange colored pill. Maybe I should wait.

But then, I still my yammering voice, my dismayed heart, and I remind myself of two things: First - While you might enjoy being a learned king for a while, the crown would weigh on your head eventually, and the job would become onerous. You’d want to toss it off, and start to laugh. Second - We are friends. We love each other. And if you laughed it could be because I made you do it, and if you got too tired from it all, we’d just curl up on the floor and have a little siesta.

Like dogs.

There is nothing evil, or even strange afoot. The world is a wonderful place. Repeat one thousand times, and call me in the morning.

The Blue and White Umbrella

2004-09-28T21:29:00.001-04:00

They have been friends for so long, they're like an old married couple, except that there's a certain tension she feels when they're together which he doesn't feel. This is a major inequity between them as she sees things. She sees too many things.

At a terrible juncture in his life, he lost nearly everything solid; his home, his son to a different family, a lot of money, business, self-esteem, confidence, and whatever else could be lost by one person. There was finally nowhere to go.

Knowing that being under the same roof would kill them, she still told him to come share her nest. It was that or almost the street, and she couldn't bear it. Because that's what friends do for each other. They stick.

So he came with bag and baggage, and in the very beginning it was possible that it could work out without too much hell to pay. But the very beginning lasted a brief time, an almost instant spontaneous combustion of good manners and consideration took place.

She felt the nest to be under attack. She ousted the newfound enemy that lay beneath the surface of her friend, unseen for almost twenty years. It was hard to decide which was worse, to finally know him too well, or to realize she had been friends with a stranger for so long. She gave it deep thought. And concluded little.

As the warm months slid by in too much rain and disappointment, her friend came to his conclusion though. It was time to move, and so he told her he was going somewhere worse. He was running blind.

On a storm beaten day, with rains threatening flash flooding, and enough dreary sky to reflect sadness that might have slept through it otherwise, he came to see her, and to collect some belongings he'd left with her.

He went back and forth, filling the car in the down pouring of sky water, carrying a big blue and white umbrella, his feet squishing in the saturated earth. When the work was done, they sat together in the kitchen, talking as though it was any day, in any week, in any month, in any year of their long time. They were so casual, a stranger would immediately know something was wrong if he happened upon them. They acted the way people do at funerals sometimes, as though burying a beloved were something they did every day.

He rose to leave. They said casual good-byes...see you later, drive carefully.... At the door though, when he was half out and still half in, he stopped, put himself in reverse, and stood before her, bent to her and embraced her. She kissed his neck and smelled his cologne, one of her favorites. He half laughed, and remarked on it, then drew himself upright. She saw his eyes with threatening tears, the whites reddened and saying so much.

Then he turned, and once again the casual good-byes....

She watched the top of his umbrella passing the small kitchen window, then, looking through the exposed full-length window of the front room, she saw the umbrella still moving along, this time in full view, completely hiding him as though he were already gone, and she wondered if she would ever see him again, or would her final memory of him be the blue and white stripes disappearing around the corner.

She was composed as she sat there, but soon enough the distress signal reached the heart, and she wanted to fall on her knees, rend her garments, throw ashes on her head, and wail in great lamentation.

Love knows no boundaries. It does not carry a card of identity that tells you, this love is for children, and this love is for marriage, and this one is for your parents, and this for friends. It is simply love, and it can break any heart in the world.

In Pennies or Gold Dollars?

2004-09-25T01:37:00.000-04:00

Where shall I spend my heart, and how much of it? Shall it be on a prince across the mountains, or on a stray dog, or perhaps a goldfish?

Shall I spend it in pennies or gold dollars? Shall I bankrupt myself, or be cautious, conserving so that I might live a little longer in less poverty?

The unanswerable question rises and falls like a dangerous tide coming in during dark hours. Autumn has been announced. It is official; whether it pretends to be summer still, or turns on us like a savage wind shaking the soul as it does the dry leaves on the maple or oak.

