Monday, December 31, 2012

found poem 2012 | assembled from the pages of the new yorker


The morning was cold and the sky was bright.
Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat.

There's something ridiculous about a woman
who takes seven husbands
as if she had rummaged through the drawers of masculinity
and come up with seven dwarves.

The real hippie
is neither biddable
nor daft.


by Ron Reed

Sunday, December 30, 2012

photo | eastvan moving


stephen adly guirgis | begging god for an ounce of daylight



Fear has cost me years of my life, it has been at the root of my depression, and it has inflicted a lot of real pain on me and, by association, on others. I have found that – for me – the only thing that truly relieves that fear, that allows me the liberation to try to live and to work and to be the person that I want to be – the person that I am – is to have some kind of connection and relationship with “God”, or, as I often rebelliously address Him – “fuckin’ God.”

I don’t want God in my life. At all. Ever. Trust me. And I don’t know what God is. But, what I grudgingly – very grudgingly – admit, is that I need Him. You may read this play and love it. Or maybe you’ll hate it. Maybe you’ll skip over it entirely, or skim it and get bored. I don’t know. But I need to say that, in the end, in the pathetic, sad hours, after all the cigarettes have been smoked and every tool of procrastination exploited, what got this play written was me getting on my knees on the linoleum floor of my kitchen and begging God for an ounce of daylight. And those ounces came despite my best efforts to ignore them. Maybe this only proves that God can help you write a shitty play, I don’t know. I’m not here to sell God. I’m the kid who stole money out of the church collection plate to buy nickel bags and play pinball – and I wouldn’t put it past me to try it again. But, this God stuff is true. For me.


Stephen Adly Guirgis
author of Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
in "Best Plays of 2000: New Playwrights' Series"
photo: Rob Olguin in Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train

Sunday, December 23, 2012

j.b. priestley | after finishing


After finishing a piece of work that has been long and rather difficult, I have a sense of the satisfaction that can expand into delight. This does not come from surveying the work done, for at these times I am rarely sure of the value of what I have just created, am more than doubtful if my first intention has been fulfilled, and may even wonder gloomily, while I hold the work in mind, if I have not been wasting time and energy. No, the delight springs from a sense of release. I have been in prison with this one idea, and now, I feel, I am free. Tomorrow, ten times the size of last Tuesday, is suddenly rich with promise. Time and space are both extended. I catch a glimpse of fifty new ideas, flickering like lizards among the masonry of my mind; but I need not bother about them. I am now the master and not the slave. I can go to China, learn the clarinet, read Gibbon again, study metaphysics, grow strange flowers in hothouses, lie in bed, lunch and dine with old friends and brilliant acquaintances, look at pictures, take the children to concerts, tidy up the study, talk properly to my wife. What a world this is to be free and curious in! What a wealth of sunlight and starlight and firelight! And so for a little while, before the key grates in the lock again, there I am, out and free, with mountains of treasure before my dazzled eyes. Yes, there comes a moment - just a moment - of delight.


from "Delight," chapter 4

Friday, December 21, 2012

ron reed | screed


I find it galling that each and every blessed year when Christmas is glimpsed on the distant horizon, killjoy Christians start trying to instill guilt about a fundamental, sacramental part of the celebration of Jesus' coming - the giving of gifts.  It's a birthday party, for God's sake!  You bring presents!  

The wise men knew it, and behaved accordingly.  Children know it, and glory in it - and except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter in.  George Bailey's neighbours knew it, and brought all they could spare.

To heck with the unreformed Scrooges of the world and their workhouses and poor laws, skipping Christmas parties and turning the portly gentlemen from their doors!  To heck with the Grinches of the world, stealing the presents from all the Whos down in Whoville!

Tell those humbuggers it's the heart of the bleak midwinter, and if we want to cheer the people we love by bringing them gold, or frankincence, or myrrh, or Tickle Me Elmo or a box of chocolates or a 52 inch flat screen plasma tv, or playing our drum for them, or pouring expensive perfume all over their feet, then we'll damn well do it!  

This is not the time to measure out our love, or our cheer, or life itself, with coffee spoons – all the ladles, serving spoons, gravy boats, pitchers, punch bowls, roasting pans and bathtubs in the whole house shouldn't be enough to contain it!  Full measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, poured into laps!

For with the measure we use it will be measured unto us.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

luci shaw | presents




"Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift."
2 Corinthians 9:15

What's so good as getting?
The anticipation, snow
in the air, people with lists,
voices that drop when you
enter the room, the pine-wood
fire smell and the smell of pine needles from the trimmed tree
by the window – it all narrows down
to the heft of the package in the
hands, the wondering, the unwrapping
(Careful – the paper's too pretty
to tear), the oh, the ah. What's
so good as getting

if not giving?
The covert questions, the catalogs
with corners turned back, the love
that overlooks cost, the hiding place
in the hamper, the card whose
colored words can't say it all,
the glee of linking want/wish
with have/hold, the handing over,
fingers burshing, the thing
revealed, the spark as the eyes
meet, and the hug. What's
so good as giving?

ron klug | joseph's lullaby


Sleep now, little one.
I will watch while you and your mother sleep.
I wish I could do more.
This straw is not good enough for you.
Back in Nazareth I'll make a proper bed for you
of seasoned wood, smooth, strong, well‑pegged.
A bed fit for a carpenter's son.

