And now for a glimpse into my love life....

While I Sleep On My Guitar, Gently

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm...............

Mel's Place - 729 7th Ave. NYC

Subway Poster Offal

Time Is a Bastard

Requiem

photo by Michael O'Neill/Corbis Outline

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed --

-- why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled.

Big Butter Jesus

RSPCA - Simon's Sister's Dog 'Fed Up'

Blargh glahg blorrrr

I don't know what the hell is wrong with me - why I haven't written on here for three weeks or why I want to go to sleep before midnight and cannot rouse myself before nine a.m., why I am falling asleep at my desk at 4:00 pm every day and feel as if Velveeta is running in my veins....

It's probably the short-ass days and cold weather that makes me all grumbly-hungry bear wanting to go into hibernation, or maybe it is sheer, unending monotony and the need for an island escape, or maybe it is career coma...who knows. I need to snap the hell out of it. I don't feel depressed, just lazy. It usually happens after I've gathered a bit of momentum and am getting excited about performing prospects....and then there is the weird let-down.

Lordy, if I am this way now, I cannot imagine how sedentary and blarghy I will be in twenty years. Time to get MOVING. Ugh, but where??

Things I Hate

People who read their stupid Blackberries while walking up/down subway stairs.

Carrying 30 pounds of laundry a block and a half to wait for machines at the laundromat.

Paying 77 bucks a month for "Basic" and "Standard" and "Digital" cable service. What a scam.

Loud, obnoxious music piped into stores. Worse; loud radio music with static at my local grocery and CVS - makes me want to run screaming out of there. Talking to management does not help.

Taxi drivers who get mad when I use the credit card swipe option. Fuck you, I just tipped you double to make up for the service charge, you don't say thanks, and you still give me shit, because cash means you can lie on your taxes. Next time, I get out without paying. And yes, I know it is a crap job, I've worked at crap jobs cleaning toilets, we do what we have to do to pay rent.

Men (and yes, it is mostly men, I've observed) who openly dig at the insides of their noses with their thumbs in very public places. Same goes for the delightful hawking and spitting on the sidewalk.

Women who brush their hair on public transit.

Having to fly during major holidays, when it costs twice as much, and my parents live in different states so I have to see one set on one holiday, and the other on the next, and I've spent hundreds of dollars, paid for car services, carried on luggage with presents, rented a car, and had to arrange for cat-sitting (on holidays - not easy). Next year, I am staying home. [I am adding this note, in case my parents actually read my blog, which is doubtful; I love you and am always happy to see you. I just rarely get to go on vacations to sunny climes and drink pina coladas and flirt with cabana boys, and this makes me cranky, because two weeks vacation is all I have.]

The unmitigated gall of financial "experts" pretending to be shocked that brokerage houses/banks/lenders were not motivated to strictly regulate themselves. From the couple of years in an admin position at a securities firm I saw what egotistical, narcissistic, money-grubbing, self-important, emotionally retarded, over-privileged, ivy-league educated jerks many of the traders were....and they are supposed to regulate themselves when thrust into management positions? I call bullshit.

Not saying "please", "pardon me", "thank you", and "please take my seat because I am obviously able to stand and you are 87 years old, with a cane, and these seats are marked for the handicapped or elderly, so I should GET the FUCK UP."

Answering, talking on, texting with your cell phone during live performances, movies, and restaurants. Take your VERY IMPORTANT SELF outside, in the hall, and away from human beings within earshot. I am buying a pocket-sized signal scrambler for myself this Christmas, so you have been warned.

Excerpt: Towards A Splendid City - Pablo Neruda

...There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny....

...an unhappy and brilliant poet, the most awesome of all despairing souls, wrote down this prophecy: "A l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes." "In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities."

I believe in this prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope. It is perhaps because of this that I have reached as far as I now have with my poetry and also with my banner.

Lastly, I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.

In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.

Morning Glow

November 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

It Still Felt Good the Morning After
By FRANK RICH

ON the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.

Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.

Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.
And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.

Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).

Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.