Nature tells us we will need extra warmth now. We do not grow a winter coat over the summer months; we need a source of heat, but is that passion? Is passion a shelter against the inevitable blizzard snows that choke places into silent submission...?

Oh, for the reassuring carpet of violets to be spread before me again outside the window, the violet lawn of spring that tells me no decision need be made on the issue of spending that which is so unused and perhaps of lessened value since the shine is off the coin, as the bloom is off the rose.

Now the wind is up, and I hear the restless shurring sound of leaves considering whether to stay through the night, or to fall gracefully when there are no witnesses. There's a chill in the late air, and a certain restless quality to sleep that bespeaks the fact of need. And I needs must check my bank balance one day soon, and reach a conclusion.

But then, there's Indian Summer yet to come, and I will buy me some time with that I think.

There are omens:

Special Weather Statement - SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR KINGS (BROOKLYN) VALID FROM FRI SEP 24 2004 09:07 PM EDT UNTIL SAT SEP 25 2004 06:00 AM EDT. KINGS (BROOKLYN) NY-NASSAU NY-QUEENS NY-RICHMOND (STATEN IS.) NY- SOUTHEAST SUFFOLK NY-SOUTHWEST SUFFOLK NY- 907 PM EDT FRI SEP 24 2004 ...DANGEROUS RIP CURRENTS ALONG ATLANTIC FACING BEACHES... SOUTHEASTERLY SWELLS BEING GENERATED BY DISTANT HURRICANE JEANNE HAVE ALREADY ARRIVED IN OUR AREA. IT IS EXPECTED THAT THESE SWELLS WILL CREATE AN INCREASINGLY ROUGH SURF AND RIP CURRENTS ALONG ALL SOUTH FACING BEACHES. THESE CONDITIONS WILL LIKELY CONTINUE THROUGH THE WEEKEND AND QUITE POSSIBLY INTO EARLY NEXT WEEK. HURRICANE JEANNE IS CURRENTLY TAKING AIM ON THE BAHAMAS AND THEN FLORIDA THIS WEEKEND. DURING SUNDAY IT IS EXPECTED TO CURVE NORTHWARD...MARCHING UP THE ATLANTIC COAST THROUGH THE EARLY AND MID WEEK PERIOD. IF THIS TRACK PROVES CORRECT...WE CAN EXPECT THE ROUGH SURF CONDITIONS TO CONTINUE ALONG WITH THE THREAT OF RIP CURRENTS. REMEMBER...A RIP CURRENT IS A STRONG BUT NARROW CURRENT OF WATER FLOWING OUTWARD FROM THE BEACH. IT CAN RAPIDLY CARRY A SWIMMER INTO DEEPER WATER AND EXHAUST ANYONE TRYING TO SWIM AGAINST IT. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT IN A RIP CURRENT...SWIM PARALLEL TO THE BEACH UNTIL OUT OF ITS PULL. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SWIM BACK TO SHORE DIRECTLY AGAINST THE CURRENT. IT CAN EXHAUST AND DROWN EVEN THE STRONGEST SWIMMER. DUE TO THE TIME OF YEAR...IT MAY BE DIFFICULT TO FIND A BEACH WHERE LIFEGUARDS ARE PRESENT. NEVER SWIM ALONE AND ALWAYS HEED THE ADVICE OF BEACH PATROLS. WATCH YOUR CHILDREN. BE ESPECIALLY CAUTIOUS NEAR PIERS AND JETTIES WHERE RIP CURRENTS CAN BE ENHANCED.

What's In A Name?

2004-09-23T14:34:00.000-04:00

Thinking about men in general inevitably led her to think of all the men in her life. Too many men; too many boys costumed as men, and men, conversely, costumed as boys.

There were men who were women at heart, and men who prized their testosterone above all else, who would have drunk it at breakfast instead of coffee if it were possible. These were her least favorite ones. Bunk, bulk, and bullshit, was how she thought of them.

