Being On Fire

 By Jack Brummet

[hand drawn, digitized, and "processed"]

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Faces No. 350 - Just Married

Drawings by Jack Brummet

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Close encounter with a polar bear

By Jack Brummet, Fauna Ed.

I don't usually post animal videos--or cut animal videos anyhow.  This one has elements of a zombie attack, with the persistent way the bear attempts to get into "the ice cube."

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ATIT Reheated, from 2006: Notes on Mick Jagger's penis, and an interesting experiment he performed on it

By Mona Goldwater, Society Ed.







Janice Dickinson had sex with both Mick Jagger and Bob Barker. Only Bob measured up.












One time musical innovator Mick Jagger was also ahead of his time on another front: Mick was at the vanguard of the "penis enhancement" movement well before it became the provenance of junk mailers and spammers. While you have probably spent a great deal of time over the last several years clearing out "penis enhancement" spams from your email--whether you actually owned one or not--Mick Jagger was personally blazing a trail through the wilderness of tallywhacker growth.

Yeeeeeeeeeeowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!

The frontman covered his pride and joy with bees to swell its size, film director Julien Temple, who worked with Jagger on the the 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, revealed in a recent interview on Britain's Radio 4.

"It involved putting bamboo over the male member and filling it with stinger bees so the member attained the size of the bamboo," said Temple. "Mick spent months in the jungle in Peru. He was going mad out there I think."

Jagger has acquired a reputation as a "cocksman" over the years and been linked with dozens of beautiful women, four of whom bore him seven children. His current squeeze is the American fashion designer L'Wren Scott. L'Wren would not comment on Jagger and refused to return calls to All This Is That.

The former Price Is Right model and actress on The Surreal Life, Janice Dickinson, told U.K. talk show host Jonathan Ross recently that "Mick has a very small penis." This leads us to the conclusion that Mr. Jagger does not measure up to Bob Barker, whom she also evaluated.

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Poem: Being extinct is really missing

 by Jack Brummet

Among those reported missing or nearly missing:

Dodos, several brands of Whales,
Snail Darters and Spotted Owls,
Pygmy Hippotami and the Flightless Cormorant,

Vancouver Island Marmot and Gavial,
Great Auk and Wild Ass.
Tapir Kagu and Manatee,

Carolina Parakeet and Dire Wolf,
Coelacanth and Blackfooted Ferret,
Snow Leopard and Przewalski's Horse,

And then, Glaciers, virgin forests and monkey flower,
Bigleaf Scurfpea and Spiny Rice,
Interrupted Brome and Greensword.

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The Worst Wedding, Ever

By Mona Goldwater, Manners and Mores Editor



I've been to some strange weddings over the years, but none matches what happened at the Princess Maria Vittoria del Pozzo della Cisterna's marriage to Amadeo (sometimes written Amedeo), duke of Aosta (and son of the king of Italy) on May 30th, 1867. On the day of Princess Maria and Duke Amadeo's wedding:

• Her page (e.g., wardrobe mistress) hanged herself.


• The gatekeeper of the palace where the wedding took place, slit his throat (possibly because he was in love with the page?). Slitting your own throat cannot be a cakewalk. But the gatekeeper did it, successfully.


• The Colonel who led the wedding procession, collapsed with a "sun stroke," or heat exhaustion, and died.


• After the marriage ceremony, the station manager was crushed beneath the wheels of the honeymoon train as it was leaving.


• One of the king's advisers fell off his horse and died immediately.


• The best man, presumably after witnessing all of this f**ked up stuff, shot himself.


• Not long after the marriage ceremony, The Princess discovered her new husband was a degenerate philanderer with an eye for the gals. When she complained to his dad, the King of Italy, the King told her to pound sand.

Three years after this series of tragic events, Amadeo was elected the King of Spain. But Spain was so factionalized that he was unable to muster popular support, and his rule was punctuated by violent uprisings by and among the various warring political factions. He abdicated the Spanish throne in 1873 and went back to Italy. Maria della Cisterna died three years later, nine years after their disastrous wedding.