The same commentators who dismissed every conceivable American demographic as racist, lazy or both got Sarah Palin wrong too. When she made her debut in St. Paul, the punditocracy was nearly uniform in declaring her selection a brilliant coup. There hadn’t been so much instant over-the-top praise by the press for a cynical political stunt since President Bush “landed” a jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in that short-lived triumph “Mission Accomplished.”

The rave reviews for Palin were completely disingenuous. Anyone paying attention (with the possible exception of John McCain) could see she was woefully ill-equipped to serve half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. The conservatives Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy said so on MSNBC when they didn’t know their mikes were on. But, hey, she was a dazzling TV presence, the thinking went, so surely doltish Americans would rally around her anyway. “She killed!” cheered Noonan about the vice-presidential debate, revising her opinion upward and marveling at Palin’s gift for talking “over the heads of the media straight to the people.” Many talking heads thought she tied or beat Joe Biden.

The people, however, were reaching a less charitable conclusion and were well ahead of the Beltway curve in fleeing Palin. Only after polls confirmed that she was costing McCain votes did conventional wisdom in Washington finally change, demoting her from Republican savior to scapegoat overnight.

But Palin’s appeal wasn’t overestimated only because of her kitschy “American Idol” star quality. Her fierce embrace of the old Karl Rove wedge politics, the divisive pitting of the “real America” against the secular “other” America, was also regarded as a sure-fire winner. The second most persistent assumption by both pundits and the McCain campaign this year — after the likely triumph of racism — was that the culture war battlegrounds from 2000 and 2004 would remain intact.

This is true in exactly one instance: gay civil rights. Though Rove’s promised “permanent Republican majority” lies in humiliating ruins, his and Bush’s one secure legacy will be their demagogic exploitation of homophobia. The success of the four state initiatives banning either same-sex marriage or same-sex adoptions was the sole retro trend on Tuesday. And Obama, who largely soft-pedaled the issue this year, was little help. In California, where other races split more or less evenly on a same-sex marriage ban, some 70 percent of black voters contributed to its narrow victory.

That lagging indicator aside, nearly every other result on Tuesday suggests that while the right wants to keep fighting the old boomer culture wars, no one else does. Three state initiatives restricting abortion failed. Bill Ayers proved a lame villain, scaring no one. Americans do not want to revisit Vietnam (including in Iraq). For all the attention paid by the news media and McCain-Palin to rancorous remembrances of things past, I sometimes wondered whether most Americans thought the Weather Underground was a reunion band and the Hanoi Hilton a chain hotel. Socialism, the evil empire and even Ronald Reagan may be half-forgotten blurs too.
If there were any doubts the 1960s are over, they were put to rest Tuesday night when our new first family won the hearts of the world as it emerged on that vast blue stage to join the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. The bloody skirmishes that took place on that same spot during the Democratic convention 40 years ago — young vs. old, students vs. cops, white vs. black — seemed as remote as the moon. This is another America — hardly a perfect or prejudice-free America, but a union that can change and does, aspiring to perfection even if it can never achieve it.

Still, change may come slowly to the undying myths bequeathed to us by the Bush decade. “Don’t think for a minute that power concedes,” Obama is fond of saying. Neither does groupthink. We now keep hearing, for instance, that America is “a center-right nation” — apparently because the percentages of Americans who call themselves conservative (34), moderate (44) and liberal (22) remain virtually unchanged from four years ago. But if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that labels are overrated. Those same polls find that more and more self-described conservatives no longer consider themselves Republicans. Americans now say they favor government doing more (51 percent), not less (43) — an 11-point swing since 2004 — and they still overwhelmingly reject the Iraq war. That’s a centrist country tilting center-left, and that’s the majority who voted for Obama.

The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

White Rabbit

Why do I do this to myself? I have a stand-up set at 5:30 today and I am sitting here in bed after oversleeping past noon, and I have no idea what I will do for my gig. My inability to rise early, my lack of discipline, my self-sabotage seems to assure my place in the world of mediocrity. In grad school, my acting teacher accused me of having a "fear of success" and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. Apparently, he was right.

