at last

two lives (truth and love must prevail over lies and hate)

Kim Jong Il dies.
Vaclav Havel dies.

How strange and rare to have such contrasting figures to eulogize simultaneously; both men led their nations but could not have been more different. Kim Jong Il inherited a totalitarian fortress state with an enslaved populace and passed it to his son intact. Vaclav Havel was a prisoner for his politics and his plays and became the first free President of Czechoslovakia in 1989. You should read about the Velvet Revolution and recall that Communism in Czechoslovakia vanished without a shot fired the next time you hear someone sneering about how political street protest never accomplished anything.

Havel is a personal hero and it is difficult to express my admiration for the man. It baffles me that a thug like Che Guevara, a murderer who embraced a failed and inhuman philosophy whose greatest success was helping Castro establish a totalitarian regime is celebrated as revolutionary hero while a man like Vaclav Havel is relatively obscure. Perhaps it was because he was successful at what he did. Nobody died in his revolution; his regime never had execution squads or secret police. His motto was ‘truth and love must prevail over lies and hate’.

Then there’s the writing. I am particularly fond of ‘Largo Desolato’, which was translated into English by Tom Stoppard. It’s a comedy about an intellectual locked in his house; he has written a book with a paragraph the authorities want him to renounce. He has asked them for time to think about it. Every time the bell rings his anxiety increases. It’s funny but it couldn’t be performed in Czechoslovakia and he couldn’t leave the country to see it. Also, he spent the previous ten years mostly in and rarely out of prison because of doing things like writing the Charter 77 manifesto in response to the imprisonment of the psychedelic rock band Plastic People of the Universe. (I actually have an album by Pulnoc, a sort of spin off band that sounds more like the Velvet Underground than anything else.)

Vaclav Havel deserves your closer examination because his life teaches us that many of the impossible beautiful things can actually be; that children are not the only ones who blush and that truth and love must prevail. Vaclav Havel was an artist, an intellectual and a hero of a nonviolent revolution who governed wisely and prudently, raising the economic status of her citizens and bringing Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Bloc to the European Union, all without firing a shot or imprisoning those who argued with him, bringing true democracy to his nation. The difference he made in the world is incalculable and will be felt for generations to come..

Kim Jong Il is dead and best forgotten quickly.

Here you come here you come again

Here you come here you come again
smashing through my windows
kicking down my doors
here you come here you come again
tearing through my hallways
searching down my self

here i am here i always am
doing what i do
tending to my flock
here i am here i always am
making my small gestures
crafting tiny metaphors

here you come here you come again
i calculated your trajectory
your vector diffract
here you come here you come again
our orbits intersect
i am braced for impact

here you come here you come again
i can catch a meteor
with my bare hands
here i am here i always am
in the home of the hurricane
where your soul stands

selenelion day

I cannot sleep;
it is an impossible  day
of rare eclipse
and asymmetrical alignment.

Wonderful phenomena
and strange metamorphoses
are quicksilver quick
to vanish back to nothing

The always of now
sings opportunity and
selenelion day surprise
and the creation of worlds colliding

Eagles Are Turning People Into Horses

Jumping For Dollars

A few friends of mine over the years have worked for a certain doctor’s office where a tradition at the holiday party consists of employees jumping to grab an envelope dangling from a clothesline strung across the restaurant (but more often in recent years, the office). The envelopes contain amounts from between fifty to a single dollar; whatever the employee grabs is the entirety of their holiday bonuses. After this spectacle, which the doctors chortle and catcall through, the doctors then play a game in which they compete to demonstrate that they can remember the names of all the office help. Morale was not helped recently when one of the doctor/owners screamed at the manager in the middle the office to fire more people so he can make more money.

Anyway, that’s what I thought of when I saw all the people going berserk shopping this weekend.

The Call of Cthulhu

This one’s for you, Huck.

 

42

I’ve been consumed with a project for the Clown Factory that leaves me little time for anything else. If I’m at my laptop, I need to be working. Due to the nature of my agreement with the Clown Factory I can’t even talk about the project here other than to say I’m working on it. Sorry to be mysterious.

I turned 42 the other day; it’s the answer to life, the universe and everything, but of course, nobody knows the question.

More later.

Wonder Pieta

"Wonder Pieta" Pencil and ink on paper. 11" x 14"

Dark Knight Dark Night

Dark Knight Dark Night. Ink and pencil on paper. 11" x 14"