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Jim Morrison Explains The Miami Incident

By Jack Brummet, music editor

You may remember the "Miami Incident" if you were listening to music back in 1969 (which would also mean you're pushing 60 or >). If you weren't, you may have heard about it. My friend Frank Curran was at a Doors show in Seattle sometime later, when someone yelled "play Miami!", and Jim Morrison unloaded on Seattle (as I also heard Jimi Hendrix do in his last hometown show).

The "Miami Incident" landed Morrison in serious hot water with the FBI and the courts. On March 1, 1969, he gave a controversial performance at a Doors concert in Miami, Florida, and was later charged with public drunkenness, and various other crimes. He was specifically accused of exposing himself to the crowd, and was eventually convicted of "indecent exposure," a misdemeanor, and not the felonies he was initially charged with. He was sentenced to serve time. But he never served it; he moved to Paris and died at the age of 27.


One night later, Morrison was out with a bunch of people, and his friend Tom Baker started goading him (it was getting hostile):  "Tell us now, Mr. Jim Morrison, rock star. Tell us what happened in Miami."

Morrison glared at Baker, and drained his drink.

And, yes, he did bring a live sheep on lamb on stage.  Someone 

brought it to the show and handed it off to Morrison on stage. 

"Come on, Jim, tell us once and for all."

"Well," Morrison said in a quiet voice, "I wanted to see what it looked like in the spotlight."

The crowd burst out laughing, spraying the bar with their drinks and Jim grinned proudly.

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Faces No. 349 - Twelve Women/Chromosome XX

By Jack Brummet

[a mix of both digital and hand-drawn figures]

click to enlarge

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Alien Lore No. 242 - Abduction: Freshening The Greys' DNA

By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Editor


"...despite the fact that we humans are great collectors of souvenirs, not one of these persons [claiming to have been aboard a flying saucer] has brought back so much as an extraterrestrial tool or artifact, which could, once and for all, resolve the UFO mystery."
- Philip Klass

The alien abduction story that really ignited the cult about alien visitation and experimentation is the Betty and Barney Hill story. The Hills claim to have been abducted by aliens on September 19, 1961.

The rise in UFO sightings is, of course, attributed to an increase in alien activity on Earth. The aliens are abducting people in larger numbers, are leaving other signs of their presence in the form of so-called crop circles, are involved in cattle mutilation, and occasionally provide revelations such as the Urantia Book to selected prophets.

According to a Gallup poll done at the end of the twentieth century, about one-third of Americans believe aliens have visited us.

In the body of alien lore, The Greys are interstellar pirates, marauding in from Zeta Reticuli. Their victims include a number of outcast (when they go public) human beings who insist they've been shanghaied by these visitors. These alleged abductees are considered crackers; bull-goose looney.

Tales of UFO contacts have become commonplace, but contact with The Greys themselves is highly suspect, and talking about it is tantamount to saying you're ready for a long rest stay at the laughing academy.

One of the main theories of alien abduction centers on the notion that Greys are clones, and like mules, or clones we have created, are incapable of reproducing. I guess it sounds kind of racist, but, they might be clones. The Greys all look alike!

The Greys abduct human males and females to extract sperm, ova, and other samples of our genetic sequences for reasons unknown.

The Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle (referring to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty of the location and momentum of an electron in orbit) postulates that genetic sequences break down and begin to have errors in the sequence after several generations of continuous cloning. This, they say, is what happened to The Greys.

Cloning from clones, after several generations, is equivalent to living in say, Bugtussle, Arkansas, where errors in the code accumulate due to to intermarriage within too small a genetic pool--not unlike the chinless wonders that still inhabit some of Europe's thrones. The Hapsburg's may be gone, but you can certainly see the effects of too tight a gene pool in the very visages of the horse-faced Windsors. Prince Charles' sons, to some extent, escaped that fate, having an infusion of their mother's gene sequences. But this is digressing pretty far from The Greys' genetic issues.

DNA looks pretty digital to me, but apparently, cloning is similar to to the analog duplication of an audio or video cassette from another recording (like some of those fourth generation Grateful Dead shows I used to have). As copies are copied, the overall fidelity and quality decreases. Therefore the Greys need to frequently freshen their code.

