Jumping Over Ponies

We were having a rain squall this afternoon and I finally had a chance to watch the first part of Children of Paradise. The Street of Crime. What amazingly inspired performances this movie has! They are transcendent. I have been resisting watching it for weeks and weeks for some reason, mostly I expect because it is “serious” cinema.

It was either that or Hulk , the Ang Lee one. I am a big fan of Marvel comics, a little known factoid about me, one even I forget on occasion.

My sister and I saw the trailer for the new X-Men: The Last Stand movie when we saw V for Vendetta over Easter weekend. The Last Stand is due out May 26th.

I knew this guy, a great friend who waited a whole year to trust me enough to tell me he had a passion for X-Men. He is Vietnamese, was raised a Communist, and when he was about 13 he was pulled from his home, and his family to come to the US as a gifted violin prodigy. He only knew a few words of English until he found a stash of X-Men comics in a neighbor’s basement and fell in love.

He actually showed me his prized possession, for which I still feel honored, a few days before leaving Portland to go to Boston to join his amazing family that has slowly but surely reconstituted itself here, #2. He has a #2.

He would get such a kick knowing I succumbed and got a tattoo on my lower back a few years ago. When he passed his final CFA exam he had a Klingon phrase tattooed around his ankle. It is Klingon script and is quite beautiful. He hid it from me for weeks because he knew I thought tattoos were in poor taste.

What I really want to do is get back to watching my secret vice. I am now on Season Three of Highlander . It is just awful and I love it. Go figure.

Actually I felt better about it when I found out recently that Adrian Paul (who is not the brightest bulb on the block) was a serious, and I expect quite gifted, dancer before he got the series. He is always dancing in the outtakes, which they have on the DVD.

Oh and as Iris Dement says in Sweet is The Melody “The dance floor is for gliding and not jumping over ponies…” Or cutting off heads I suppose…

Oh well.

For Kevin

I'll see your wild iris and raise you a mess of domesticated ones. More of a "real" post soon... Life has been a bit, how do you say?, intense of late.

Transformational

Thought the page needed some color...

These Nymphs

I could write about Stéphane Mallarmé whom I am both reading and reading about. Last week I read the whole of L’Après-Midi D’Un Faune to Andrew (in English) in the car on the way to the grocery.

I could write about oft quoted and seasonally appropriate The Song of Solomon, which I was reading today. When I asked Andrew for back story on it, he knows all this stuff, he wanted to know why I was asking, what got me going on that…

This is the same Andrew who a few years back when I was researching the culture that sacrificed a young woman to the gods that was found frozen by mountaineers hundreds of years later and came upon the history of the “red carpet” (prized red shells broken to create a path for the king to walk upon), he scooped up handfuls of white rose petals, (we were in a rose garden at the time) and flung them on the ground before me as I walked.

I could write about the warm fragrant air and the fat bees and a spring the likes of which I have never seen, but what I really want to write about is my Aunt Alice.

She is my mother’s baby sister and we just found out about her existence two weeks ago. Our mother was adopted under mysterious circumstances and died now almost 30 years ago. This is our mother’s blood sister and she remembers our mother as a girl! This is an amazing development and ripe with material for much art.

I could write about all that and more but now I have to go take a shower and read my murder mystery about Hiroshima survivors and get to sleep!

Ummm?

I was talking to a friend on a landline last night in San Francisco, he has neither a cell phone, or a computer and so communications with him are initiated at a leisurely pace and happen infrequently.

I was teasing him about it all and saying something about blogging and he asked, “Hey, speaking of blogging is it true that some assistant director of Homeland Security is being extradited to Texas or somewhere on child pornography charges having to do with the internet, or is that just a blog thing?”

I said, well it sounds like a blog thing, who would be stupid enough to…

But after we stopped talking I got curious and did a NYT’s search and…

23 counts?! Houston, we have a problem with these people in charge of our security. When I called my friend back and told him that this had happened, he wanted to know why there weren't big headlines about it.

April 6, 2006

Official Resists Extradition on Charge Involving Internet and Sex
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

WASHINGTON, April 5 — The Department of Homeland Security's deputy press secretary appeared in a Maryland state court on Wednesday and refused extradition to Florida, where he faces charges of using the Internet to seduce someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl.

The press official, Brian J. Doyle, was arrested Tuesday night in his home in Silver Spring, Md., after nearly a month of computer contact with a Polk County detective who was posing as a teenager. Mr. Doyle now faces 23 counts of using a computer to seduce a child and transmission of harmful material to a minor. Under Florida law, each count is a third-degree felony that carries a five-year prison term.

Mighty Chestnut

I can only hope that the some of the overwhelming sensual pleasure I experienced in apprehending these beautiful brand new leaves comes through in this shot I took on my way to work yesterday.

The Cult of Me

I did watch the French movie from 2000Va Savoir last night. As all the reviews said, it gets off to a slow start and doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be until mid-film. It was an excellent film to practice one’s French on if one is so inclined and it is filmed in Paris. In case you are longing for Paris.

When I was in Tahiti I of course took notes about all that I saw and did towards the idea of writing poems. I have written poems while in both the Caribbean and in Hawaii while there.

Tahiti was different though, I didn’t write while I was there and it has been six months since I returned home and until this last week, nada, nothing.

I think it was two things, and now that I am musing on this I remember the same thing happened when I went to Paris, it was so radically different from the world in which I live it took longer to absorb the sights, the smells, the sounds, the light and the language.

The other hitch I think is finding a place so magnificent it feels overwhelming to try to find language to do it justice and also this idea that I get stuck on that I have to write about things as they happened.

Andrew has worked extensively on that one with me by asking screw reality, what makes sense artistically? That is the question.

One doesn’t always have to tell the precise truth to write the truth. There are many paths in and the one of the imagination is often the best.

Who cares what happened to me?

I went to a poetry reading by a prominent and well-published older poet a few weeks back and the only way her poems have any value for the reader is if the reader cares for her. A stray image may float loose and hold one’s interest but fundamentally the value lies in how well she is telling her stories.

I have no problem with her as a person, but I also have no interest in her point of view. It seems dull to me, flat, pedestrian, umm… unimaginative.

As far as I am concerned the only way that my experience matters in a poem is if it is a universal one and that through the filter of the imaginative I, you are able to touch your own experience.

Unversed really in expressing strongly held opinions I wonder if this makes any sense?

Let me be your guide to the depths of your soul. I’ll go in first my torch held high and if I can’t illuminate the dark places for you then I am not doing my job.