Sunday, January 23, 2022

jorge luis borges | celestial empire of benevolent knowledge


In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: 
(a) belonging to the emperor, 
(b) embalmed, 
(c) tame, 
(d) sucking pigs, 
(e) sirens, 
(f) fabulous, 
(g) stray dogs, 
(h) included in the present classification, 
(i) frenzied, 
(j) innumerable, 
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 
(l) et cetera, 
(m) having just broken the water pitcher, 
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

michael pasche | photo, west 10th

 


danny kaye, enthusiast


In his later years, Danny Kaye entertained at home as chef. He specialized in Chinese and Italian cooking. He had a custom-made Chinese restaurant installed at the rear of his house by its alley, then had a kitchen and dining area built around it. The stove that Kaye used for his Chinese dishes was fitted with metal rings for the burners to allow the heat to be highly concentrated, and a trough with circulating ice water cooled the area to keep the intense heat tolerable for those who were cooking. He learned "at Johnny Kan's restaurant in San Francisco and with Cecilia Chang at her Mandarin restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles." He taught Chinese cooking classes at a San Francisco Chinese restaurant in the 1970s. Kaye approached kitchen work with enthusiasm, making sausages and other foods needed for his cuisine. His work as a chef earned him the "Les Meilleurs Ouvriers de France" culinary award. Kaye is the only nonprofessional chef to have received this honor. 

Kaye was an aviation enthusiast and pilot. His interest was sparked by his longtime friend, choreographer Michael Kidd, who had recently earned his private pilot's license. Kaye began studying for his own pilot's license in 1959. An enthusiastic and accomplished golfer, he gave up golf in favor of flying. The first plane Kaye owned was a Piper Aztec. Kaye received his first license as a private pilot of multi-engine aircraft, not being certified for operating a single-engine plane until six years later. He was an accomplished pilot, rated for airplanes ranging from single-engine light aircraft to multi-engine jets. Kaye held a commercial pilot's license and had flown every type of aircraft except military planes. Kaye received a type rating in a Learjet, and he was named vice president of the Learjet company by Bill Lear as an honorary title (he had no line responsibility at the company). 

A lifelong fan of the Brooklyn / Los Angeles Dodgers, and a good friend of Leo Durocher, Kaye often traveled with the team. Possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, Kaye and his business partner Lester Smith also led an investment group which was awarded the American League's thirteenth franchise, which became the Seattle Mariners for $6.2 million on February 7, 1976. 

Kaye was also an honorary member of the American College of Surgeons and the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

"Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it." 

Cinema Shorthand Society

Monday, January 17, 2022

found poem in progress | assembled from the pages of the new yorker, 2021

1

Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is. 
"Here's a horse accident!"
"Here's a candlestick accident!"
Basically, any time an organization needed someone to go, expenses paid, 
to a country that had crocodiles, he was interested.
He hated the United States, but, outside the United States, that is not a rare sentiment.

He had a vision of God on a croquet lawn around the age of seventeen, but he let this pass until four years later, when he fell in love with Vivien, a Catholic who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to marry him, what with his being a Protestant and also, as he seemed to her, a rather strange person.

She developed a social circle, went out to night clubs, rejected the advances of various male friends - a window washer, a private chef, a bodega worker, a sex worker and Occupy protester, a charming young man who wrote deft jacket copy, and a lice consultant - and came back home afterward to eat toast with Alice in the living room. Her ideal occupation she thought might be "nun farmer" or "nun park ranger." 

Occupations come and go, their life spans following trend and technology.  Town criers, soda jerks, lamplighters, clock winders, pinsetters, and ice cutters give way to air-traffic controllers, genetic counsellors, drone operators, influencers, and social-media managers.


2

In February, 2014, Putin was a very busy autocrat.
He hosted the winter Olympics, in Sochi, 
shipped a new batch of activists to prison colonies,
and seized Crimea.

Trump. They tried to freeze him,
but the scientists say that when they removed his head
there was nothing inside but lint, paper clips, and pennies,
like an old piggy bank in a landfill.


3

She tells me about the giants carrying trees and bushes on what she calls zip lines, which I am able to identify as telephone wires. Beneath the busy giants, she explains, there is a marching band playing familiar tunes by John Philip Sousa. Plays and operas were staged in our back yard, spontaneous parades appeared in the streets.

In the house, nothing held still: objects danced on the mantel, the ideograms on our hanging scroll of Chinese calligraphy flew around like butterflies. At the beginning, many of these transformations had given her pleasure. More and more, however, they annoyed and alarmed her. Three women were hanging in her closet and refused to leave. The Flowery Man roamed the house.

“We certainly can’t stay any longer in this person’s house, in a place where we don’t even speak the language.”

Do the chickens think of warmer times?
They do not.
By the time a snowflake has landed,
snowflakes are all a chicken has ever known.


4

The Museum of Sex, in New York City,
the Museum of Ice Cream, in San Francisco,
The Disgusting Food Museum, in Malö, Sweden,
the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden, 
the Museum of Broken Relationships, in Zagreb, Croatia:
   photos of hookup spots,
   a diet book that a woman received from her fiancĂ©,
   three-week-old cheese from the garbage that had also 
      been pissed on by every dog in the neighborhood,
   self-destructing DVDs,
   a collection of Harley Davidson perfumes
      that smelled like socks at the bottom of a gym locker,
      drizzled with paint thinner,
      like taking a bite out of a corpse.

If you know how to pick up a roadkill and eat it
   (Are its eyes clear, or are they clouded over?) 
and tan its hide and wear it, 
   (Are the guts blown? How many insects are on it?)
you don't have to work that forty-hour-a-week office job that you hate.


5

Old people in advertisements smile with a certain optimism.
Young people laugh and laugh, opening their mouths wide
and showing their gums and tongues.
One contestant entered the show
in the hope of hiring a carpenter to patch
the bullet holes above her bed left
by her husband's suicide.
Another, a Holocaust survivor,
wanted funds to have her tattoo from Auschwitz removed.
They have trouble maintaining eye contact with the host,
and nervously wrap their handkerchiefs around their fingers.
"I had two handicapped sons. I lost them,
and then I took care of an elderly lady
in a wheelchair. She passed away,
along with my mother and my father, 
and then my husband passed away. 
I feel that I would like to have a vacation."

Many requests had been fulfilled
(airships, telegraph, harvest)
some hadn't
(Hop o' my thumb, bootblack in the act, Alex the Gt. cutting the Gordian knot)

“Haunted Ouija doll - Blinks, Noisy, demonic spirit portal” 
ships for free anywhere in the United States;
a horror fantasy in which 
a woman with a titanium plate in her head
is impregnated by a car.
This ugly, ugly America,
all machine, it is excruciating!


6

There hadn't been much time for sightseeing in Rome
so our young driver circled past the Colosseum,
shouting out fun facts
     "Five hundred years before Christ was built 
      the first sewer system!"
as Strong, trying to describe a scene from "Succession,"
quoted passages from "The Wasteland":
     “Thank You! Can’t wait to start experiencing things!!
     Going from doing my homework 
     to putting on my rawhide sandals that I made and
     going out in the woods.
     But it's good to get off TikTok and go out and make cedar-bark cordage."



Sunday, January 09, 2022

tom hennen | sheep in the winter night


Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one
another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening
in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked
weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought
of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they
eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have
just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian
religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were
full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their
white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods,
night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering,
along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes,
but the power that moves through the world and makes our
hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself.

Wednesday, January 05, 2022

this message seems dangerous


"Who said anything about safe? Course he isn't safe. But he's good."