Collage: Portrait of President Abe Lincoln

click portrait to enlarge
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Keep On Blogging

Democrats complete a sweep of three branches of government

It's all over now except the vote, and perhaps a pointless filibuster. We have blown the Senate, The House, The White House, and now The Supereme Court. Even if President Bush leaves the White House early (an increasingly likely prospect...and not just statistically!), or if we win the 2008 election, we'll have the President's two relatively young appointees.

It's on now to the midterm elections and to find a Presidential candidate who might actually win. I am one of the fools who believe we could retake the house. And maybe the Senate if some more crazy stuff comes out.

Elizabeth Holtzman (our ex Congressperson in NYC) published an article in The Nation this week speculating that impeachment itself is not as insane as some would have us believe. It's pretty to think.

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Letters, a short story, and memories of Paul Bowles

Click all images of the manuscripts and letters to enlarge...

Paul Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999), was a powerful novelist and musician, who often seemed to be in the right place at the right time. He met with, partied with, and worked with people like W.H. Auden, Leonard Bernstein, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Virgil Thompson, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as a few truly masterful Moroccan storytellers, whose work he translated and helped popularize in the west. He was married to Jane Bowles, an excellent writer as well, who Tennessee Williams, John Ashberry and others consider one of the most underrated American writers. It was an odd marriage indeed, but somehow it worked. Jane served as the model for one of the main characters in The Sheltering Sky. At least one movie has been made about their marriage.

Paul Bowles wrote classic 20th century novels like Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and The Sheltering Sky. He also published fourteen collections of excellent short stories, as well as translations of several native Moroccan authors, most notably numerous novels and collections of the strange and compelling writer Mohammed Mrabet (who people often claimed didn't exist and was merely an alter-ego of Bowles). Bowles also wrote a truly crazy autobiography, Without Stopping, and a masterful travel book: Their Heads Were Green, Their Hand Were Blue.



I was (and am) a big fan. When we started Scape magazine in 1981, I contacted him, and begged for stories, photos, anything. To my shock, he answered with a warm note. And then, to really knock my socks off, a few weeks later, he sent me a story for Scape (to us! Instead of Anteus, or The New Yorker, or The Paris Review!). These are scans of some of the notes from him, as well as the story he sent to Scape.

I blew my one chance to meet him. In 1982, Keelin and I were traveling in Europe, and spent a week in Morocco. In Tangier, I was dog sick with food poisoning (contracted in Granada, Spain) and could not pull my act together to spend any time with him...











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a note from e e cummings

While I worked at Carl Fischer in New York (77-82), I acquired this letter of the great American poet e.e. cummings. We were cleaning out the copyright files--purging contracts and documents for books and music that had been out of print for decades. No one wanted things like this, so I picked up this, a couple of letters from Theodore Roethke, and other ephemera.

This letter has been sitting in a ziplock bag with my photos for about 23 years, and I broke it out today. I also dug out three short letters (to me) from the great American novelist, short story writer, and composer, Paul Bowles. I will also be reprinting his original manuscript that we later published in our journal, Scape.

---click e.e.'s letter to enlarge---

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Poem: The Bay Of Delusion

Between what we do
And what we'd like to think we do
Lies a vast bay of denial and delusion

We make believe
There is war in our bones
That growth is the child of destruction

That we are the chosen ones
God's boys and girls given carte blanche
To make war

We make believe
We are right or wrong
That it doesn't matter

In this world
And we'll take a flier
It doesn't matter in the next.

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Joni Mitchell's lyrics to God Must Be A Boogie Man

God Must Be A Boogie Man

He is three
One’s in the middle unmoved
Waiting
To show what he sees
To the other two
To the one attacking--so afraid
And the one that keeps trying to love and trust
And getting himself betrayed
In the plan--oh
The divine plan
God must be a boogie man!

One’s so sweet
So overly loving and gentle
He lets people in
To his innermost sacred temple
Blind faith to care
Blind rage to kill
Why’d he let them talk him down
To cheap work and cheap thrills
In the plan--oh
The insulting plan
God must be a boogie man!