The favored men were the softer ones who had intelligence, and sensitivity, who never stepped on her toes because she was female, and they could have. She was kind toward them; listening to their tales, troubles, and dreams. They were the men she smoked grass with, while they talked and played music on the stereo that carried her far away and sometimes into bed with them.

Making love with close friends was taboo. Nothing could wreck a friendship faster than the one eyed mouse visiting the forbidden chamber.

The tumble might be fine, even extravagantly good in fact, but the morning after found them awkward, as though something more should happen now, or more awkwardly, that not only should the night before never have happened, but no other night, afternoon, morning, and all that might lie in between those time slots, should ever happen again.

Paranoia. The horror of expected expectations on the part of one or the other. A realization that this was one the other could never fall in love with "that way". "That way", being, a visit to an altar one day down the line, or at least, an introduction to Mummy Dearest at some point.

Enduring such a visit would have been tantamount to getting dragged home like a slightly disreputable pedigree-free stray mutt that had been found by the roadside, cleaned up a bit and brought to the family fold for feeding.

A loss of friendship that had some merit, because of capitulation to a whim, a twinge in the nether regions, and a hit on the peaceful pipe was a grim thought. She knew this from experience. She should never have slept with Italian Joey. After she slept with him, he was terrified of her, and she never got to wear his cap, which she loved, ever again.

Sex with friendly acquaintances? Oh, by all means! A good way to get nicely tussled, with the distinct possibility of falling in infatuation, or lust, or both. A fine summer diversion or, a nice capper to the holiday season when letdown is likely to bring one down. What better antidote to the blues, than a healthy toss in the hay? So good for the complexion too.

So, she thought of the men that had crossed the threshold, sometimes thinking with a distinctly jaundiced attitude. For example, why did so many men name their penises? And why such inane names? If you're going to tag the thing, do it with style! But no...they'd stand there wagging it coyly at her, saying something like, "look Junior, there's a nice_____ (fill in the blank) for you", or words to that effect. (OR worse. There are no limits to cutesy in the human race. Unfortunately.)

"Junior". And the perfect retort. If this is "Junior", does that make you "Mister Dickhead" then?

She dreamed in color.

2004-09-19T19:46:00.000-04:00

She dreamed in color. Many don't. The recall of the dreams had always been accepted as normal until she read in some learned tome that it was in fact, not so. This set her apart from the herd on yet another count. She thought that was a nice idea.

The dreams, more than a little laden with peculiar scenes...brought on the sense of colliding with Hironymous Bosch in the land of nod.

War always brought images of intensity and doom, leaving her tired at the break of dawn. The pink pearl light of the sky did little to dispel the sense she was still caught in the clutch of a Svengali who instilled these visions in her because it amused him.

They served no purpose.

As a child it was commonplace to dream of her mother. One dream was of her mother being killed by an atomic bomb.

She awakened one morning to find her mother gone. She was very young, and struggled with her clothes, unaccustomed to dressing without help; a tug on a strap of her overalls that slipped her shoulder, or being supplied with a pair of socks so there was no need to climb on a chair to reach the drawer. The absence of the friendly hand brushing her hair, and fastening a barrette to keep it out of her eyes....

She prepared herself purposefully, and making sure to lock the door behind her with the key that hung on a pink ribbon around her neck, she headed for the cellar.

Pulling open the heavy door, she felt the unease that the cellar always evoked, but went down the stairs regardless of it. There her mother lay, perfect in death, on the floor in her underwear. It seemed very strange. She appeared to be sleeping.

With that deep sense of dread strangulating her, she squatted down and shook her mother. She knew there was no hope of awakening her. The atom bomb definitely killed anyone who got hit by it.

She began to cry, soon becoming so full of loss that she screamed like a wounded animal, choking on mucous and hysteria, gasping for air as the sound of her voice twisted, turned, and echoed through the labyrinthine catacomb maze of the cellar that bound together the buildings of the housing project where they lived.

Ah, she was suffocating from grief. The loss of love, so acute, so infinite, so devastating.... Oh, and the fear of the next bomb, as she crouched there trying to hear if there were sirens wailing, but the sound was her own keening.

