Digital art: The Jihad

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Poem: On seeing the photo of a long lost friend

These pictures open a door

I thought was shut forever.

Behind the door is a friend

Who never got to go grey.

The door creaks open

And I am afraid to look inside.

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Ouch! Reusable, recyclable, and refreshing toilet paper

click to enlarge

Reusable, recyclable, and refreshing invigorating toilet paper

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Further ruminations on Phil Kendall

Hobart, Mort, and Pomeroy - click to enlarge

I have been enjoying the slow accumulation of writings, and letters and photos on the Philip Kendall blog, a site dedicated to the memory of our late, great friend. The three gents pictured above were one of my strongest impetuses for going to college. As I explained here earlier (or maybe it was there), Mort drew me in, and soon enough, Jerry a/k/a Bart, and Philip a/k/a Pomeroy (later Root), were my brothers. We knew we would be friends for life. I think we even talked about that sometimes.

We talked frequently about our good fortune, how "this is the life," and how studying, reading, drawing, drinking wine, talking and telling whoppers and jokes all night, partying, scheming for girls, and immersing ourselves in music was as good as life would ever be. We knew--despite our relative poverty, living on food stamps, and just barely scraping by--that our friendships and the life we were leading was as good as it gets. As it turns out, as life goes on, other things come to fill the vacuum. But nothing has ever taken the place of Phil and he is memorialized as a special case, because he is fixed in time. When he died in early 1975, Richard Nixon was still President, the world was billions of people smaller, the Vietnam war still raging, and Elvis Costello, CDs, bottled water, global warming, and PCs were still years away. Willie Nelson was a fresh-faced kid! When you look back in time, there is the young face of Philip, fixed in that distant, analog world.

This photo is taken at 1636 Humboldt Street in Bellingham the year before I moved in with them.

I have about five poems and stories about Phil in germination, but I've been struggling with them. It's difficult to make connections and to trace the heartline across this vast lacuna of 33 years. Jerry Melin also died long before his time. But his time was to last 25 years longer. Jerry died before he was fifty, and in those years there were countless letters and later, emails; drawings and doggerel; dinners and drinks; a shared vacation; road trips, children, visits, and phone calls. Philip is fixed in time as a fresh-faced 21 year old, and I can't even really think of him as an adult because he just barely got there. Kevin Curran and I were remarking that as big a part of our lives as he became, the time we knew him was only a few short years. In those few short years we developed a bond that was stronger than most of the friendships I've had since. And it has now come back to haunt me. The haunting is not the regrets and the slow missing of those many years; I am haunted by not being able to remember everything he ever said and did because in such a short transit and eclipse every action and every word takes on a far greater import than it would had he been able to live the last 3/4 of his life.

Seeing his face again re-opens the wounds of his death, but also the joy we had in knowing him. The pain of his death only slowly waned, and never entirely went away. His death has always been painful to remember. We just didn't have enough time. Whenever I look at that face, it reminds me of everything that has passed these last 33 years, and how he would be horrified and amused to see all that has transpired. What would he think of the war, genital grooming, tattoos and hardware, computers, punk rock, indy music, iPods, digital cameras, situational ethics, modern literature. Would he still love Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare? Would he have liked Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, and John Coltrane, or Buck Owens and Bob Wills? Would he still love The Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan? Pieter Brueghel? Tuna fish sandwiches? William Blake? I'll never know.
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Painting: Gibberish/Alien Lore No. 115: The Grey Manifesto

click to enlarge

I think of this painting as alien script. . .something that was perhaps slipped under my door by Krill. To decipher this manifesto, you would need to utilize the same procedures that have been used before to translate various ancient codices, The Rosetta stone, the texts found on crashed UFO vehicles, or the methodology Joseph Smith used to decode the golden tablets that contained the Mormon scriptures. First you need to determine how the text is arranged: does it read top to bottom, left to right like a standard English text? Do you read it up or down, from the bottom up, from right to left? Is the message encrypted, or is it raw data? And then, you need to analyze the actual markings as text, and attempt a translation based on recurring character patterns. attempting to establish some sort or corollary with English texts?
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Cindy Sheehan for Congress::::::The "Spokesperson" abandons her five week retirement to hit the hustings:::::::: Sheehan is ineluctably inelectable

Cindy Sheehan emotes under the burden of being the spokesperson

for the entire anti-war movement

Cindy Sheehan told the Associated Press earlier this year that she would enter the 2008 House contest, in one of the nation’s most solidly Democratic and liberal-leaning districts, unless Speaker of the House Pelosi introduces articles of impeachment against Bush by July 23.