Just wait till we get back to Nazareth.
I'll teach you everything I know.
You'll learn to choose the cedarwood, eucalyptus, and fir.
You'll learn to use the drawshave, ax, and saw.
Your arms will grow strong, your hands rough ‑‑ like these.
You will bear the pungent smell of new wood
and wear shavings and sawdust in your hair.

You'll be a man whose life centers
on hammer and nails and wood.
But for now,
sleep, little Jesus, sleep.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

luci shaw | advent III


Advent III
for Marya Gjorgiev

The Third week, and about now
Mary is heavy with God, her first
and the Father’s only, with a journey
to plan for, going south. Anxiety
is in the air. It is so dark and cold
and kind Joseph is only a man, not
a midwife. She feels answerable
for the welfare of the heaving life
in her belly.

Let us feel with Mary in her
waiting and knowing. And not
knowing. Today I try to remember
all the world’s mothers and every
new child yet to arrive, made
in the same God-likeness. Pray
for more than a cave in the hill town
when their time comes. Though that
will do if there is love enough.


Luci Shaw

Friday, November 23, 2012

bob dylan | nothing easygoing


Popular radio was sort of at a standstill
and filled with empty pleasantries.
What I was playing were hard-lipped folk songs
with fire and brimstone servings.

LPs were like the force of gravity.
They had covers, back and front, that you could stare at for hours.
Next to them, 45s were flimsy and uncrystallized.
They just stacked up in piles and didn't seem important.

I had no song in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway.
Songs about debauched bootleggers,
mothers that drowned their own children,
Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon,
floods, union hall fires, darkness
and cadavers at the bottom of rivers
weren't for radiophiles.

There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang.
They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness.
They didn't come gently to the shore.
I guess you could say they weren't commercial.


Bob Dylan, "Chronicles: Volume One"

Friday, November 02, 2012

art neufeld | hair


humans are the only creatures with hair rather than fur.

 head hair gives humans an opportunity to demonstrate that they have free will.

in ancient Egypt false metal beards were worn by kings
and sometimes by cows.

 ninety-two percent of hair whorls grow in a clockwise direction.
there is some evidence of an association
between the counter-clockwise hair whorl and male homosexuality.

there is no evidence that stress makes hair go gray.

if you laid end to end every hair that grew on your head
during a seventy-five-year lifespan
it would reach from New York City to Chicago.

ninety percent of the people on earth have black or dark-brown hair.
blond hair probably first appeared only ten or twenty thousand years ago,
produced by a mutation.
redheads make up between one and four per cent of the population,
and may be particularly sensitive to pain.


from "Hair Today" Rebecca Mead 
New Yorker, Sep 24 2012

Friday, October 26, 2012

Lisa Shea: "JFK & Jesus"


As a child, listening to my mother read to my sisters and me from the New Testament, I tried to care about the people in the stories, who were lame or leprous or blind, who ate locusts and raw fish, who didn't have television or telephones or toilets, who were homeless or lunatic or possessed. I pictured these Bible people, even the famous ones like Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist, unwashed, dressed in rags, their hair hanging down infested and uncombed. My eight-year-old body shuddered, because of course they must have smelled bad, and wht about their teeth, if they even had any!

It seemed a sore test of my belief in God that he could love these ancient, unkempt people; that he had picked them to be born and live and die among and not us who washed and drank milk and went to church on Sunday in America in 1963. I thought it was a waste of the Savior of Mankind, an error on God's part to have sent his only son to earth so early on, before we really needed Christ to save us from Khrushchev and Castro, and Richard Nixon, a man whose hatred of President Kennedy I knew made him evil.

Other aspects of the Bible vexed and bewildered me as my sisters and I lay sprawled on our parents' bed, hearing the stories in their entirety for the first time. There were the Pharisees, who tried to trick Jesus at every turn. I had no idea who the Pharisees were, but the word made them sound like phony piranhas or farcical parasites. There were the high priests, whose identity also was obscure to me. Why were they in synagogues instead of churches? I didn't know there weren't any churches because there was, as yet, no Church. So the high priests came off as bogus, a pack of holy lowlifes.

*

Over the weeks at bedtime, as my mother read the Gospel of Matthew in her lively speech-and-drama-major voice, I fell in love with God's son. Christ was handsome. In the popular renderings of the day, he had long wavy hair, an aquiline nose, and soulful – our mother would have called them bedroom – eyes. His was a portrait of masculine beauty and serenity, a face radiatingquiet, unthreatening authority. What kind of man was this, I wondered, who, unlike my own father, was brilliant but not bullying, powerful but not paranoid, handsome but not arrogant, sexy but not sadistic? At night in the dark, in the room I shared with my younger sister, I kissed my framed Sacred Heart Auto League picture of Jesus (given to me by my grandfather, who was a member) over and over.

