Jack Nicholson moons reporters—St. Tropez 1976

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The best Asian bootleg DVD cover ever: Break So Bad (a/k/a Breaking Bad)

by Jack Brummet, Travel Ed.

Whenever I travel in Asia, Mexico, or South America, I see these "so bad they're good" covers on the bootleg DVDs sold on the street.  This Korean cover on a Breaking Bad DVD has to be about the best one ever, replete with images from Bryan Cranston's earlier sitcom.

"With the cancerous concern lonely man must use chemistry skill in making most potent of drugs methanphetimen. Danger and serious threat comes to man' s family to bring his to life to serious impact."

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Jerry's Garcia image from Getty Images (used by permission)

 

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Drawing: Faces #689 - first skin graft

by Jack Brummet

I want to point out that I actually have no idea what a skin graft looks like. Yes, I know where I could find out, but sometimes it's just better to let your head and your heart run wild.  And not just sometimes. 

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Muhammad Ali talks a suicidal man down from the edge

By Jack Brummet, Heroes Ed.

I've posted a lot of photos of my heroes over the years on All This Is That, including dozens of Muhammad Ali.  But this one. . .wow.  What is more heroic than talking a potential suicide back from the edge?  This is the best picture I could find. You can also see a brief news clip of Walter Cronkite reporting the story below:

 

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Poem: Ghosts

By Jack Brummet

1
The scenery whirls by
In a drunken Gaussian Blur
Until I slow it down
And watch it unravel
In a multi-colored, quadraphonic
Parade of flora and fauna
Waltzing Venn Diagrams
Around each other.

2
I quit chasing ghosts,

But once in a while

I look over my shoulder
And find a face in the crowd,
With a sad smile and a halo.
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Living in Brooklyn, 1977 (The Summer of Sam), when the doctors nearly succeeded in killing me

By Jack Brummet, NYC Metro Ed.

My pal and my gal, Brooklyn, 1978

A shot I took from of our fire escape during a Brooklyn parade. The tall building is the House of Detention.

I shot I took from of our fire escape during a Brooklyn parade. The tall building is the House of Detention.

I moved to Brooklyn in June 1977, (The Summer of Sam), and after a couple of months living in a loft near The Bowery on the Lower East Side, we moved for two years to 324 Atlantic Ave. (between Smith and , right across the street from the Brooklyn House of Detention. On July 5th, I experienced a spontaneous pneumothorax that developed into double pneumonia with a fever of 106 one day (the very day the A/C was shut down due to the blackout).

It was seriously touch and go for a few days as to whether I'd make it or not. On July 13th, from my window in Long Island College Hospital, I watched as the lights on the World Trade Center dimmed and went out. And the great blackout and riots of 1977 began. I got out of the hospital three weeks later, in early August.

On August 10th, after a year of terror, they finally captured Son of Sam, and brought him, yeah, right across the street from our crib, to the House of Detention. It was a heady first couple of months in Brooklyn and NYC, to say the least. They've cleaned the place up a tad since we lived there. Back then, people would look kind of befuddled when you said you lived in Brooklyn. And getting a taxi home from Manhattan was virtually impossible unless you paid a double fare. It was a rude and harrowing introduction, but I loved every minute of it and Brooklyn and Manhattan have been part of my DNA ever since.

KeeKee Brummet and Jan Newberry probably saved my life that summer, and for that I'll be ever grateful to my pal and my gal.

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Poem: Dreams

by Jack Brummet

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.                      

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Poem: Robert Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy

by Jack Brummet

I think about Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy―
how he charged around his studio,

rolling vast, turgid highways
of black oil paint over acres of canvas,

and the wrong-headed people
who say "my child could have done that."

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Alien Lore No. 259 - ACLU lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) lays down the facts about aliens and UFOs

by Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Ed.

A clip from the movie Easy Rider (directed by Dennis Hopper, and written by Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Terry Southern.  The ACLU lawyer and town drunk, George Hanson (played by Jack Nicholson) lays out the "facts" about UFOs, and the alien takeover of earth.

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President Garfield's ambidextrous parlor trick

By Jack Brummet, Presidents Ed.

He was only President 200 days (with a good chunk of that being mortally ill after being shot),   and is therefore considered one of the forgotten Presidents.

But. . .President Garfield was the first left handed President.  He was left-handed, and also ambidextrous.  He also knew a couple of other languages, and combined that with his ambidextrous hands to be able to write in two languages simultaneously, Greek with one hand and Latin with the other.  He would write a question with one hand, and write out the answer with the other. That was quite a parlor trick.

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Cenacolo di Foligno (The last supper a/k/a sleeping at the last supper) by Pietro Perugino

The Last Supper Fresco by Pietro Perugino (b. 1450, Citta della Pieve, d. 1523, Perugia)

According to The Wikipedia, Cenacolo di Foligno, pained in 1493-96 is located in the ex-convent of the Tertiary Franciscans of Foligno, transformed into the "Conservatory of poor and honest girls" in 1980 after the transfer of the nuns. The fresco was rediscovered in 1845 and attributed at first to Raphael, but recent critics have unanimously agreed it was the work of Perugino, dating it between 1493-96. The idea has also been advanced that it was painted over another fresco of the same theme by Neri di Bicci (1419-1491).

click to enlarge

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