The President's Lady

In election season I probably get 10-20 political solicitations a day, most of which are deleted immediately. But once in a while I glance through something from MoveOn, or the President, or a petition forwarded by some friend. Michelle Obama is not only the Mistress of the White House, but a Mistress of Messaging too. (Tea Partyers and racist Repugs, that word has several meanings other than the one making you salivate.)

Some days you just gotta go with the flow. This is what I emailed to Obama headquarters a while ago:

Hello... Whoever.

I realize Mrs. O will never read this, but I just made a small donation, and decided I might also vent a bit. I am one of the many disappointed liberal/progressive/very-anti-corporate, displeased-with-Demos-too worker bees who fill this land of the fraud, home of the brazen chicaners and banksters. I wouldn’t vote for a Righty Repugnant if I were on fire and he was right (of course!) there holding a bucket of water in one hand and a fire-retardant blanket in the other!

Yet of course I am exaggerating. There have been many decent members of the GOP in the past, those fiscally conservative, Midwest-styled Moderate men and women who are so sorely lacking today—the House full of trash and the Senate full of aristocratic refuse(rs). So we elected a fine man, a prof and orator who sort of rose from the streets... but who turned out to be badly advised (by old boy insiders who should have been ostracized), or ineffectual, or too aloof from the fray for too long. Yes, the President has been trapped by economic Fate, battered and obstructed and subjected to racist vilification. But he hasn’t really fought back either; he seems intent on just holding the moral high ground and keeping the dirt off his hands and still-buttoned shirt sleeves.

You of the campaign, using the First Lady again, mailed out a splendid family photo along with the usual plea for support. This note (plus donation made) is in answer to the long letter and photo caption ostensibly written by Mrs. Obama. She makes reference to the magic words of campaigns everywhere: “real and lasting change.” A year into the first term I too pondered that phrase, and I dreamed up a nice-looking t-shirt that I gave to friends and strangers alike; it showed a giant buffalo nickel encircled by these words: “I voted for real change, not nickel-and-diming.”

And here are a couple of excerpts from the credo statement I wrote to hand out with the t-shirt; sadly they’re still pertinent today:

“...We’re trapped in this Grim Regression, praying for a Progressive President to arise—not retreat or appease—an F.D.R. full of stubborn spirit, a leader burning with the fire of M.L.K. and the hard grit of L.B.J., active and involved rather than aloof and above the fray, a scrapper who’ll kick ass, not kiss it, who’ll chop the neo-cons and turncoat ’dogs and conman Republican’ts right off at the knees!

“Over the past 30 years, Reaganomics and misbegotten corporation-funded administrations have ruined manufacturing, devastated the unions, outsourced the nation, and decimated the middle class...

“It’s time. No more pharma liars and Goldman Sachs cheats, feckless conniving Supremos and ‘best Congress money can buy.’

Yes, we backed a brilliant orator who brought us this far, but now we need an arm-twister and angry do-er... an activist President who stands with us and for us!”

I don’t think I’m the only worn-down citizen who feels this, even while continuing to vote Democrat. So please, Mrs. Obama, if you do see this note—on behalf of all us confused and disaffected--give the President a hug and a kiss and, please, a whole lot more gumption.

All best regards, Ed Leimbacher

* * * *
Some reading this may recall that ailing poet Robert Frost tried to read a new poem at Jack Kennedy’s inauguration, but had to settle for reciting his classic “The Gift Outright” instead… which states midway, “Something we were withholding made us weak…” But our embattled President actually reminds me of a different Frost work. If I may wax fanciful, he stands on the verge of the ocean of our nation’s problems, but so far seems unwilling to do more than wade the shallows, “neither out far nor in deep”—when he needs to jump in with both feet and swim hard for the horizon, ignoring sharks and storm-surge and other struggling swimmers, if he really wants to save himself and his beautiful family and the rest of US from drowning.

(Photo copyright Luke Sharrett and The New Yorker.)