Which would it be
Mingus one or two or three
Which one do you think he’d want the world to see
Well, world opinion’s not a lot of help
When a man’s only trying to find out
How to feel about himself!
In the plan-oh
The cock-eyed plan
God must be a boogie man!
- Joni Mitchell
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Jesusland in jeopardy? Pat Robertson retracts another statement

Pat Robertson, the American telenazi and leader of the evangelical Taliban, is now backing off from statements he made earlier that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon was smitten with a stroke by God in retribution for withdrawing from Gaza and moving real estate lines around in the Holy Land.

Why would the Reverend back off? You may have guessed: $$$.

Pat is frantically apologizing everywhere in sight to save his $50 million plan for a biblical theme park--Jesusland--in Galilee.

Jesusland's future was already a little shaky, due to esthetic and development issues. A statement from Robertson headquarters says that he was merely pointing out the Old Testament perspective on the division of Israel. Avi Hartuv, a spokesman for Israel’s tourism minister, said: "We will not do business with him."
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Poem: The Broken Chord

The rain falls
As you practice arpeggios

Running out the broken chord
In an ever-shifting

Pattern of music sifting
Through caesuras between notes

Forming a counterpoint
With the drumming of the rain

Thousand of patterns
Weave around and through other patterns

The rain chicanes in the wind
Breaking up and merging again

Billions of drops bump together
In a choreographed ballet

We can never reproduce
But that's nature for you

We replay the same stories and themes
Over and over

And nature trumps us
With a singular snowflake.
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In praise of the reign of rain (with apologies to victims of S.A.D. - Seasonal Affective Disorder)

Rain, rain, go away
Come again another day,
Little Johnny wants to play.

Rain, rain, go to Spain,
Never show your face again.

“The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A newcomer to Seattle arrives on a rainy day. He gets up the next day and it's raining. It also rains the day after that, and the day after that. He goes out to lunch and sees a young kid and asks out of despair, "Hey kid, does it ever stop raining around here?" The kid says, "How do I know? I'm only 6."

I am in a fairly small minority (of one?) on this. I have met several other NW natives who will reluctantly confess they like the rain too. After three weeks of rain, it feels cozy.

Rain imposes a certain rhythm on the world--the fantastic, incessant drumming and thrumming. Roostertails, mud puddles, downspouts funneling gallons of water a minute, the amazingly clean air, the glossy sheen varnishing the landscape, the muffled traffic and industrial sounds--I love everything about it. Rain reminds me of home, and family, of writing, listening to music, reading, and drawing. It feels like an old friend. They say in Seattle it's either a rain day or a drain day. At the moment we're trying to rain AND drain. The rain is winning. It's always there in the background, that wonderful, rhythmic drumming. It's a winter soundtrack.

You may have heard of the Alaskan tribes that have 400 words for snow? The Great Inuit Snow Hoax started in 1911 when anthropologist Franz Boaz mentioned that the Inuit—he called them "Eskimos," (the derogatory term for eaters of raw meat)—had four different words for snow. With each succeeding reference the number grew (or heh heh, snowballed), until it settled in at 400 words. The linguist Steve Pinker says they have no more words for snow that your average kid in Minnesota: "Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen." For rain, I only come up with a handful of synonyms in the northwest: showers, drizzles, sprinkles, flurries, precipitation, mist, precip, drencher, downpour.

It has rained every day in Seattle for the last three weeks. It is supposed to. And yet, transplants and locals alike complain about it every day. And we're not even close to the record (1953, when it rained 33 days straight).

The cumulative effect wears on people, and the land. My yard, which has already sprouted a small spring or two (e.g., the water table has nowhere to go but up). The yard is approaching 100% saturation. Walking across the lawn is like tiptoeing across a bowl of pudding, with the grass almost floating on top of a substrata of jiggling, barely solid mud. Even worse are the edges of the hills themselves. Seattle is largely a bunch of hills, separated by lakes, rivers, and canals. I live in the North Beach neighborhood of Ballard, on Crown Hill. Puget Sound is a ten minute walk down the hill. It is around the edges of these hills that things begin to liquify, slide, and tumble.