As I observe my former elementary schoolmates achieve greatness - partners in law firms, entrepreneurs, advisors to presidents, loving parents - I flounder around in a day job that, despite my cool bosses and my own office, turns me to stone because it is not what I dreamed for myself. I remain single and nearly celibate. I am out of shape and soft in all the wrong places. I distract myself with television, late nights, internet surfing, stupid shit...

I want to: run the NYC marathon, get an agent, be in love again, love what I do, help someone else to achieve what they want, focus. Focus.

I am in a state of constant overwhelm and dissatisfaction. Just one step at a time, I try to chant. One step forward instead of sideways.

I Went Into the Maverick Bar - Gary Snyder

...SNYDER: The real work is becoming native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that this is really the continent we're on and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves developing a loyalty that goes back before the formation of any nation state, back billions of years and thousands of years into the future. The real work is accepting citizenship in the continent itself.

[from The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets by Bill Moyers. Ed. James Haba. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Public Affairs Television, Inc., and David Grubin Productions, Inc.]

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”

Make you feel my love

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love

When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love

I know you haven't made your mind up yet
But I would never do you wrong
I've known it from the moment that we met
There's no doubt in my mind where you belong

I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue
I'd go crawling down the avenue
There ain't nothing that I wouldn't do
To make you feel my love

The storms are raging on rolling sea
And on the highway of regret
The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain't seen nothing like me yet

There ain't nothin' that I wouldn't do
Go to the ends of the earth for you
Make you happy make your dreams come true
To make you feel my love

Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video

Just vote. Vote. Get others to vote.

Eli Wallach

...Well, there's a strange bonding that goes — that takes place in the theater. Once the curtain goes up, you're on your own. In a movie, they can — if you yawn, they can take the yawn and put it wherever they want. There are usually six or seven writers in a film so that you're getting different food. In a play, the writer — on Broadway, the writer is king. You can't change a word. You do a play by Tennessee Williams, you can't ad-lib. You have to say what he says. It's interesting that the play this year was written in 1852 by Turgenev. And it was one of the best shows on Broadway with Alan Bates and Frank Langella. They both won Tonys. So I like the plays. However, I get on a bus now, and people say to me, "Oh, oh, how are you — ooh.” And then they whistle the music from "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly." I'll tell you, if you want to know about fame, the most mail I ever get now is from one episode I did of “Batman.” I played Mr. Freeze...

... It was an half-hour episode, and I got $350. Two years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger played Mr. Freeze and got $20 million. So I said to my wife, "I spent my life in the theater. You know, I get $350, and he gets $20 million.” She said, "Lift weights.” So that was the way.

[From a June 5, 2002, interview taped in New York, conducted by Ken Paulson.]

Palin Jazz

Henry Hey set music to Sarah - fantastic.

Thanks to John Pizzarelli for the forward. (And go see John and Jessica Molaskey perform at The Carlyle - this is the last couple of weeks! )

Dick Cavett - Column in New York Times

Anger Mismanagement

I just watched the two candidates at the Al Smith dinner on YouTube.

What a strange and disorienting experience it is to see the bitter rivals laughin’ and scratchin’ and gigglin’. Both had good gags, good writers and, for non-comics, good delivery. Both brought down the house; or in this case, the hotel.

It’s fun to watch the two men joking. Maybe the whole campaign should be done in jesters’ caps and bells, eliminating those possibly life-threatening rises in our blood pressure from yelling in rage at the TV screen. For a brief interval you can say to yourself that maybe this isn’t so serious after all.

If only that were true. The laughter will be quickly forgotten, and sniping resumed.

Nothing could have convinced me a few days ago that I could find myself laughing at (and with) and liking John McCain. For moments on end. The distance between the Al Smith/Letterman McCain and the debates McCain is, to me, both vast and puzzling. And two people.