Gil: Still Cool

Gil Evans, the brilliant, self-effacing, stubbornly dedicated arranger/composer, died in 1988, but admirers of his recordings and students of his amazing re-imaginings of other composers’ work, whether Tchaikovsky’s “Arab Dance” or Parker’s “Donna Lee” for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra; Gershwin’s “Summertime” or Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for Miles Davis; Weill’s “Bilbao Song” or the Willie Dixon Blues-assembly known as “Spoonful” (and howled by the Wolf) for Gil’s own bands--or for that matter his famous tunes like “La Nevada,” “Flute Song,” “Hotel Me” (with Miles), “Zee Zee,” “Las Vegas Tango”—marked the Evans Centennial on May 12th of this year. And they… I should say we, because I am one and we are many… we have great cause for celebration.

One of our number, a young composer named Ryan Truesdell, protégé of composer/bandleaders Bob Brookmeyer and Maria Schneider and sometime Jazz musician, was curious about one long-lost work of Gil’s, inquired about it to the Evans family, was given access to great heaps of paper (scattered across the U.S.) representing Evans’ accumulated life’s work, and gradually found a treasure trove of unknown arrangements, some never used, others played but unrecorded and forgotten, from the five decades of Gil’s life in Jazz.

Ryan searched for all the elements for 15 or 20 of the more intriguing, found nearly every chart for those arrangements, and then applied to the ArtistShare program, which helps musicians raise the money for projects adjudged worthwhile, and which also provides a shared-ownership record label to present the results. But most of the production money comes from fans of each artist, who are invited to “participate” at contribution levels ranging from the price of a single CD up to several thousand dollars. (More about that below.) Among previous ArtistShare successes are award-winning albums by Maria Schneider, Jim Hall, Bob Brookmeyer, Pat Metheny, the Clayton Brothers, and other less familiar names.

With this Evans hundredth-year project, simply titled Centennial, the combination of splendid subject, important discoveries, applicant’s proven experience (and connections), and willingness of Evans fans to cough up some serious money carried the day; and so last fall Truesdell assembled a modern Evans-styled orchestra made up of New York’s top Jazz band musicians (including a few who had played for Gil), and they recorded ten of the best or most interesting arrangements, with pride of place, the opening track on the terrific resulting album, given over to “Punjab”--the missing tune that began Ryan’s unplanned quest--revealed as quintessential Sixties Gil, a wandering and wailing (piano and alto sax, respectively), 14-minute, tabla-driven journey, past Bangalore and the Hindu Kush to regions unknown… or, if I exaggerate, just think of an open window with a view of the richly exotic East, and then look beyond. (That tabla, by the way, was Truesdell’s own shrewd addition to the Evans arrangement.)

Complexity and a sheath of eerie dissonance mark Gil’s revision and extension of Kurt Weill’s “Barbara Song,” the ten-minute earlier version of which had appeared on the Individualism album. But Gil revisited and re-arranged it for a 1971 Berlin concert of his compositions; allowing for plenty of the Evans-patented, unresolved, hovering chords, the new version also leads to a more driven and insistent second half. Truesdell in turn has allowed the “Orkester Neo-Gil” (I made up the name) to wind and find its own way, like an Evans band of the later Seventies, through colors and silences and drifting solos, and with a vibraharp guiding the arrangement--in place of the original’s startling piano cues and Wayne Shorter’s haunted, lyrical tenor--providing a musical spine that seems to rattle a bit like the skeleton-ribs vibes in some Thirties b&w cartoon. (Anyone confused by that sentence, mea culpa, and be assured that the resulting 12 minutes of “Barbara” may well be the CD’s piece de l’existence.)

There are many other gems here—a beautiful expansion of “The Maids of Cadiz,” once a trim highlight of Miles Ahead; three delicate but craftily constructed vocal tidbits, two meant for Thornhill and the third for Astrid Gilberto years later, plus a peripatetic fourth chart maybe played by both Tommy Dorsey and Les Brown (think of all these as small steps on the path of a scufflin’ arranger); a three-tune Evans medley, a melange of meandering melodies meant to nudge his players into leading from within; plus the late-evening chart that Brookmeyer remembered playing during his brief time with Thornhill's band, and that he recommended Ryan track down as well. (It was “How About You.”)

All the tracks merit further attention, but I want to discuss participating in ArtistShare instead… because I did.

