11 Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean. From his present dissatisfaction man reasons that there was some catastrophic wreck in the past, before which he was happy; some golden age, some Garden of Eden. He also reasons that somewhere ahead lies a promised land, a land without conflict. Meanwhile, he is miserably en passage; this myth lies deeper than religious faith.

12 Seven men inhabit the raft. The pessimist, for whom the good things of life are no more than lures to prolong suffering; the egocentric, whose motto is Carpe diem – enjoy today – and who does his best to get the most comfortable part of the raft for himself; the optimist, always scanning the horizon for the promised land; the observer, who finds it enough to write the logbook of the voyage and to note down the behaviour of the sea, the raft and his fellow-victims; the altruist, who finds his reason for being in the need to deny himself and to help others; the stoic, who believes in nothing but his own refusal to jump overboard and end it all; and finally the child, the one born, as some with perfect pitch, with perfect ignorance – the pitifully ubiquitous child, who believes that all will be explained in the end, the nightmare fade and the green shore rise.

[continue reading…]

Trans Band (Berlin)1982 Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina, Bruce Palmer, Joe Lala, Joel Bernstein & Larry Cragg

Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Oh hello Mr. Soul I dropped by to pick up a reason
For the thought that I caught that my head is the event of the season
Why in crowds just a trace of my face could seem so pleasin’
I’ll cop out to the change but a stranger is putting the tease on

I was down on a frown when the messenger brought me a letter
I was raised by the praise of a fan who said I upset her
Any girl in the world could have easily known me better
She said you’re strange but don’t change and I let her

In a while will the smile on my face turn to plaster
Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster
For the race of my head and my face is moving much faster
Is it strange I should change I don’t know why don’t you ask her

Is it strange I should change I don’t know why don’t you ask her
Is it strange I should change I don’t know why don’t you ask her
Is it strange I should change I don’t know why don’t you ask her

“Written by Young after experiencing an epilepsy attack after an early show with Buffalo Springfield in San Francisco. Many people in the audience were questioning if it was part of the act. While being a patient at UCLA Medical Center, he wrote the song once he was awake and recovering and told to return for further tests. The lyrics reflected Young’s experience, feeling as though he was about to die. Thereupon, he was advised by his doctor to never take LSD or any other hallucinogenic drugs.“

Advice, I note, Mr. Young obviously ignored. . . [continue reading…]

Ballooning: Now and then.
I’m going with then.

[Now with 50% more memegif goodness for members at New American Digest ]

Look for the REAL Union Label: Union Labor – by Michael DC Bowen – Stoic Observations Obviously working class people are left high and dry with little to no serious consideration. They don’t code. They weld. They pour cement. They repair material things. They prepare meals. They dig in the dirt for ores and minerals and for growing plants. They tend animals. They have no such people like them in Congress. They are forgotten, belittled, besmirched. They depend on complete fool outsiders like Trump because they are desperate. The slightest amount of patriotic sentimentality gets them in their guts. Why? Because in their hearts they know that their grip on the wheels of commerce is what makes America function.

They know the geography. They know the infrastructure. They know the pipes and wires. They know the arteries and veins. They know the currents and tides. They know the woods and watersheds. They hump furniture up and down stairs. They peel potatoes by hand. They birth babies. They coach kids. They know that they are critical and they carry out their duties with all the care and dedication required. In silence. We pay them lip service as ‘the heart and soul of America’ and all the truck vendors and country singers give them a bit of glory. But they have all of the political influence of a homecoming queen.

I find American economic discussions extraordinarily complex. After all this is the largest, most diversified economy in human history. I tend to believe its inefficiencies are useful given how much we are money-driven rather than culturally sophisticated. We’d burn through every social convention to get paid if regulation didn’t slow us down. Just like gangta rappers do. So there are probably a dozen ways in which the re-establishment of union power in America might be stifled such that the above talk could be rendered useless and even wishful. Still, it is the most legitimate kind of power I can think of that would be directly beneficial to the ordinary Joe. If you’re political, ask what the right unions might do for all of us.

What do you know? Why don’t we have good, powerful unions?

Howard Pyle’s *The Mermaid* (1910) – The Public Domain Review There is something profoundly haunting about a master artist’s last painting left unfinished upon its easel, especially when that work has had such a powerful hold on the modern world’s imagination. Writing about Howard Pyle’s (1853–1911) The Mermaid in The Outlook less than a year after the artist’s death in Italy, a “Spectator” described the unfinished and unsigned painting “brought back from Florence”: heaving sea of iridescent blue and green, a cold moon, and slippery rocks, from which a mermaid siren, glittering, mysterious, alluring, winding her white arms about the young fisher-lad, was dragging him down, down, into the depths below of white lacing foam. But the painting did not travel with Pyle to Florence: it never left the artist’s atelier in Wilmington, Delaware.

and everything else too: The Head of Frankenstein

It looks to me like, in the US, the right is increasingly embracing the “punk rock”; the right is becoming the counterculture, the left is becoming the authority figure waggling its finger at those who misbehave. The right is the coalition rebel forces, the left is the empire. Given the history of countercultures, on the specific issues that the right is pushing back against the left’s authoritarianism – I expect the right to win. This particular fight has been swinging back and forth for decades now, even if, in retrospect, it is sometimes difficult to figure out who was who. Approximately: 30s-40s, leftist authoritarianism (Prohibition); 50s-60s, right authoritarianism (Nuclear family); 70-80s, left authoritarianism (Equal access media laws tearing down religious radio stations); 90-00s, right authoritarianism (Anti-atheism); 10-20s, left authoritarianism (many names).