In the same way a badly adjusted set of binoculars gives you two overlapping images, the two McCains don’t come together for me. It must be frustrating for his handlers to be unable — due to some internal blockage in the candidate — to get the amiable self onstage instead of the less palatable one who shows up for debates and now-hollered speeches.

Because the one is affable, funny, and handles himself skillfully before an audience.
The once seemingly genial John has appeared less frequently of late. John Number Two is a remnant; the snappish, scowling sour husk of the man I could once see myself voting for. (But as Hamlet put it, “And now, how abhorred in my imagination it is.”)

Now someone has actually tallied Sen. John’s eye blinks in that last debate, coming up with a total that runs into four figures beyond normal. Sometimes they come in rapid flurries, leading to the thought that between his blinks and her winks he may never have seen Sarah Palin.

Laughs aside, unfortunately, I realized during the last debate that watching the two of them together on the screen I would think anyone, even a non-lip-reading, non-English-speaking viewer with the sound off, could see at a glance which man is presidential.

Partly because the word “angry” is so often applied to McCain these days, I decided to read up a bit on anger. And it made me mad.

At myself, I mean. Because I have a goodly portion of it in me, and reading about it has shown me how dangerous it can be. Over the years I’ve seen articles with titles like “Getting Angry Can Kill You,” and sick-making cute titles like “Your Ticker Wants You to Be Glad, Not Mad.” I have now read one too many.

It comes as a sort of relief that, according to the experts on anger, we can often blame this, too, on our parents.

One authority, a Ph.D. professor with the fun-to-say title of — hold onto your hats — “behavioral epidemiologist” (would the old “What’s My Line?” panel have ever gotten that one?) says that “children who are angry often come from families where there is a lot of punitive blaming, a lot of high emotion and anger expressed.” This, he says, happens when adults take things personally rather than simply recognizing that the kid is just being a pain in the posterior nether regions. (Not the prof’s exact words.)

The scarier stuff on anger is the evidence of what it can do to your vitals. I know full well that I am laying down deadly plaques in my arteries when enraged: as when you’re late and the cab driver lets other cars in ahead of you — causing you the acute pain of sitting through a green light while the cars he let in glide into the distance — all the while murmuring and nattering into his cell phone in no known language.

Similarly, although I like most women, I can momentarily loathe them all. Irrationally, of course. As when I, late for something, am hurrying along the sidewalk and one gets in front of me with a hairdo too wide for peripheral vision.

As I try to pass, she diabolically wanders left and right, blocking me on both sides, over and over. Defeated by her coif, I even get mad fantasies involving a pair of hedge shears. (Harpo would produce them from his coat and make short work of those hirsute blinders.)

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve. Then, just as we angerable folks sigh with relief in reading this, there comes a vivid technical description of how our major snits can lead to heart disease, diabetes and “other major health problems.”

Like, perhaps, the irritating one of getting smashed in the face with a Coke bottle by the object of your anger?

A cause of anger you, reader, might identify with could be people who promise something in their column that they fail to deliver.

Remember that test a good ways back that was said to show how ill-informed and poorly educated America’s young folk are? (Perhaps, like me, you have small reason to dispute this. A youthful graduate of the esteemed Bowdoin College recently asked a friend of mine who wondered how he’d liked “The Iliad,” “Is that the one about ancient Rome?”) A natural philosopher of my acquaintance, Charles Roos — a computer expert by trade — supplied me with the following. The funny thing: this smugly erudite test makes a mistake. It claims Ralph Ellison wrote “The Invisible Man.” Ahem. Ralph Ellison did indeed write “Invisible Man,” but “The Invisible Man” was H.G. Wells.

I have a long list of things that make me mad. Maybe if you send me some of yours, we can have some fun, laugh and save our hearts, if not minds. And I promise to never once use that mimsey little junior high newspaper interviewer’s inevitable phrase: “pet peeve.” I flustered one once by telling her my pet peeve was nuclear war.

I have room for a few more of mine:

Paper cuts.

Weathermen who can’t pronounce “meteorologist” and say “meter-ologist.” These same ones have never noticed that the word “Arctic” has two c’s and so should their “Ant-ART-ic.”