I had purchased direct from the organization some excellent CDs by Schneider and Hall, so I received email notice of the Evans/Truesdell project, with an invitation to help make it happen. “Wow,” I thought. “…If I only had the money.” As the saying goes, Be careful what you wish for…

A day or two later, I heard from my friend Ken Wiley, radio station KPLU’s Sunday afternoon deejay, playing the whole history of Jazz for 30-plus years now. Ken wanted me to help him sell some duplicate Mosaic-label box sets on eBay. (He proudly owns no computer.) I’d have done it as a favor, but he insisted on splitting the money on any sales made. Long story short, the collectors were buying; Ken made out like a band leader, and I fell into a first chair spot. Suddenly I had some discretionary money. I hemmed and hawed and then went ahead, sending the cash for a Bronze-level participation.

Each project sets its own definitions for rewards and, I suppose, light responsibilities—for example, buttonholing other fans to contribute or to join. The Evans project so far has posted well over a hundred videos, downloads, interviews, caches of session photos, rough mixes, reports from Ryan, and more—all available to participants only (but that includes single CD buyers too). Each of us also received a Signed copy of the Evans biography by Stephanie Stein Crease, and one or two peripheral notices from Ryan. Also per the system, the big-bucks Silver or Gold-level participants might be invited to recording sessions or club dates; and all of the "metal" bearers have their names listed prominently on the elaborate double-fold digipak (which also comes with separate burnt-umber booklets housing Ryan’s informative liner notes and session-musician photos). Altogether, First Class treatment and a First Rate experience… and with Gil Evans involved, one can claim to be contributing, however slightly, to the serious History of Jazz.

Meanwhile the Centennial disc keeps spinning and gleaming. Chords hover and solos turn sharply. Trombones bark and trumpets sound, saxes swirl and woodwinds moan. There’s tuba and tabla, bass clarinet and clarion bass, horns a-French and flutes afloat, oboes ever and—oh, man—all over his drum kit, the great Lewis Nash. Ryan conducts with assurance, Frank Kimbrough channels Gil at the piano, altoist Steve Wilson hard-charges inside and out-... and together they transport the band from the lost history behind to the Free Territory ahead.

Spread the word, shout it out, write it on the walls:

Evans Unearthed… Gil Lives.

Under Reconstruction

Uh, that would be me, not the website. I figured this silence might be deafening someone, or at least defining me not as I would like to be known. So here's an interim dispatch from the front... or, I should say, from a region of the body politic further south:

The pinched-nerve pain persists, in the lower back and elsewhere. Makes focussing difficult. I nod off at the keyboard from pain meds and can't sit for long comfortably, anyway. But I'm hopeful nonetheless. Some days are better than others, and I'll soon be getting a cortisone shot in the lumbar part of my spine.

Meanwhile, during this unwanted break I'm actually working on three different mini-essays at once, so there are new posts on a Jazz celebration, a cult film, and a slide guitarist all looming.

As Ahnold accidently threatened, "Ah'll be Bach." (My, my. Imagine all those Messes and Fugs, Gould-plated yet, if it were so.)

It's Turk to Me

“YOHHHG-JIAH! YOOHHHHGG-JI-AHHH!”

That was one of many street cries we’d hear—some daily, some less frequent; some intruding through the curtained glass-wall front, straight into our second-floor apartment, but others faint and far off like a distant train whistle.

We were living in Turkey then—it was the mid-Fifties—in the old, old Aegean coastal city known as Smyrna for well over three thousand years, one of Christianity’s original “Seven Churches of Asia (Minor),” with another, Ephesus, just down the road. In 1900, say, the city was still a generally peaceful mix of young Turks migrating from the dusty countryside; longtime resident Greeks, many of them well-to-do merchants; and a small colony of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain hundreds of years before.

But in the post-Ataturk nation--more secular, with most Arabic connections denied, and a new Westernized Turkish alphabet and language created--the city’s name had been modernized by deleting the end syllable and adding a new beginning (was it perhaps symbolic?), creating the harsher-sounding urban destination “Izmir.”

The population for this major seaport city, spreading out from a sweeping crescent of harbor, was already around 300,000 by then, but has since expanded explosively to four million and counting. The sounds and street shouts we heard are drowned in traffic noise now—a great clatter and clamor… fewer cries and whispers.

