By Jack Brummet
Some of us try
astral projection.
The rest of us
leave in dinghies, bikes, and cars,
Racing down
highways, expressways,
Streets and boulevards.
Streets and boulevards.
A continent of smoking skull orchard
---o0o---
Friday, October 31, 2014
An Idiot's Guide To Spinal Surgery
By Jack Brummet, Medical Ed.
This handy little pocket guide to spinal surgery is available here, at Amazon.
The Pocket Atlas of Spine Surgery by Kern Singh and Alexander R. Vaccaro lists at $49.73 and contains 152 pages. It strikes me a little bit like "The Idiot's Guide To Spinal Surgery."
"Specifically designed for use in a fast-paced clinical setting, Pocket Atlas of Spine Surgery is a concise surgical guide that gives readers the essential tools needed to successfully perform spine surgery. It provides a distinctive view of complex spinal anatomy that facilitates a better understanding of the subtleties of both open and technically demanding minimally invasive spine procedures."
This handy little pocket guide to spinal surgery is available here, at Amazon.
The Pocket Atlas of Spine Surgery by Kern Singh and Alexander R. Vaccaro lists at $49.73 and contains 152 pages. It strikes me a little bit like "The Idiot's Guide To Spinal Surgery."
"Specifically designed for use in a fast-paced clinical setting, Pocket Atlas of Spine Surgery is a concise surgical guide that gives readers the essential tools needed to successfully perform spine surgery. It provides a distinctive view of complex spinal anatomy that facilitates a better understanding of the subtleties of both open and technically demanding minimally invasive spine procedures."
---o0o---
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Ken Kesey and the bear
Seeing a sign that said, “Beware of the Bear,” Ken Kesey said “it used to mean, ‘be aware of the bear’ and now it means ‘be afraid of the bear.’”
---o0o---
Poem: Bercilak de Hautdesert
By Jack Brummet
Grey light pools
On the floor in the distance.
A green knight walks toward you,
A battle-axe in one hand
And a branch of holly in the other.
Bercilak de Hautdesert asks if you want to play a game.
You take the axe and swing. The helmet flies off
And smashes against a stone wall.
The head tumbles down the hallway.
The Green Knight picks up the head
And tells you to meet him
For his his exchange blow.
The Green Knight's head chuckles
In his arms as he slips away.
---o0o---
Grey light pools
On the floor in the distance.
A green knight walks toward you,
A battle-axe in one hand
And a branch of holly in the other.
Bercilak de Hautdesert asks if you want to play a game.
You take the axe and swing. The helmet flies off
And smashes against a stone wall.
The head tumbles down the hallway.
The Green Knight picks up the head
And tells you to meet him
For his his exchange blow.
The Green Knight's head chuckles
In his arms as he slips away.
---o0o---
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Drawing: Faces No. 932
By Jack Brummet
[Pen and India Ink on rough Strathmore watercolor paper, 11 x 16"]
[Pen and India Ink on rough Strathmore watercolor paper, 11 x 16"]
click to enlarge
---o0o---
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Porm: Sparks a/k/a Defensive Daydreaming
By Jack Brummet
Defensive Daydreaming
Six hours into the surprise visit, he lumbers on.
My brain unsnaps from its moorings
and drifts like a drunken dirigble
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.
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.
---o0o---
Defensive Daydreaming
Six hours into the surprise visit, he lumbers on.
My brain unsnaps from its moorings
and drifts like a drunken dirigble
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.
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 Curran and Jan Newberry.
I think about
the 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 spitshined,
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 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 spitshined,
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 today
Pouring from a rising skyscraper.
The welder is a star thrower,
Pouring from 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,
Those sparks are like his words,
Falling
down iron bars
To disappear like fugitives
In a white lake of sparks.To disappear like fugitives
---o0o---
Monday, October 27, 2014
Live footage of earth, streaming from the International Space Station
By Jack Brummet, Out There Ed.
A High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment aboard the International Space Station was launched on April 30, 2014.
"The wide-angle lens shows a huge swath of country that stretches from Portland, Oregon (right) to Phoenix, Arizona (left). The largest string of lights is the Ogden-Salt Lake City-Provo area (lower center) in Utah. The Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan regions, and the cities of the central valley of California (Bakersfield to Redding) stretch across the horizon. The green airglow layer always appears in night images."
"This experiment includes several commercial HD video cameras aimed at the earth which are enclosed in a pressurized and temperature controlled housing. Video from these cameras is transmitted back to earth and also streamed live on this channel. While the experiment is operational, views will typically sequence though the different cameras. Between camera switches, a gray and then black color slate will briefly appear. Since the ISS is in darkness during part of each orbit, the images will be dark at those times. During periods of loss of signal with the ground or when HDEV is not operating, a gray color slate or previously recorded video may be seen. "
To learn more about the HDEV experiment, visit here. For a display of the real time ISS location plus the HDEV imagery, visit here.
A High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment aboard the International Space Station was launched on April 30, 2014.
"The wide-angle lens shows a huge swath of country that stretches from Portland, Oregon (right) to Phoenix, Arizona (left). The largest string of lights is the Ogden-Salt Lake City-Provo area (lower center) in Utah. The Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan regions, and the cities of the central valley of California (Bakersfield to Redding) stretch across the horizon. The green airglow layer always appears in night images."
"This experiment includes several commercial HD video cameras aimed at the earth which are enclosed in a pressurized and temperature controlled housing. Video from these cameras is transmitted back to earth and also streamed live on this channel. While the experiment is operational, views will typically sequence though the different cameras. Between camera switches, a gray and then black color slate will briefly appear. Since the ISS is in darkness during part of each orbit, the images will be dark at those times. During periods of loss of signal with the ground or when HDEV is not operating, a gray color slate or previously recorded video may be seen. "
To learn more about the HDEV experiment, visit here. For a display of the real time ISS location plus the HDEV imagery, visit here.
---o0o---
Found in translation: Chinese signs in English
By Jack Brummet
I loved every English sign I saw in China. What was lost in translation was most often rendered into Surrealist poetry.
I loved every English sign I saw in China. What was lost in translation was most often rendered into Surrealist poetry.
---o0o---
Sunday, October 26, 2014
The time Gary Cooper gave Pablo Picasso a cowboy hat and a heater
By Jack Brummet, Arts Ed.
In 1959, Gary Cooper gave Pablo Picasso a pistol, a cowboy hat, and marksmanship lessons.
In 1959, Gary Cooper gave Pablo Picasso a pistol, a cowboy hat, and marksmanship lessons.
---o0o---
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