Oldsters who still say “President ROOZA-velt.” (Why? No more excuse than for saying “Lyndon JENson.”)

The waiter who, when you are late and want the check, vanishes to another country.

This one deserves caps: “AOL HAS UNEXPECTEDLY QUIT.” (Remove the “Un” and you have the galling truth.)

Men’s shirts without a pocket.

The President.

Wrong boyz

I know I haven't been writing as often as I should.... I'm trying to figure out if it is laziness, burn-out, day-job work load, or my increasing crankiness over the presidential campaign and my unwillingness to blog about it - for fear of seeming like a crochety ole shouty lady. I'm not performing stand-up, which makes me crabby as well, and I am feeling somewhat - how do I put this politely - uh, in need of someone in close proximity to my body on a regular basis. It would be nice to have a dude hangin' around. Lately, I've been having dreams of past loves - the most recent dream was sprinkled with an old flame's contagious laughter. Just hearing from him recently got my damn memory-machine all overheated and, of course, he's married. Like Peggy says on Mad Men, "Why do I pick the wrong boys?"

Yes, yes, I know why. No need to psychoanalyze, I've paid someone very well to do just that. But with my newfound awareness, my shedding of a teeny bit of extra flesh, my shrink-lightened baggage compartment, I guess I thought my radar would be newly callibrated and I'd find the feller for me. No such luck. I can't seem to escape my past - and I must say, I've been lucky to meet one or two wonderful gentlemen in my younger years. These gentlemen stay inside my brain, my heart, my fascia, and as the days and months of solitude go by, it becomes more and more difficult shake the feeling that I may never again meet a guy that rocks my world in the same way.

Listen, I do revel in my independence. I celebrate my singlehood every day, I assure you. But, damn, it'd be nice to have someone's hand to hold.

Hymn of Not Much Praise for New York City - by Thomas James Merton

When the windows of the West Side clash like cymbals in the setting sunlight,
And when wind wails amid the East Side’s aerials,
And when, both north and south of thirty-fourth street,
In all the dizzy buildings,
The elevators clack their teeth and rattle the bars of their cages,
Then the children of the city,
Leaving the monkey-houses
of their office-buildings and apartments,
With the greatest difficulty open their mouths, and sing:
“Queen among the cities of the Earth: New York!
Rich as a cake, common as a doughnut,
Expensive as a fur and crazy as cocaine,
We love to hear you shake
Your big face like a shining bank
Letting the mad world know you’re full of dimes!
”This is your night to make maraccas out of all that metal money
Paris is in the prison-house, and London dies of cancer.
This is the time for you to whirl,
Queen of our hopped-up peace,
And let the excitement of your somewhat crippled congas
Supersede the waltzes of more shining
Capitals that have been bombed.
“Meanwhile we, your children,
Weeping in our seasick zoo of windows while you dance,
Will gobble aspirins,
And try to keep our cage from caving in.
All the while our minds will fill with these petitions,
Flowering quietly in between our gongs of pulse.
These will have to serve as prayers:
“ ‘O lock us in the safe jails of thy movies!
Confine us to the semiprivate wards and white asylums
Of the unbearable cocktail parties, O New York!
Sentence us for life to the penitentiaries of thy bars and nightclubs,
And leave us stupefied forever by the blue, objective lights
That fill the pale infirmaries of thy restaurants,
And the clinics of thy schools and offices,
And the operating-rooms of thy dance-halls.
“ ‘But never give us any explanations, even when we ask,
Why all our food tastes of iodoform,
And even the freshest flowers smell of funerals.
No, never let us look about us long enough to wonder
Which of the rich men, shivering in the overheated office,
And which of the poor men, sleeping face-down on the Daily Mirror,
Are still alive, and which are dead.’ ”

Ukulele Orchestra of GB - Shaft

And Now For Something Completely Different....