The called-out, cajoling offers of the horse-drawn carriage drivers (who occasionally came riding to the rescue of threatened young Americans) have given way to honking, tires-squealing taxicabs. The music drifting from windows and doorways sounds generic Western now, rather than harem-shrill Turkish or the haunted strains drawn from bluesy Greek rembetika. (Early singer Rita Abadzi was a Smyrna native.) Muezzins high in the minarets today need loudspeakers to call the

faithful to prayer, where their voices in older times, rising and falling rhythmically, were alone sufficient.

The old Bazaar, a dark, crowded maze of shops and stalls, coffee houses and blind alleyways, still exists, but now selling machine-made rugs and cheap gimcrack knockoffs from China instead of brass bells and camel saddles and coffee thick as sludge. The camel trains hauling trade goods are gone, and the beautiful pebble-front, two- and three-story apartment buildings—lost in the rush of Metro trains and a modern international airport, and the crush of massive eight-floor, Soviet-style housing blocs that push out in all directions.

Revisiting Izmir 30 years later in 1986, the only wandering street vendors I saw involved parked-all-day handcarts with young guys boredly hawking shishkebabs, or the Turkish equivalent of gyro wraps, or melting ice cream. Long gone, it seemed, were the whistling knife sharpener with his foot-pedal grindstone wheel, and the old man singing out his willingness to gather all your discarded books and newspapers, and the big-voiced vegetable seller busy letting everyone within a two-block radius know which fruits and vegetables were fresh that day and right there for sale on his produce-piled-high wagon pulled by a rough-and-ready horse.

My own favorite, back in the fondly remembered Izmir of the Fifties, was the peripatetic yoghurt seller, roaming the city with a heavy yoke on his shoulders and two big buckets dangling down, hollering out “YOOGGHHJIAH” and slower, stretched-out variations of the same. You could buy a small paper-cup’s worth or fill up your kitchen container, and the only flavoring came from a honey jar he carried along too. Rich, creamy, and with the honey, a treat nearly as special as ice cream…

So here we are today, going on three decades farther on, and the supermarkets and TV ads of the wider world tout, not just yoghurt, but specifically Greek yoghurt.

Huh? What makes this yoghurt Greek? The goats or cows or, I don’t know, penned sheep maybe, deliver the same milk wherever they are (barring agriculture conditions), and they don’t recognize national boundaries. In fact, I think they graze on any available grass-without-borders.

I also sampled and examined single-serving containers from a couple of different U.S. companies and found some data of interest. One offers Greek yoghurt (“Greek style,” they say) originating in Montlake Terrace, Washington; and another hails from New Berlin(!), New York. One calls itself “The Greek Gods” (Pomegranate represents

Apollo), while the other bears the distinctly non-Greek brand name Chobani. And if the Greeks do have a process for their word (extra straining to insure less liquid and more protein), the Japanese-sounding, German settlement, Greek-insistent product has 3g of Fat, 160 calories, and 14g of Protein, while the “stylin’” one’s same-size serving holds 17g Fat, 230 calories, and 6g Protein. (In comparison here’s a plain, unGreek yoghurt with 0g Fat, 120 calories, and 12g Protein; tastes just fine with a dab of honey.) Both brands offer a mild and tasty product enhanced by fruit flavoring, or some fruit jam in the bottom of the cup meant to be stirred up into the unflavored yoghurt.

Which of these is more faithfully, maybe poetically, Greek? It’s true that the Greek

people suffered occasionally when the Ottoman Turks ruled a vast, lazy, Eastern Mediterranean empire that included Greece--and then more certainly, murderously so, in 1922 when Ataturk’s army drove the Greeks residing in Izmir and elsewhere literally into the Aegean Sea. But the yoghurts of both lands are very much the same. Only paid company scientists and (m)ad men and women care to define (or invent) such specious claims.

Yoghurt from a streetseller in Izmir 50-some years ago vs. yoghurt sold in Seattle today? I suppose it's a wash, aside from advances in sterilizing and mass producing,

but my memory says different. That yoghurt cup you’re pretending makes for a yummy lunch? Well, it may be Greek to you, but it’s Turk to me.