And then the voice from far away..."what's the matter dear, what is it, did you have a dream?"

Oh, those sea colored, beloved eyes, so full of concern, was there ever anything so precious as that moment of her short sharp life? That good kind hand pushing back the copper colored hair from her wet, flushed face.

Would that she could place a kiss on that hand just one more time, so many years later....

Click image to enlarge.

Some things have no name.

2004-09-15T13:24:00.000-04:00

The seer is supine upon her sofa, eating chocolates. She especially likes the ones with a cherry inside.

In a ritual full of sexual undertones, she bites through the top, sucks slowly at the liquid center, finally eating the candied cherry, then the gutted chocolate shell. Afterward, she licks her fingers, and reaches for another, as she reads a crime filled pulp novel.

Her numerous, sometimes discordant with each other pleasures are: chocolate covered cherries, barbed remarks, fiendish gossip, Puccini's operas, filthy French post cards, pulp fiction full of criminals, but notable for an absence of romance, sexual and/or mayhem glutted fantasies spun out while she lounges in her bathtub filled with bubbles and scented green waters of peculiar origin, arguments with the cat over whom she towers in height though not in intelligence, casting spells (which rarely work properly), being idle, seerhood, having tea and a bagel for breakfast, and falling in love.

Though not necessarily in that order.

*********

The princess paces the corridors of the castle in a state of agitation. She has heard the voice of the king whispering of conspiracies; promising the guillotine to those who betray.

She had spoken too long in the night to her lover, who stood outside her window with a lute, serenading her as he caught the words she said in a tiny basket attached at his waist by a fine silver chain.

*********

The cartomancer sits in her darkened room, thinking. It has been a quiet day with no distressed foolish young things, looking for signs of love that will eventually torture them, in the spread of her cards.

The princess hasn’t been seen in quite a while, and there is talk of blood spilling across rough dungeon floors. And more guarded talk, of great lamentations emanating from the King’s private chambers, but no word on whose voice it is that does the crying out.

The cartomancer reaches for her glass of absinthe and sips at it, her glance moving across the room until it meets with the eye sockets of the skull staring back at her from the bookshelf.

Now, what was his name?

The anaconda of words is present. No one ever promised you anything else.
*fic*

Full Moon Night

2004-09-14T13:44:00.000-04:00

New York City
This was taken along Eighth Avenue from a
bus window on my way home from the work.

The art was done with the permission of city
officials who figured it would be done one
way or the other, so why not legitimatize it?
Click image to enlarge.

Woman in Terminal-Staten Island Ferry 1977

2004-09-11T16:39:00.000-04:00

I saw this woman frequently in the terminal of the Staten Island Ferry. I believe she was homeless. If not homeless, then terribly down on her luck. I felt bad in a sense, taking her picture. I was invading her privacy. But the desperate have been an obsession with me since I was sixteen years old. I think she was a desperate person, as I define them.
Click image to enlarge.

The quiescent moth suddenly spreads its wings...

2004-09-10T19:16:00.000-04:00

The quiescent moth suddenly spreads its wings as it rests on the windowpane. The design it creates would be loved by my friend R. who would stare at it with reverence were he here. In homage to my friend and the moth, I will stare at it in reverence, for its symmetry is almost a fearful thing to behold in its perfection, and we are but chunks of flawed humanity.

When folded, the moth is near invisible, attracting no more attention than a burnt match would in a filled ashtray.

Perspective is everything, or so my father, the artist, told me. Others, older ladies for instance, declared, "position is everything". Each believed they were right.

*********

Signs of competence in a male sometimes poetically and erotically awakened her. This was caused perhaps, by the fact her mother alone had raised her. The male of the species became mysterious by default. In the eyes of other females she was an absurd woman, placing far too much romantic expectation on the shoulders of men, whom the other women knew to be clods and dunder-headed idiots most of the time.

