[click image to enlarge]
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Poem: 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.
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 nod 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 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---
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.
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 nod 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 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---
Friday, January 14, 2005
ET Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood
[click to enlarge this painting by Jack]
I have been fascinated with alien folklore for years (Roswell, the 1947 Mt. Rainier UFO sightings, Cattle Mutiliations, Area 51, The Hive, Dark Skies, Abductions, Crop Circles, John Lear, Whitley Streiber, Dreamland, Bill Cooper, Foo Fighters, Project Bluebook, the Men In Black, The Black Choppers, The Betty and Barney Hill abduction, Government coverups, famous "alien" encounters, Majestic 12, and Dulce, the massive underground city, among other people, places and things).
I have read hundreds of pieces by completely deranged wackos, skeptical scientists, and many people somewhere in between. I am hopeful, but skeptical. I'd like to believe we have some cousins Out There. Mostly, I have been interested in the urban legend/folkloric aspects of this, but there are some serious scientists discussing the issue of possible extraterrestrial visitors.
"We are in the curious situation today that our best modern physics and astrophysics theories predict that we should be experiencing extra-terrestrial visitation, yet any possible evidence of such lurking in the UFO phenomenon is scoffed at within our scientific community," says an astrophysicist, Bernard Haisch.
Click on the title of this piece for a link to an interesting article on the space.com website. ---o0o---
Thursday, January 13, 2005
poem: the glass is not half-full
I saw our dreams
Disappear
Like a white pony
Over
A low grassy hill.
---000---
Jack Brummet
Disappear
Like a white pony
Over
A low grassy hill.
---000---
Jack Brummet
Tsunami: Before and After
[click to enlarge]
14 sets of before and after satellite images of tsunami damage in various South Asian countries.
http://homepage.mac.com/demark/tsunami/14.html
Shattering Gamer Stereotypes
Click on the title to link to the original article on the Game Industry News website.
"The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has released the results of research recently conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., which shows that typical American gamers are far removed from the stereotype of the lazy, fat, isolated geek that has been falsely pinned on them. The ESA says that gamers spend far more time exercising, attending religious services, reading, etc. than they do playing games. Video games are merely one activity in a well-rounded life."
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
The Rasterbator
[click to enlarge]
The Rasterbator is a web service that creates gigantic rasterized [1] images from any picture. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into cool looking posters up to 65 feet long!! To get to the site, click on the title of this article above.
To check The Rasterbator out , I uploaded a drawing I published here a while ago:
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2004/12/jack-drawing-faces-no-467.html
The image I put on this page is page 38 of 375, or 1/375th of the rasterbated image!
First, I upload the image. I select the size I want, and they process it. In a couple of minutes, I download a PDF of the new image. Printing it in the large scale format will take 375 pages of 8 1/2 x 11" paper.
This slick software creates gigantic half-toned images [2] like a massive painting by Roy Lichtenstein with Ben-Day dots (they give you an option to scale the size of the dots). This site would be great for making large scale posters. . .without going to Kinkos [tm]. They write on their web site about releasing a free GPL version sometimes in the future. This had to be a fun application to create.
/jack
[1] Rasterizing converts images into a bitmap form for display or printing. Vector graphics, and vector and outline fonts have to be be rasterized to print or display them.
[2] If you look closely at newspaper photos, they are done in half tones, using dots to represent the blacks and whites (and greys by the way your eyes blend them). It's all circles. You can see a half-toned photograph here: http://photos1.blogger.com/img/278/2473/640/jb.jpg
---o0o---
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Poem: It's Getting Crowded Here
We cover the earth
With Venn Diagrams
Of our steps
Bisecting old steps.
---o0o---
With Venn Diagrams
Of our steps
Bisecting old steps.
---o0o---
What A Difference A Day Makes!
Only yesterday, I posted a note about how the 42nd and 43rd President have become Bosom Buddies (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2005/01/bosom-buddies.html).
Today, POTUS named Michael Chertoff (an ex-federal prosecutor who was chief Republican counsel to the Senate Whitewater committee) as the new head of Homeland Security! This guy helped spend millions of dollars, and a lot of time trying to put Bill and Hillary behind bars.
That should give Presidents Bush and Clinton something to jawbone about at their next coffee klatsch.
/jack
---o0o---
Today, POTUS named Michael Chertoff (an ex-federal prosecutor who was chief Republican counsel to the Senate Whitewater committee) as the new head of Homeland Security! This guy helped spend millions of dollars, and a lot of time trying to put Bill and Hillary behind bars.
That should give Presidents Bush and Clinton something to jawbone about at their next coffee klatsch.
/jack
---o0o---
Rabelais!
After reading Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons (about which, more later), I have begun re-reading Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. I have read it three times and parts of it many times.
It is a difficult, strange and wonderful book. But you should read it anyhow. So, just why should you read an obscene, difficult book written by a 16th century French monk/doctor/lawyer?
It is an exuberant, satirical, wonderful, encyclopedic, and, at times, tedious book of sonic thought and riotously inventive language. It is filled with learned disquisitions, and scatalogical lists. It lives up to its name: it is Gargantuan. Rabelais is right up there with Shakespeare and Melville and Joyce. Most of all, this work is filled with a shimmering, laughing love of life.