But better yet might be the world remembering that yoghurt too is Gaian first. One world… one yoghurt.

* * * * *
It occurred to me today (three days post-post) that I missed a chance to more deftly make the point (split infinitive be hanged). So...

Insisting that Greek yoghurt somehow tastes better than Turkish is tantamount to claiming that Jewish olives grown "inside" the infamous barrier Wall taste better than Palestinian ones grown on the other side... when what the two sides really need is for one or the other to offer an olive branch.

Got Me in Its Spell

Some damn slice of Spam shows up on my computer almost daily, for a nothing called Magic Jack; never opened a message so I have no idea what that is, nor do I care. But that word “Magic” has been haunting my brain like the words to some familiar song.

As a result, lately I’ve been thinking and remembering… magic sets and birthday magic shows, a happy family staple of mid-20th century America; King Arthur’s mentor Merlin perennially revived in books and movies; Sinatra’s versions of “Witchcraft” and “That Old Black Magic”; Ingmar Bergman’s superb black-and-white film starring a youngish Max von Sydow as The Magician, and the recent, and decent, bit of full-color trickery called The Illusionist; innumerable novels of the world incorporating anything-may-happen “magic realism,” versus John Fowles’

creepy Greek Isles sojourn titled The Magus; the ubiquitous wizards and fannish wannabes brought together by mania for the Harry Potter saga and The Lord of the Rings; the inescapable illusions of Houdini and his modern-day descendants, the “Davids” and “Chrises” appearing and disappearing near us all.

Among the hundreds of references and memories circling in my brain, one stands starkly lit and alone, a late-Seventies television commercial. Ridiculous that such a thing can still command one’s attention (anything short of Kate Upton engulfing a burger, anyway!) 35 years later, but such is the case. And from that case, his special holding cell, comes the scary ventriloquist’s dummy of the thriller flick

simply titled Magic (starring Anthony Hopkins and Ann-Margret).

The dummy, in a tightening close-up of its neck and head, a continuous 30-second shot, mockingly intones a scary bit of verse, something along the lines of:

Corpses are blue,
Blood is red;
Magic is fun…
You’re dead.

Then the eyes roll up in its head, and End.

Whoa, Nelly! That one hit me straight on, and it was just as disquieting the few times I caught it again. But Magic the film pretty much stiffed, and the commercial vanished into the graveyard of dead TV spots. Yet the memory lingers on… (It’s possible that I’m misremembering the verse recited. In a 30-second You Tube upload the dummy practically smacks its lips saying, “Hocus pocus, We take her to bed; Magic is fun, We’re dead.” But I like my version better, seems more likely to have satisfied the television censors of 1978!)

Anyway, such were the forms of magic lurking in my head when I wrote this odd poem many years later…

Svengalied

She vanished me. Now you see

me nought. A mesmer’d man,
a cache of bewilderment, I was
convenience of coyntage only.

What began as parlor tricks—
my slide of hands upon her
sequined gown, and nothing
up my sleeve—became a mixed

preponderance, a legerdemain
of lust, and I masterfully mis-
directed. Pick a night, any
night, any night at all; feigned

rings linked, fingers palming
balls, miraculous escapes.
Found coin did multiply her
‘til she worked my enabling

cards with a consummate skill;
no one discerned the mage
in her rough magic… (Oh, teller
ensorcelled! Oh, Circean tale!)

For as I too quickly learned,
the trick is sold when the trick

is told. Wands become wilted
flowers; fair-color silks turn

mourning doves; and love dis-
appears up its own frayed rope
once the abracadabras have
all been said, and no rabbits

in the rigged hat remain. My
heart is black stone now
without illusions, much harder
words unpenned--who’d deny

such grievance?--as I saw my
self in half, my voice thrown
far, full past some dummy man-
drake’s raw unsevered cords.

* * * *
Hoist with his own petard? Maybe... so long as you know that petard does not mean "rope."

Chips, Grits, and Mother Wit

So-called “Reality TV shows” (real? Oh, really?) are considered a guilty pleasure by many of those who watch. Personally I find them cheap and tawdry, and an insult to participants and watchers alike. (Tromp the Donald! Too much American Idol makes idle Americans! Housewives, househusbands, re-unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains… and cable!)