She was an oddly perverse and often dreamy type who seldom dared to give voice to her fantasies regarding anything. She harbored within, a secret desire never spoken to a lover, to be bound at the wrists occasionally with red silk scarves, and now and again, spanked lightly during sex.

There are many opportunities lost in the course a lifetime.

All that sashaying about in rustling taffeta gone to waste. But then, she was too young at the time to recognize the extraordinary value of seduction through lowered eyes, restless whispering fabrics worn with the face of innocence, and vaguely smoke scented floral colognes.

Of course she learned eventually, but by then, taffeta had gone out of style, and flirtation was a game played for keeps, often with bad results.

The only thing worse...

2004-09-09T23:23:00.002-04:00

NOTE: This series has been rearranged to read consecutively.
******
The only thing worse than being too well understood, is recognizing unequivocally you are undesired.

One might become known for being undesirable, but there is another thing, possibly even worse, to be known for.

It is the ownership of a Litany of Complaint.

Being undesired (therefore, obviously undesirable, in our own eyes...this is called the double whammy) is often a fleeting stage of life, altered eventually by the motion of the stars, or sometimes a new deodorant.

The Litany of Complaint has staying power, and resists nearly everything designed to render it gone.

I have a grand Litany of Complaint.

Many people avoid me because I am capable of reciting from it at the drop of a hat, or at the drop of one of those repulsive baseball caps nearly everyone has adopted.

The only legitimate wearers of those ugly things are baseball players, and farmers. To all others, including the military, and the various departments of intimidation: Invent your own gear. You all look ugly in those caps.

Major chunks of population wander around dressed horrifically, joyfully adopting those absurd lids. They are absolutely lacking in dignity, and an insult to the wearer, since no one looks even reasonably attractive in them, whether they know it or not. Though judging from the styles of the times, it is safe to say that since reasonable taste and even moderate flair have flown the coop, they don’t know diddily.

The military has never been known for making a decent fashion statement, though you’d be hard-pressed to realize it since military costume is so relentlessly affected by so many these days.

There! You see? It’s like an anaconda of words. It will surround you and choke your life away. It has the ability to hold you in its grip merely because it’s hard to imagine that you were so stupid as to get caught by a madwoman with a Litany of Complaint in the first place.

You keep checking, through means of sidelong glances at a shop window reflection to see if indeed it did happen, but you don’t struggle against the grip, because your reflected image is indistinct (as such images are intended to be according to divine edict) and therefore untrustworthy.
So you’re never certain, you see.

That may be what happened to Sindbad.

*********

In the course of dream dancing, I saw my neighbors who had both developed beaks where their mouths had been before. They each had their most precious possession in their beak. Their possessions were of a shoddy quality, and had nothing to commend them. This speaks loudly of the state of affairs all around.

*********

A good dream is one you recall for all of your life.

My mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table in a house I knew to be ours, though I didn’t recognize it. I was telling her very urgently, that a man was coming to kill us. We tried to get away, but as we were rising from the table, I saw the man get out of a car. He walked casually up the path to the house. I watched him through the picture window. He saw me watching him. Our eyes met.

He was wearing a taupe gabardine overcoat. He had red hair. He was a large man, with a competent air about him. Casual but alert. Business-like.

I ran into the bathroom, and tried to lock the door. I heard gunshots from the kitchen, and knew my mother was dead. I stood there in the bathroom. My mind was racing. The door was still unlocked. Then there was no time to lock it. He opened the door, pointed the gun at me, and fired.

This dream is more than forty years old.

For a dream to be a good dream, it does not have to be pleasant.
I was told we never dream of being dead.

Who are the experts?

*********

The only thing worse, cont'd.

2004-09-09T23:22:00.000-04:00

Her hair flowed like a copper river coursing down her back. She was inclined toward twisted ankles, and spates of depression.

One day, after shopping relentlessly for clothes to take away on vacation, she lay on her bed, still wearing the black, gray, and white finely checked, perfectly circular taffeta skirt with the hem that measured nine yards around, which rustled seductively when she walked, as taffeta does. There was magic when she spun around and around like a dervish in front of a mirror, making the skirt stand straight out from her body, holding her in a ring of silver.