Human mutations from one generation to the next increase diversity. The mutations created don't involve the function of major systems of the body. With clones, however, the mutations are copied from one generation to another, and as the number of mutations accumulate, the chance of a fatal or highly defective mutation increases rather than decreases. In a closed system clones like this Mutation=Mutilation.

While the Greys allegedly successfully cross-breed their genetic material with that of humans, their actual knowledge of truly advanced genetic engineering appears slim and the Greys have little control over the genetic code of the hybrids. Thus, cloning eventually becomes fatal to the Greys, and has left them racially impure, since much of their population are now hybrids.

Abductees often experience memory loss and "missing time". Some of them have been able to recall their abductions from memory and others have recalled their abductions by the aid of hypnosis (Betty Hill for one). Often these encounters involve being taken aboard an alien craft and examined by the Greys and put through a variety of physical and mental procedures. Naturally, many of these experiments involve sex and reproduction. When the individuals are returned, they become, as Dark Skies termed it throwbacks. Many of the abduction victims are reported to show signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

A 1992 Roper Poll tells that one in fifty people believe they have had these experiences. If it is true then it is also possible that what is occurring with abductees may be the beginning of something much larger.

There has been some material evidence of Alien contacts. There have been markings and injuries on abductees, including scoop-marks in the flesh, incisions, burns, apparent radiation exposure, bruises, inflammation, etc. Skeptics believe these marks are self-inflicted.


Recovered implants are yet to be identified as alien in nature. They could be similar to the stones that are found in kidneys which are normal concretion, usually composed of mineral salts, occurring chiefly in the hollow organs of their passages.

No one seems to have staked out, or performed long term observation on abductees who claim to be visited by their alien raptors on a regular basis. Professor David Jacob's book The Threat says "Training a video camera and recorder on an abductee every night has produced limited results. Some abductees report a dramatic decrease in abductions. Most report that the frequency of abductions tends to decrease only a bit. So far, no abductions have been videotaped. Rather, tapes reveal people getting up and inexplicably turning off the VCR, or unusual power outages during which the camera turns off, or the camera simply goes off mysteriously." Of course, anyone with the ability to travel in space ships at the speed of light, communicate telepathically, and stealthily conquer earth, might also be able to shut off a camera without being seen.

This is all basically hot-air until we capture an alien in the act, in flagrante. . .but as fantastic as the story is, it has become an accepted part of the lore of UFOs and alien contact.
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The Beatles Unplugged

By Jack Brummet, British Invasion Editor

The Beatles: Unplugged is a bootleg CD thar is so interesting, and sounds so good that Capitol/EMI should release this right now.  

This disc, subtitled "The Kinfaun-Session," referring to George Harrison's home in Esher) contains 23 songs that George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney recorded as demos/works-in-progress in May 1968. Most of the tracks would later appear on The White Album.   This is pretty cool stuff. 

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ATIT Reheated - Jack Brummet poem: Sparks (a/k/a Defensive Daydreaming)

[From All This Is That, 2006]