Born of a Hollywood writers’ strike as I recall, they have now grown like a topsy-turvy set of Tribbles, and beneath all the interactive ballyhoo and brief celebrityhood lie a different sort of cheapening, and the cutting of work staff, and a domestic sort of outsourcing--a crafty thumbing of the nose at unions: “No need for all those expensive writers and theatrical directors and set builders; we’ll save a boatload by just paying the fools we

follow around.”

But I have my own guilty pleasure these days… the fictional, scripted, actual-actors weekly TV series called Hart of Dixie, about a darn-Yankee dame named Zoe Hart--a cute, too-clever-by-half doctor; a surgeon, even--who takes up residence in some near-Gulf Coast town between New Orleans and Mobile (approximately), eager to “fit in,” but too opinionated to accept the Southern characters as they are. (Zoe seems not to have learned the lessons of Reconstruction!)

That’s enough about the show. It’s intermittently funny and vaguely scenic (the cutaway shots, that is; the bulk of each episode is likely taped on a Hollywood set). I watch mostly because it reminds me of my mother and her rural Georgia family and upbringing; her occasional Southern-belle ways, too. Mom was vivacious and

beautiful, a heartbreaker no doubt, and she could be gracious or imperious, friendly or snippy, generous or mean--sometimes all of that in the course of a half hour in her usually charming company! She was moody, subject to migraine vapors, more Conservative than our Dad, the Illinois-born Air Force officer.

My sisters and I learned Emily Post manners and military deference, to show proper respect and to say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” and “Thank you,”and mean it. Home Ec. major Mom told us often that people in India were starving, so we cleared our plates, at the table and off to the sink afterwards. But the parents also raised us to think for ourselves, and then regretted it when all three children grew up to be Left radicals at college and forever after… They loved us, but weren't sure what to make of us.

But before that, we lived for a few years in parts of Texas, and we learned about border Mexican food long before mass immigration and excited tastebuds made "Cinco de Mayo" celebrants out of regular meat-and-potatoes Yankees. We

learned to eat all sorts of root vegetables and a good-for-you mess o’ greens too, spicy New Orleans cooking (“Where’s that dang Tabasco bottle?”) and both high and low on the hog, with special attention to fried okra and--of course--grits.

Crispy crawdads, better known as “Cajun popcorn”? Pshaw. Like mother’s milk to a budding Louisianan. Pecan pralines from some branded and candied pit-stop en route from Here’bouts to Over Yonder? As reg’lar as pees in a pot, and twice as salient. But grits…? Now, that’s the foodstuff that separates Rebs from Yanks, and cows from corn. In years

gone by, every restaurant across the South offered not bacon but ham and grits, usually with ham gravy called “red-eye” (I think), any time day or night.

You can still order the ham, but these days you might have to ask for the grits. In fact, North or South, I’m the only person I know who actually likes grits and eats them regularly--but at breakfast as a hot cereal, with butter, salt and pepper, Tabasco, and sometimes melting cheese. I guess the tiny soft core bit in a kernel of corn constitutes a single grit, but they make for a bowl of grits if you collect and steam enough of them. Grits have nothing to do with gumption or some other definition of “true grit,” of course, but newcomers still might have to grit their teeth

to consume a bowl!

Reading Black literature during college, I came on an expression in Ralph Ellison’s great and astonishing novel Invisible Man that instantly became part of my less polite vocabulary: a clever, no-account, shrewdly elusive survivor type was reckoned to be full of “shit, grit, and mother wit”—a tough, fast-talkin’ attitude buttressed by sharp native intelligence, and partly learned from one’s dear old mother, or a stand-in Mama like Dilsey in Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, who doesn’t just survive, but endures. (The Ellison and Albert Murray dust jacket photo relates in this way: “trading twelves” equals “doin’ the

[dirty] dozens”--that is, swapping elaborate crude insults, a verbal throw-down among streetwise hustlers full of sg&mw.)

One food fact our Mom claimed was that poor people worldwide, who couldn’t afford to eat meat much, have via accumulative wisdom learned to eat foods that combine to deliver protein to the body--beans and rice, beans and corn, other vegie combos. So as I was eating grits for breakfast the other morning, I had a vision for a means by which to enlighten the world to the pleasures of corn bits. Some flashy

high-end New Orleans or Tex-Mex restaurants should introduce the opening-salvo appetizer dish I’m calling “Chips, Grits, and Mother Wit.”