"We've reached a threshold for saturation."

Last week, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) issued an advisory that more rain could trigger slides in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties. "The gradual buildup of rain makes it hard to predict slides," said USGS spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna, "because the soil is so soaked that it takes only a little rain to prompt a slide." "We've reached a threshold for saturation," she said.

I don't want the hills to slide into the sea, but I could easily enjoy another month or two of this. Break out your wacky sun lamps, bumbershoots, and parkas. Trudge in for your seasonal affective disorder treatments. In a few short months, it will dry up nicely. And I will miss the rain.
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Alien Lore 59 - Abductees, extraterrestrial sex, and "The Stockholm Syndrome"

One embattled psychiatrist, John Mack, M.D., argues that alien abduction cannot be understood in the western rationalist tradition of science.

Dr. Mack, of Harvard Medical School, is a long-time champion of alien abductees and a paranormal theorist. His 1994 bestseller, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, drew wide attention with his argument that the men and women he has debriefed have indeed been abducted (and molested, or worse) by aliens.

Dr. John Mack says abductees often come to love their alien captors.

This behavior in hostages is known as the Stockholm Syndrome. The most famous example is Patty Hearst's behavior following her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Despite waking bruised and rodgered, these abductees say their feelings for The Greys transcend temporal human bonds and lead to a sense of enveloping oneness with the universe that approaches the ecstatic sage of some religions.

Peter Faust, a 45-year-old acupuncturist, says he endured years of sexual probing by The Greys. Following hypnotic-regression sessions with Dr. Mack, Faust concluded that he is yoked to a female alien-human hybrid with whom he has multiple offspring. He said he "realized we're not alone in the universe. There are beings out there who care about us. But getting to this point is a long, arduous journey, with a lot of people who want to deny your experience."

Many abductees tell stories of displaced sexual desire and romantic fantasy. Some of the alleged victims have had hysterectomies, and yet they tell of alien insemination and being forced to conceive an alien child. Are they mourning lost fertility or fearing lost sexuality? The unpleasant aspects of imagining forced sex with an alien are played down, and the emotional satisfactions played up. Many women fall in love with the male aliens who have lifelong relationships with them, and father their hybrid children.

Some UFOlogists contend that abductees who perceive their experiences negatively do so because they themselves aren't spiritually advanced enough to truly understand what has really happened to them. Persons treading on a higher spiritual plane tend to have positive alien encounters, and those who have painful experiences are troglodytes. Whitley Strieber voiced this theory in his book, Majestic: "In the eyes of the others [the aliens], we who met them saw ourselves. And there were demons there."
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Links to the best of the original art on All This Is That

Collage: Happy New Year, Republicans!
Painting: The balance of power tilts
Painting: The President's Head Explodes During A Press Conference
Drawing: Teaching a horse the missionary position
A Company Photograph
Photograph collage: Donald Rumsfeld
Flag No. 16
Painting: W
Drawing: Lines
Sixteen Panels

Collage: Five Presidents
Painting: The Grey landing party
Painting: The nudist beauty pageant
Easel painting: A Jury of your peers
Painting: The spooks from the C.I.A.

Painting: The missing link
PaintingL The tyrannosaurus steps into history
All This Is That Poster
Painting: Cyclops
Painting: The 28 men who run the world

Painting: Self portrait
POTUS 28: President Woodrow Wilson - The President Who Short-Circuited & POTUS 28A: President Edith Wilson - An Alternate Portrait
Painting: Movie Love scene
All This Is That: Jack Drawing: Faces No. 467
All This Is That: Hobo Signs
Painting: Cyclops 2
Faces No. 407
Painting: Abduction
Another All This Is That Poster