By Jack Brummet


Six hours into the surprise visit, he lumbers on.
My brain unsnaps from its moorings
and drifts like a drunken dirigible
into the torrent of everything I've seen,
smelled, eaten, licked, drunk,
smoked, touched, read, watched, and heard.
It's like he's been talking weeks now
and I remember Nikita Kruschev
on the television at the UN, flashing
those bad teeth and that goofy smile,
pounding those oxfords alive.
I try but I can't quite hear him;
I hear my friend narrating himself.
Things have gotten so out of hand that
I remember today is Renoir's 164th birthday
and I don't even like his painting,
but, hey, at least he threw in some nudes.
He looking at me! What did I miss?
He looks for a yes and keeps talking.
"Yeah," I say, "right. . .yeah." I think about
Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy
and how he charged around the studio,
rolling vast turgid highways
of black oil over acres of canvas.
I think about Alice Neel
painting all those people
and what they thought
when they saw the final product
or what people thought when they saw
the first Cubist or Dada paintings.
My friend looks for a show of interest.
Yes! By all means, encourage him.
I cock an eyebrow. He revs back up
and I think about my favorite color,
that mid-palette blue...a blue bisque,
the color of my grandma's cameo brooch...
vibrantly subtle...is that possible?...
yes, it's the color of Della Robbia's Florentine ceramics.
He goes on about old times, about how it was then,
way way way back when when when
when we were all back where, back when, doing what
with, for, and to whom. My brains coughs up chimes,
resonations, cross-references, cerebral links,
odors, tinkles, cues, and subtle whiffs of distractions.
I hear Charlie Parker play Carvin' the Bird
somewhere in my head and it segues into
Black Throated Wind and lurches into
Foggy Mountain Breakdown. He jumps
from childhood to yesterday, in between, and back. 
I think of my gal and my pal Keelin
and Jan and how in the end
it was probably a good thing plural marriage was frowned upon.
I think about the incredible, loving extended family
we built in Brooklyn and Manhattan and how often
every single one of them--Mel, Keelin, Jannah, Nick, Kevin, Jan, Miya,
Colin, Tony, Cheryl, Pinky, Fuzzy, Dot, 'Moto, and all our side friends--
shoot across memory like blazing comets, like right now.
See? He keeps sensing me drifting and dreaming but
I nod and wink and pick up the reverie, falling, falling
back, back, back to the night my daughter was born.
It was as quiet as a painting in Berkeley,
driving at three a.m. on Telegraph Avenue
toward Oakland, to the delivery room.
I saw a new moon hung on our old sky.
We watched the monitor and waited.
When her robber-stockinged face came down,
one bleat to the rafters started us all breathing again.
He's buzzing in my left ear
and the rhythms say I am safe.
I think about dreams--not drifting
like this, but real R.E.M. dreams:
I don't know which is better,
to dream it or see it,
to see it right now,
or to have seen it.
I don't know which is better,
the memory or the thing itself.
The memory can be repeated forever
but loses fidelity like an old record
and the fictions your mind confects
start filling in the gaps
until the memory becomes a framework
for what we wanted to be, or what should have been.
He nudges me, waiting for a yes, the go-ahead sign.
Yeah baby, take it on home. I think about Casey Stengel.
He suspects I am drifting over the hills and far away.
I nod "um." It is the sun's birthday
and where did the crows go? When he jumps to El Toro,
my mind starts sleepwalking from Boot Camp.
I wonder if I will ever get to Palestine,
or if there will ever be another Palestine,
or if I will get back to Seville or Tetuan,
Chora Sfokion or Brooklyn, Heraklion or Hoboken,
Vinaroz or the Delaware Water Gap, if I will ever see
Leningrad or Katmandu, and I wonder
if I would want to see Calcutta, Johannesburg,
Bhopal, Cleveland, Camden, or Port-au-Prince?
I don't know which is easier:
to listen or pretend to listen?
I think about bottles of beer
chilling in a tub of cracked ice.
Sexy rivulets of water fall down bottles
glistening in the hot sun.
Even my nose is tired.
Should I pee, or hold it?
Should I hold it and focus
on the distraction?
What did Gertrude Stein mean
when she wrote about those
"Pigeons In The Grass, Alas?"
Was it the pigeons or the grass
or the pigeons and the grass aggregated?
I want to bang my head on the wall
to dull the pain between my ears,
and he's warming up for the stretch.
A pipe doesn't slow him down and the wine
just keeps his throat supple, his voice nimble,
and the memories and word torrent flowing.
He talks about the Marines
and six years marching, marching marching
on the parade ground erect and spit shined,
marching, saluting, dreaming, marching, yes-sir-ing.
I remember Nick Gattuccio's name
means Sicilian Dogfish and the time we drained
a demi-john of Chianti in Florence.
He tells me twenty things I don't want to know
and ten I'm indifferent about for every one I do.
He remembers where he left off
and murmurs a bridge to the next installment.
I think about the firefall of light I saw that day
on a rising skyscraper.
The welder is a star thrower, and constellations
of pale yellow sparks tumble from a heaven
of beams and girders strung with wire and pipe.
Those sparks are like his words, falling down iron bars
to disappear like fugitives in a white lake of sparks.
             ---o0o---

The Polar Bear Plunge, Ballard, 2012

By Jack Brummet

Hearty souls, these.  I can't even make that plunge in July when it is 85 out. . .

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