The recipe, should anyone care to experiment, requires a shallow casserole of grits, water, butter, salt, chopped onion and peppers (both the colorful sweet and gourmet varietal hot), topped by a mix of shredded cheddar and Mexican cojiba cheese, baked in the oven until bubbling and crusting

slightly, served straight from the stove with, not ordinary corn chips, but those dark, speckled-grain chips made more from Mexican beans than corn.

And that’s it, folks: good vegie protein--bringin’ the heat and the sweet corn grits, straight to your gullet and pleasure center. ("Grits ain't groceries"? Little Milton knew better.) Go on, take a dip!

Blue State Reds, Red State Blues

Isn't there something comically ironic about Right Wing states being "Red"? Which leaves the Lefty states to give you the Blues. But any adult person cognizant of history knows that the assigned colors in fact should be reversed. Maybe, but I did say "cognizant."

In this time of media-mogul control of the once independent and skeptical press, of search engines and social networks, wee speedy gadgets and short attention spans, even a partial working knowledge of history seems, if I may purloin a phrase, “a consummation devoutly to be wished." Yet any such possibility is rapidly receding into the past.

Wearing narrow-focus blinders tricked-up by evil terrorists, fighting hellishly expensive desert and mountain guerilla wars for which we are ill-equipped (no matter how spectacular our weapons and stalwart our soldiers), we are left with an economic Depression, a crumbling education system, a rising tide of random violence

everywhere, a stupid resist-all-taxes posture embraced by the rich and powerful (c’mon, you fools, these are just dues, the ordinary everyday dues you owe your country!)… and thus no money available for the nation’s needs. So in time-honored fashion (“Blame outsiders”) we now nurture a shameful animosity toward all immigrants.

Yet with so many streaming here from nations shaped by the former USSR, still we neglect the curious Putin puppet show enacted behind the tattered Rust Curtain--

with potentially hazardous developments reaching from the onion domes of Moscow to the steppes of Central Asia and the sub-zero wastes of Siberia. Did Reagan truly ring down the Iron Curtain? Or was it Gorbachev instead--and was he realist or dreamer? Or does the credit/blame actually belong to Stalin’s crazed policies starting back in the Thirties?

Who among the young of America now can discuss intelligently Hegel, Marx, the Manifesto, Communism vs. Socialism (that word the Republican’ts throw around so casually)? What about the Red and White Armies? Or Stalin outmaneuvering Lenin, Trotsky, and others, becoming the savage leader who killed more of his various peoples than the many millions of Jews, Romany, leftists, and others murdered by

the Nazis (that other word favored by our black President’s enemies)?

But enough. It’s easy for me to get wound up and start hollering these days. But... surprise! This latest addition to the blog is actually intended to house and introduce a love poem… or, rather, an out-of-love poem I wrote when my first marriage came to its bitter end, but couched in the language of the collapsing USSR, with lots of Iron Curtain wordplay and oblique historical references thrown in to keep things lively... suitable for another false Springtime in the Pacific Northwest.


Glasnost, with Fallen Angels

The thaw has breached us.
And now in our icebound Baltics
a certain freedom of movement strikes

the alders, as flights of rhetorical starlings
pursue their social revolutions.
Snow that lay like linen

now flows in rivulets
down the steps and sidewalks,
and dissident speech of crows marks

preparations for the May Day coming.
In all the withered-away reaches
of the state, suddenly

budding green workers arise,
throwing off the chains of mothering earth.
It is Progress of Spring all

over, again, the break-up of
our sovereign union, after the Fall

and Winter chill of years. In

this spirit of no love
and understanding, we brush aside
the dust of bitterness, shed

our heavy coats and, compromised,
walk carefully, negotiating each
step, taking the sun and air…

apart.

* * * * *
As I mentioned last week, a pinched nerve in my back is wreaking havoc. Blog posts will be more erratic than usual for the next few weeks. As a deejay friend is wont to say, Thanks for being out there.

I hope you choose to stay tuned.