Guess what? The Speaker did not move to impeach the President. Therefore Sheehan is in the race, running for the San Francisco 8th District seat now occupied by Nancy Pelosi.



She even has some supporters lined up. In a recent interview with The Hill, Sheehan said she has been endorsed by actress Roseanne Barr, country star Willie Nelson and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. Sheehan also claimed that White House hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (a/k/a "the runt") and former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) are also backing her.“Celebrities bring a certain kind of...credibility,” Sheehan said. Willie Nelson is apparently a friend of Sheehan’s and has offered to help her raise money for her campaign. “[Nelson and his wife] just have the exact correct politics and the exact compassion for the earth and humanity that I think attracts us as friends,” she said. Willie? When I bought tickets to see you this summer, I hope you realize I never intended for my hard-earned mon to go toward a misguided attempt to unseat the Speaker.

God help us. Cindy, I do have a few questions:

- have you thought about taking on actual supporters of the war?

- why attack The Speaker, who has solid anti-war credentials, but failed to cave in to your pathetic blackmail tactics?

- was your five week retirement from spokespersonship so painful that you needed to leap back in to reclaim the limelight?

- do you really think your histrionics will fly in the House of Representatives?

- do you really want to be the spoiler in this election? Are you Ralph Nader (a/k/a The Dingbat) in disguise? - don't you realize this folly will only result in hellish blowback for your cause?

- do you not realize that you are ineluctably inelectable?

Other recent articles here on Ms. Sheehan:

Matt "Sleazeball" Drudge Strikes Again

Cindy Sheehan Rides Again: She's back after five weeks of retirement

Cindy Sheehan now outside the tent, pissing in

Cindy Sheehan rides again

Cindy Sheen picks up the cudgel again

Cindy Sheehan: They’re a bunch of f***ing hypocrites!

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Bin Laden escapes the hangman's noose once again

According to NBC news, Bin Laden may have just escaped U.S. forces. An August mission in Afghanistan just missed snagging Public Enemy Number One.

"A little more than a month ago, with the anniversary of Sept. 11 approaching and fears of a new al Qaeda attack rising, some U.S. intelligence and military analysts thought they had found one of the world’s two most wanted men just where they last saw them six years ago." Read the NBC news story here.
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The Party & an anonymous party's eternal mortification

Of all the readers of All This Is That [tm], only Jeff Clinton could have sent me this. . .and he did. No editorial comment is needed...

[you must click this to enlarge and read!]



What I like best about this email are 1) this is the first time he ever drank; 2) his fretting over the homosexual aspect of what happened. It was a dog, fella!); and 3) the episode was apparently videotaped by one of the cheering crowd.
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Dynamiting, bulldozing, and building in Whister, British Columbia

destruction and construction on 99 to Whistler

I have been at Whistler Mountain in British Columbia for the last few days. Driving up here was a complete circus. Hundreds of trucks parked everywhere; huge mountains of gravel and scree everywhere, waiting to be deployed by trucks and bulldozers; dynamite shacks and blasting off hillsides; literally hundreds of flaggers on the road between Vancouver and Whistler. They are seriously widening this gorgeous, winding road to make way for the thousands of people who will be attending and participating in the Winter Olympics 2010. It is completely insane! The road to Whistler is faced on one side by rocky hills/mountains, and on the other by a steep cliff. 99 is about the last road you'd want to widen...which explains all the dynamiting. And it looks like everything they dynamite away is being used on the cliff side to build up the road so they can add another lane on that side.

click to enlarge the bobsled run

Then, when you actually get to Whistler, there is an insane frenzy of building all over the place. As if it wasn't insane enough in the first place! We are having meetings on top of the mountain, which entails going up rocky, windy, and muddy switchback roads in a HumVee caravan every morning. The drivers on the road are all in constant communication, since the road is about a lane and a half, and you have to plan ahead for possibly meeting a Semi-truck trailer, or another HumVee, or possibly even a little ATV. It's a little spooky. Let's put it this way, you have to sign an insurance waiver every morning to get in the truck.