Sarah "six-pack" Palin - just a regular gal for 'mongst the hoity-toity Washington elite

"...Oh, I think they’re just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying you know what? It’s time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that’s kind of taken some people off guard, and they’re out of sorts, and they’re ticked off about it, but it’s motivation for John McCain and I to work that much harder to make sure that our ticket is victorious, and we put government back on the side of the people of Joe six-pack like me...."

09-30Hugh-Palin.mp3

Paul Newman - The final summation from "The Verdict", screenplay by David Mamet, directed by Sidney Lumet

[Frank is giving his summation to the jury]

Frank Galvin: You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true." And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time, we become dead... a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims... and we become victims. We become... we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law. But today you are the law. You ARE the law. Not some book... not the lawyers... not the, a marble statue... or the trappings of the court. See those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are... they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion, they say, "Act as if ye had faith... and faith will be given to you." IF... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And ACT with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.

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" ...as Putin - rears his head - and, ah, comes into the airspace of the United States of America - where do they go? It's Alaska, it's just, right over the border...."

Sweet lord I just want to wrap my arms around her and whisper in her ear "Shhhhhhh. Shhhh. Quiet now. Just, please, be quiet. Stop. Go home. Please, just go home and do something else with your life while you still have a shred of dignity left...."

Can you see the little piggies....

Image by Ewing Galloway (1881 – 1953) ALLPosters.comTuesday, September 23, 2008 - 2:48 PM PDT
CEO pay: What those involved in the financial meltdown made

East Bay Business Times
by Mike Sunnucks and Chris Casacchia

As Congress considers a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street and the banking sector, there are calls to restrict the pay and severance packages for CEOs at investment houses, banks and mortgage lenders poised to be benefit from the plan put forward by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

Executives from some of the major investment and commercial banks involved in the financial upheaval and bailout earned hefty paychecks last year, according to proxy statements outlining their salaries, bonuses and stock options:

Lehman Brothers Chairman and CEO Richard Fuld Jr. made $34 million in 2007. Lehman (OTC: LEHMQ) filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection earlier this month.

Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), which Sunday gained Federal Reserve Bank approval to become a bank holding company, paid its chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, $70 million last year. Co-Chief Operating Officers Gary Cohn and Jon Winkereid were paid $72.5 million and $71 million, respectively.

American International Group’s chief executive, Martin Sullivan, got a $14 million compensation package in 2007. He was ousted in June. The insurance giant (NYSE:AIG) is on the receiving end of an $85 billion federal bailout. Edward Liddy took over as AIG’s chief executive earlier this month.

Morgan Stanley Chairman John Mack earned $1.6 million. Chief Financial Officer Colin Kelleher got a $21 million paycheck in 2007. Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) also received approval to become a banking holding company, a shift that allows Morgan and Goldman to bring in bank deposit assets which offer more-solid financial footing.

Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain was paid $17 million in salary, bonuses and stock options in 2007. Merrill (NYSE: MER) is being acquired by Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC).

BofA CEO Kenneth Lewis earned $25 million in 2007.

JP Morgan Chase & Co. Chairman and CEO James Dimon earned $28 million in 2007. Chase (NYSE: JPM) acquired troubled investment house Bear Stearns earlier this year with the federal government promising to take on as much as $30 billion in Bear assets to help get the deal done.

Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd received $11.6 million in 2007. His counterpart at Freddie Mac, Richard Syron, brought in $18 million. The federal government announced earlier this month it was taking over the mortgage backers with Herbert Allison to serve as Fannie CEO and David Moffett the new CEO at Freddie.

Wachovia Corp. Chairman and CEO G. Kennedy Thompson received $21 million in 2007. He was succeeded by Robert Steel as CEO in July. Steel is slated to get a $1 million salary with an opportunity for a $12 million bonus, according to CEO Watch. Wachovia (NYSE: WB) is one of the banks that could be sold in the midst of the financial crisis.

Seattle-based Washington Mutual (NYSE: WAMU) will pay its new CEO, Alan Fishman, a salary and incentive package worth more than $20 million through 2009 for taking the helm of the battered bank, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.