I wanted Christ to be with me, my savior-lover made flesh. Then, as my mother finished the Gospel According to Matthew and began reading us Mark in late November, President Kennedy was shot.

Through the terrible days and weeks after the killing, my mother read on, finishing Mark and beginning Luke, but her voice wasn't lively; it sounded heavy and tired. Sometimes, she would stop and cry, and we'd cry with her, thinking about our murdered president. She'd sit, not reading, and sip quietly from her "Coffee With Kennedy" cup, a souvenir from her volunteer work on the 1960 campaign.

*

By the following spring, as my mother read us the Gospel According to John (in a voice that had regained some of its fine theatricality), my older sister and I had discovered the Beatles. Every day we’d come home from school – we were latchkey kids – turn on the radio in the dining room to WPGC-AM, LOUD, and dance to Beatles songs. Iworked out a theory that each of the Gospel writers was like one of the Beatles. Mrk was lively like Paul; Matthew was quieter like George; Luke was lovable like Ringo; and John was just like John, smart, harsh, inscrutable. My older sister’s favorite Beatle was Paul, whose sunniness I found a little boring. My favorite was George, who was lanky like Christ and who had those necrotic good looks. (My younger sister, who was five, wasn’t into the Beatles; she liked Dwayne Spedden, who was also five and lived next door with his cousins.)

Toward the end of the summer, Our New Testament gatherings on my parents’ bed became more sporadic. I am pretty sure my mother had begun reading us the Bible as a stay against the Cold War scares of the early sixties: bomb shelters, Cuban Missile Crisis, air-raid drills, Bay of Pigs. That and the more personal hell of her deteriorating marriage to my increasingly volatile father. Maybe she thought the Bible would guide us or help us or even save us from all the public and private terribleness abroad in the world and in our own unhappy house.

And then, around the beginning of the new school year, the readings ceased altogether. I’m pretty sure my mother stopped reading us the New Testament not because the world had become a safer place but because she was miserable and exhausted, worn out from the chaos that ruled our home.

My crush on Jesus Christ ended, not to mention my memory of his words and deeds, his divine miracles. God’s love might be everlasting, but mine was fickle. I’d look at my Sacred Hear Auto League picture of Christ and wonder what it was I ever saw in him.

I still think about the people in the Bible. Far from feeling scorn, I envy them their living witness. And I still want to know: is God real? Is religion real? Can I, can anybody, be saved? The new Testament stories taught me to think on these things, even if I can’t bring myself to believe.


from "The Good Enough News" in Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, edited by Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke
Highly recommended

Rick Miller & Daniel Brooks, "The Fab Four Gospels"


The Gospels according to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Ladies and gentlemen, "The Beatles."

The Evangelist Mark - the Beatle Ringo: the oldest, the shortest, builds a solid rhythm for the others, nothing flashy.

Matthew - George: more spiritual, occasionally adds a composition of his own to the mix.

Luke - Sir Paul: the chatty one, the friendly one. Everyone likes Luke, everyone likes Paul. They have prolific solo careers. Luke writes "Acts of the Apolstles," Paul writes "Band on the Run."

John - John: the poet, more controversial than the rest. Gets himself and the others into trouble. These three (Paul, George & Ringo) are similar enough in style, tone, and story elements to be grouped together. Scholars call them the Synoptic Gospels.

John's Gospel is a completely different animal...


from the stage play BIGGER THAN JESUS

Editor's note: Contemporary scholars differ on the precise Bible-Beatle correspondence (e.g., cf Shea, Lisa; JFK & Jesus

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

fifty years ago today


October 17, 1962 - Osaka, Japan 
Artist Yoko Ono joins American composer John Cage 
 in a performance of his piece 
  26'55'988 for 2 Pianists & a String Player
 Ono served as Cage's interpreter for much of the artist's 1962 tour of Japan.



October 17, 1962 - England 
The Beatles make their debut television appearance on Granada TV, 
a northwest-servicing commercial television franchise. 
They perform the songs "Some Other Guy" and "Love Me Do."

Source: Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

books | doc savage

Seeing BOOKWORM in the Vancouver Fringe made me look again at the books that fill our home, and when a buddy who's writing graphic novels mentioned Doc Savage, I spent a little time visiting these old friends.



Ideal Library edition (1934)



 Bantam Books (1964)


 Golden Press (1975)

DC Comics (1989)


Nostalgia Ventures (2008)
reprint of original pulp edition (1933)


THE CODE OF DOC SAVAGE
Let me strive, every moment of my life, to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, 
that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right, and lend all my assistance to those who need it, 
with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates 
in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong to no man.