The most interesting thing here, aside from the mountains, of course, is the construction of the bobsled run. I am naive enough that I actually believed bobsled runs were just carved out of the ice and snow. Au contraire. It is a massive undertaking...way longer than I ever expected, with reinforced concrete, and it looks like piping (to cool the snow?) and, of course, lights, and platforms. It is a massive undertaking, and that's just for one sport. Just like on 99, there are hundreds of trucks here and building going on non-stop.

It began snowing today when we were on top of the mountain. In a month, you won't be able to drive to the top, and the construction will presumably slow down until the thaw next spring.

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I haven't heard it yet, but I am happy to know that Joni Mitchell released a new album yesterday called Shine. I won't get to hear it for a couple of days, unless there is a CD store in Whistler, British Columbia.

Today, also, I believe Herbie Hancock released a tribute album to Joni. I'm looking forward to that one too.

As it turns out, the day of this record's release I am in her home state, about fifty miles from her house on Vancouver Island (where my daughter also lives). Like I said, I won't hear the record until I get back to stateside. I am not much of a digital music buyer. I have to hit the brick and mortar shop and have a CD to hold in my hands. Then, I just play a CD once...when I digitize it. Anyhow, here's to Joni. The advance on this album i that it's very good.


The tracks of Shine:

"One Week Last Summer"
"This Place"
"If I Had a Heart" "If I Had a Heart, I'd Cry" is a reaction to the state of the environment and what Mitchell called the current "holy war." In February 2007, The New York Times described the song as "one of the most haunting melodies she has ever written." Of the impetus that inspired her to write the song, Mitchell explained, "My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species. I can't cry about it. In a way I'm inoculated. I've suffered this pain for so long. …The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species."
"Hana"
"Bad Dreams are Good" "Bad Dreams Are Good" was inspired by a comment Mitchell's grandson made at the age of three: "Bad dreams are good, in the great plan." In a March 2007 BBC2 radio interview with Amanda Ghost, the singer jokingly said she'd promised to "cut him in" on the song's profits.
"Big Yellow Taxi" In March 2007, The Guardian reported that Shine will feature a "new version" of Joni's 1970 environmentally-themed hit single.
"Night of the Iguana"
"Strong and Wrong"
"Shine" Toronto Globe and Mail described this song as "a lush lullaby for the soul."[
"If" This song, which will be the last on the album,[8] is based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling. The jazz-inflected piece features Herbie Hancock playing piano.
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What would Jesus do? (pick up a naked woman?)

click Jesus to enlarge

Belgian Catholic bishops are protesting a TV ad that shows a pot-bellied, "hippy" Jesus performing miracles and picking up barely-clothed women in a club, according to church spokesfolk.

Plug TV and RTL-TVI defended the commercial, saying that it was not blasphemous but depicted a "laid-back Jesus addressing youth."

Some more traditional approaches to depicting Jesus:






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Alien Lore No. 113: Why do cars in the vicinity of UFOs die?

Why do witness's vehicles inevitably die when they see an alien space craft?

Ufologists seem to agree (that doesn't happen often!) that these engine failures are the result of electromagnetic fields emitted by the spacecraft. Thomas M. Sipose, the L.A. Bureau Chief of "Weekly Universe" wrote:

"The functioning of starcraft ionic-microwave engines (aka antigravitation or electromagnetic engines) is accompanied by electromagnetic field phenomena, i.e. plasma, which can cause air mass movements."

According to Weekly Universe: "...When real true-life starships descend, says [ufologist] Voron, "ionic-microwave streams interact with the environment...Even more shockingly, starship electromagnetic fields can impact our environment in still other ways -- some of them potentially deadly! UFO sightings have been accompanied by dangerous engine failures in planes, boats, cars -- as well as failures in other mechanical, electronics, communication devices."

To read more Alien Lore on All This Is That (112 articles and counting), click on this Google Search

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