CEOs of large U.S. corporations averaged $10.8 million in total compensation in 2006, more than 364 times the pay of the average U.S. worker, according to the latest survey by United for a Fair Economy. In 2007, the CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company received, on average, $14.2 million in total compensation, according to The Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. The median compensation package received was $8.8 million.

The Puget Sound Business Journal, a sister publication, contributed to this story.

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Art Imitates Life - Dance a Little Sidestep

Augh. Our Presidency, our candidates - it's all a goddamn musical comedy....

"There are times, believe it or not, when policy makers actually need to, like, work on making policy,"

President Bush walking out to make a statement outside the White House in Washington on Thursday. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated Press)

Bush addresses Wall St. crisis - briefly

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Published: September 18, 2008

WASHINGTON: On Thursday, the president spoke.

It was brief, just two minutes. His brow was furrowed, and his words were careful: "The American people can be sure we will continue to act to strengthen and stabilize our financial markets and improve investor confidence." Then, having imparted no specifics, he once again slipped out of sight.

In the increasingly surreal world of the White House, the appearance was a sign that all pretense of normalcy is gone. All week long, with Wall Street engulfed by what analysts are calling the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, President George W. Bush had mostly stayed out of sight, except when trying to maintain the façade of business as usual. To be sure, other presidents - most recently Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton - have been careful about what they say in public when Wall Street is in turmoil.

But by all outward appearances, Bush has been reduced this week to almost a bit player in his own government, as Washington has reoriented itself away from the White House and toward the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke.
On Monday, as Americans absorbed the news that the venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers had been wiped out, Bush received John Kufuor, the president of Ghana, at the White House. The sun-dappled South Lawn was awash in color that morning, as a full military honor guard and Revolutionary fife and drum band marched across the grass, entertaining the leaders before they exchanged the customary pleasantries.

"Your tenure has been full of events and challenges, some very mind-boggling and hair-raising," Kufuor told Bush, raising more than a few eyebrows. "You are a survivor," the Ghanaian leader told the American president. "And my hope is that history would prove kinder to you."

That evening, after the Dow industrials had plunged 500 points, Bush, his wife Laura and more than 100 of their guests dined on Maine lobster and ginger-scented lamb during a state dinner in the African leader's honor. Then, in their tuxedoes and ball gowns, they repaired to the Rose Garden to watch actors from Disney's "The Lion King" perform a medley of songs under the cool, dark Washington sky.

On Tuesday, with the insurance giant AIG headed for disaster, Bush flew to Texas to inspect hurricane damage. As he flew over the devastation in his helicopter, Marine One, a press helicopter following him adjusted its flight path to allow photographers on board to capture the image of Bush's chopper in perfect alignment with the wreckage below.

On the ground in Galveston, Bush met behind closed doors with state and local leaders, and emerged surrounded by a crowd of them, holding the hand of Galveston's mayor, Lyda Ann Thomas, as he walked past television cameras that his aides kept a safe distance away.
"Mr. President!" a reporter shouted. "What are you going to do about AIG?" Bush looked straight at the cameras and kept walking as he shouted back.
"We're here talking about the people of Galveston, Texas," he said. "They've got a great mayor, and they're working hard."

And so it went, until Thursday, when it became clear that Bush would have to show himself to the public, after the White House press corps had begun agitating to know just what, precisely, the president was doing.

The day earlier, Bush had kept up another seemingly ordinary schedule: separate meetings with General David Petreaus and the president of Panama, hosting the annual White House Iftaar dinner, in honor of American Muslims.

"There are times, believe it or not, when policy makers actually need to, like, work on making policy," his press secretary, Dana Perino, explained.

But by 11 p.m., the White House put out the news that Bush would no longer spend Thursday traveling to Alabama and Florida, where he had planned to attend two Republican fund-raisers and, in Alabama, to tour a facility that converts sewage and other waste to energy. Instead, he huddled inside the White House and emerged just after 10 a.m. to explain himself: "I've canceled my travel today to stay in Washington, where I will continue to closely monitor the situation in our financial markets, and consult with my economic advisers."