/jack
---o0o---
It is a difficult, strange and wonderful book. But you should read it anyhow. So, just why should you read an obscene, difficult book written by a 16th century French monk/doctor/lawyer?
It is an exuberant, satirical, wonderful, encyclopedic, and, at times, tedious book of sonic thought and riotously inventive language. It is filled with learned disquisitions, and scatalogical lists. It lives up to its name: it is Gargantuan. Rabelais is right up there with Shakespeare and Melville and Joyce. Most of all, this work is filled with a shimmering, laughing love of life.
/jack
---o0o---
Monday, January 10, 2005
Bosom Buddies?
Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
"For two men at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the relationship between the 43rd and 42nd presidents has grown surprisingly warm and personal over the last six months. " Click on the title for a link to this story! /jack
---o0o---
Sunday, January 09, 2005
What Happened To Odor Eaters?
[click image to enlarge]
Dear Dr. Scholls and Combe, Inc.:
This is almost as depressing as when Johnson & Johnson replaced the ultra-cool little red thread on Band-Aids [tm] with a tacky little plastic strip.
You're breaking my heart. I wear tennis shoes 98% of the time, and Odor Eaters [tm] and Odor Destroyers [tm] were an important accessory. But I can't find them anymore.
Dr. Scholl's web site is pathetic. Yeah, you do have Odor Destroyer Insoles listed somewhere, buried deep among the flossy gel insoles, and other products. Combe, Inc.'s website at least pays lip service to the coolness of Odor Eaters. But, I can't find or buy your products anymore. I guess stinkfoot is just not worth bothering with in the 21st century!
You both claim Odor Eaters and Destroyers exist...but no stores carry them anymore. All most stores seem to carry are those silly gel insoles and a bunch of ozone whackin' sprays. The insoles now appear to be virtually extinct.
You'd think there would be more demand for your products than ever--I mean, you are required to remove your shoes off in some people's houses. But whew!!! It is easier to go out and buy methamphetamines on the street than it is to find the formerly ubiquitous Odor Eaters.
Dudes! There must be millions of people like me out there, willing to part with four bucks for these products. Get with the program!
Yours,
Jack Brummet
Seatle, Washington
Select Wisely - Help For Travellers With Food Allergies
This posting is--amazingly--not a political rant, poem, drawing, or warped story about my past. A couple of old friends in 'Jersey recently started an interesting niche business/web site [1] for travellers with food allergies. Jim and Pamela Ahlberg have begun a business selling pocket-sized cards in fourteen different languages, covering over 40 specific food allergies. These cards would come in handy in Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants right here in the U.S. and Canada. They have a wide variety of cards covering just about any contingency--including one for vegetarians [2].
Their daughter Meredith had been travelling in Europe, but had some serious food allergies and was unable to tell restaurant workers about her condition, or grill them about what exactly was in their food. So she
". . .stuck with what she knew: ice cream, bread and shish kabobs. No pastry in Vienna, no chocolates in Switzerland, and no local German cuisine. Wanting to help her and others with similar challenges, we have developed this unique product."
An article on them appears here: http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/0404/06allergycards.html
Nice work, guys! Sometimes the internet actually is about more than stealing music and downloading "adult entertainment." Click on the title of this entry, go to their web site, and buy some stuff! /jack
[1] Maybe not so much of a niche, since 2% of American adults, and 8% of children under three have food allergies.
[2] Vegetarians who have a philosophical food allergy, more or less...
---o0o---
Their daughter Meredith had been travelling in Europe, but had some serious food allergies and was unable to tell restaurant workers about her condition, or grill them about what exactly was in their food. So she
". . .stuck with what she knew: ice cream, bread and shish kabobs. No pastry in Vienna, no chocolates in Switzerland, and no local German cuisine. Wanting to help her and others with similar challenges, we have developed this unique product."
An article on them appears here: http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/0404/06allergycards.html
Nice work, guys! Sometimes the internet actually is about more than stealing music and downloading "adult entertainment." Click on the title of this entry, go to their web site, and buy some stuff! /jack
[1] Maybe not so much of a niche, since 2% of American adults, and 8% of children under three have food allergies.
[2] Vegetarians who have a philosophical food allergy, more or less...
---o0o---
Crossfire to Stop Hurting America::: Jon Stewart Wins
A couple of months after Jon Stewart (the host of Comedy Central's Daily Show) accused the "Crossfire" hosts of "partisan hackery," implored them to "stop hurting America," and called the ranting little demi-god Tucker Carlson a "dick, " CNN announced it won't renew Carlson's contract and it has cancelled the long running show.
"I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp," said CNN Chief Executive Jonathan Klein. The video (and transcripts) of Stewart ripping into the Crossfire hosts are all over the net...
/jack
---o0o---
"I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp," said CNN Chief Executive Jonathan Klein. The video (and transcripts) of Stewart ripping into the Crossfire hosts are all over the net...
/jack
---o0o---
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