The Grey
Priest Cartoon
Poster for The Seattle Sledgehammer Murder Movie
Chou En Lai collage and painting
New Years
Painting: General Douglas MacArthur
Heroes And Villains No. 20--> Two More Catholics--> Keelin Curran & Pope Alexander VI a/k/a Rodrigo Borgia a/k/a "The Bad Pope"
Heroes and villains no. 10 --> Ma Barker and Elizabeth Gaskell
Heroes And Villains No. 7---> Two Bald Guys--> Hideki Tojo and John Glenn
Heroes And Villains No. 6--> Jerry Garcia and Tokyo Rose (aka Ikuko Toguri)
Heroes and villains no. 4 --> Jeffrey Dahmer and Daniel Boone
Heroes & Villains No. 18--> Joni Mitchell and Maier Suchowljansky (a/k/a Meyer Lansky)
Heroes and villains no. 1 --> Adolph Shcikelgruber Hitler and Lyndon Baines Johnson
Flag No. 19

POTUS No. 9 - Wm. Henry Harrison, The drive-by President
POTUS 34: Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower - A Most Detached President
POTUS 38: Pres. Gerald R. Ford - Pardon Me, Mister President!
POTUS 16: Pres. Abraham Lincoln - The Most Beloved President?
Painting: Lines 2
POTUS 42: Pres. William Jefferson Clinton - The Comeback Kid
POTUS 35: Pres. Jack Kennedy - Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
The peacekeeper robot
Heroes and villains No. 49: Mario Cuomo and Ann Coulter
Heroes And Villains No. 40--> Larry Rivers & Lucrezia Borgia (a/k/a The Duchess of Ferrara), Daughter of Heroes And Villains No. 20, Pope Alexander VI
Painting: The UFOs approach warp speed
Painting: Judge Alito
Heroes and villains no. 38 - Eleanor Roosevelt and Lee Harvey Oswald
Painting: Alien Landing part No. 2
Painting: Bipolar
Painting: Meet the new boss
Heroes and villains no. 35 - Doris Lessing and Typhoid Mary
Heroes and villains no. 34 - Mata Hari and Dr. William Carlos Williams
Heroes and villains no. 32 - John Lennon and Carrie Nation
Heroes and villains no. 31 - Nina Simone and Lynette Squeaky Fromme
Painting: The Wheel of progress
Heroes And Villains No. 29--> Phyllis Schlafly & Peter Jackson
Heroes And Villains No. 26--> Two People born in 1893--> Anita Loos & Joachim von Ribbentrop
Heroes And Villains No. 25--> Congresswoman (and 1972 Presidential Candidate) Shirley Chisholm & Senator Joseph ("tailgunner Joe") McCarthy
Painting: A Grey Visitor
Painting: Grey Alien No. 7
Painting: The battle for Rohan
Heroes and villains no. 23 - J. Edgar Hoover and Billie Holiday
Potus No. 33 - Harry S. Truman (The buck stops here)
Potus No. 17 - Andrew Johnson - The Worst President Ever?
Potus No. 39 - James Earl Carter
POTUS 15: President James Buchanan, The Man Who Left A Divided Country And War For Pres. Abraham Lincoln

Painting: U.S. Flag
Potus No. 8 - Martin Van Buren
Potus no. 21 - Chester Alan Arthur
Potus No. 2 - John Adams
Painting: The return of the king
Potus No. 43 - George W. Bush
Mosaic of George W. Bush
POTUS 13 - Pres. Millard Fillmore: Another Partial Term President
Potus No. 37 - Richard Nixon and the comedy of errors
Potus No. 10 - John Tyler, the first accidental president
POTUS 12: Pres. Zachary Taylor - The President Who Mostly Closely Resembled Mel Brooks
Seven Year Art Project - No. 12
Painting - The Invasion

Seven year art project no. 10
Seven year art project - no. 9
Easel painting: The flash
Easel painting: Bluehead
Easel painting: I read the news today
POTUS 32: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - The Man In The Wheelchair Who Lifted The Country On His Shoulders; The Only POTUS To Win Four Terms
Painting: grey alien from Zeta Reticuli
Painting: Adam and Eve
Painting: Gomorrah
Mosaic
Painting: Chancellor Hitler
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