The pink organdy blouse she wore showed lace covered immature breasts through a haze of fabric, and her skin was pale, like milk. She was quite young.

The bathing suit she had bought was a firm and serious deep tone of aquamarine. It too rustled seductively. That was the year of taffeta.

Her new sunglasses had pale pink pearlized frames, and very dark lenses. She was mysterious behind them.

She lay on her bed with the new things spread all around her.

She wanted to be loved. She believed in love and was sure she would one day have some, like cookies along with the teacup filled with life she was drinking.

A storm came up suddenly. The room was gloomy and all the light went out of the swimsuit, the skirt, the painting above the bed….

The rain was torrential; a mid spring shower that soaked through the earth, and brought out that sharp smell of wet concrete she liked so much because she was a city girl. Wind battered the world.

Then it was over.

The doorknob rattled, causing a stopped heart, a withheld breath, and a clutch of that terror which makes adrenaline fly through the system. The knob turned infinite slow, and life seemed to be near the final moment. The door opened just a crack, slowly, slowly. The entire universe went about its business while her time stood still.

The crack widened only enough to admit the narrow form of the cat that had taught herself the art of breaking into places she’d been shut out of. With that cat triumph sound in her throat, and the greeting of erect tail quivering at the tip, she jumped onto the bed, and settled down amid the yards of taffeta, purring in her pleased accomplished cat way.

In the silent apartment, she made the only sound.

Sudden sun broke through the gray clouds, and it’s light was caught in hundreds of droplets of rainwater on the window panes, which in turn spilled onto the glass wind chimes hanging there, moving slightly in the draft. The room filled with flying prismatic diamonds. They were everywhere: on her skin, her skirt, the walls, the ceiling. This was to be one of the most beautiful moments of her long life.

She knew that even then.

*********

The only thing worse...End

2004-09-09T23:21:00.000-04:00

She lost her maidenhead. It fell into a box of conjurer's tricks, and was never seen again though all in the kingdom searched and searched for it.

A prize of gold was offered.

No one ever got rich that way.

In her early thirties; after love had walked away with a beautiful wealthy young woman, whose hair hung like a straight shining black river down her back, and whose skin was Oriental ivory in color, and whose triumph at the capture of her friend’s wild husband was unmistakable; a man named George, who loved her well, came by to commiserate, and to cut off her long hair.

The hair fell soundlessly in thick wavy coppery clusters onto the wood floor, while she waited in silence, not looking down, as instructed by George, who was wiser than many.

*********

In the time it takes a glistening fish to leap from the water, arc gracefully, and plunge into the sea again, many terrible things can happen.

Or, a water lily can begin to open.

It’s the luck of the draw.

*********

Algunas Bestias
(Some Beasts)

By Pablo Neruda

It was early twilight of the iguana.

From his rainbow-crested ridge
his tongue sank like a dart

into the verdant land,

the monastic ant-heap was melodiously

teeming in the undergrowth,

the guanaco, rarified as oxygen

up among the cloud-plains,

while the llama opened candid

wide eyes in the delicacy

of a world filled with dew.

The monkeys wove a thread

interminably erotic

along the banks of dawn,

demolishing walls of pollen

and causing the violet flight

of the butterflies from Muzo.

It was the night of the alligators,

pure and pullulating night

of snouts above the ooze

and from over the sleep-drenched bogs

a dull sound of armor

fell back upon the original earth.

The jaguar touches the leaves

with his phosphorescent absence,

the puma runs on the foliage

like all consuming flame

and in him burn

the alcoholic eyes of the jungle.

The badgers scratch the river's

feet, scenting out the nest

whose throbbing delight

they'll assail red-toothed.

And in the depths of great water

the giant anaconda lies

like the circle of the earth,

covered in ritual mud,

devouring and religious.

*********

Beware the anaconda.
A. Murray—August 26, 2004