The Buying Mania for Old Songs Has Come to a Sudden and Ugly End Consider the case of Hipgnosis, the British investment fund that took the lead in this buying mania. The fund was launched in 2018 with the promise that old songs were “a better investment than oil or gold,” according to the Financial Times. Hipgnosis eventually raised more than a billion dollars, and during their first year alone acquired rights to 5,000 songs. But that was just a start. By the end of 2021, this fund controlled a staggering 65,000 songs. Whether your tastes turn to Neil Young or the Chainsmokers or Barry Manilow, they control the songs the whole world sings. And Hipgnosis was so convincing in its advocacy for songs as investments, others with deep pockets decided to acquire vintage song acquire catalogs of their own. Even record labels, businesses that usually focus on new music, decided that it was now better to invest in oldies. But those rosy promises have failed to come true. As it turns out, oil and gold really are better investments than classic rock.

You’re still going to have to shoot sumbitches in the face, long past the point you’re sick of it, and they still won’t leave you alone, not ever, until there aren’t any of them left. Look at what happened in Rhodesia. Look at what’s going on in South Africa. Look at Israel. You can’t build the fences high enough to make people who want to kill you stop trying. And there’s no where left to run. You’ll have to hunt them down and exterminate them to bring that happy moment to fruition. Waiting for the knock at the door is planning to fail.

Following his Mouth-of-Hell speech last week, declaring war on half the country, “Joe Biden’s” prospects are dimming along with sclerotic circuits in his brainpan. The Party of Chaos is desperate to survive the midterm election. Therefore, look for them to grudge up an excuse to make them not happen. They need a “national emergency” and they’ll manufacture one if necessary. Wait for it. [continue reading…]

Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know
Within that smoke their ash still falls as snow,
To settle on our flesh like fading stars
Dissolve into sharp sparks at break of day.

At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the flight of fire into steel,
The shaking not of subways underground,
But screams from inside flowers made of flame.

We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in death’s ballet
Too far removed to hear their falling cry.

By noon that band of smoke loomed low
Upon the harbor’s skin and made us gasp;
A hand of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its lethal grasp.

The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Who’d screaming run beneath the paws of death,
Like dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
If they lived in light or only for a breath.

They’d writhed and spun within that storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the river’s further shore
No sanctuary other than despair.

The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
That marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver’d stood.

By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all of what could not be clean again.

We breathed that smoke that bent and crawled.
We learned to hate that smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go but not to go.

Within that city shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where our grief would best anneal.
Upon our walls and trees their faces loomed
To gaze at us from time beyond repeal.

Their last lost summer faded into ash.
Their faces faded into name scratched stones.
Our years flowed into endless desert seas
Where warplanes prowled in search of bones.

In time their smoke and ash became but words
In stories told at dinner, told by rote,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the “larger issues” were of note.

In time their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But still beneath clear plastic they endure
Reminding us that we have not escaped.

Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.

New York, NY- WTC heavy winds cause a wind swept dust storm around the ring of honor at the bottom of ground zero during the one year anniversary of the tragic event. 9/11/2002

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
— Christina Rossetti

10,000 FEARED DEAD
— Headline, New York Post, September 12, 2001

AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY I lived in Brooklyn Heights in, of course, Brooklyn. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24 of 1883 transformed the high bluff just to the south of the bridge into America’s first suburb. It became possible for affluent businessmen from the tip of Manhattan which lay just over the East River to commute across the bridge easily and build their stately mansions and townhouses high above the slapdash docks below. Growth and change would wash around the Heights in the 117 years that followed, but secure on their bluff, on their high ground, the Heights would remain a repository old and new money, power, and some of the finest examples of 19th and early 20th-century homes found in New York City.

When I moved to Brooklyn Heights from the suburbs of Westport, Connecticut in the late 90s, it was a revelation to me that such a neighborhood still existed. Small side streets and cul-de-sacs were shaded over by large oaks and maple that made it cool even in the summer doldrums. Street names such as Cranberry, Orange, and Pineapple let you know you were off the grid of numbered streets and avenues. Families were everywhere and the streets on evenings and on weekends were full of the one thing you rarely see in Manhattan, children.

Brooklyn Heights had looked down on Wall Street and the tip of Manhattan from almost the beginning. It hosted the retreat of Washington from New York City during the Battle of Long Island, the first major engagement of the Revolutionary War. To be in the Heights was to hold the high ground and all the advantages that position affords.

Brooklyn Heights today enjoys a kind of armed hamlet existence in New York. Outside influences such as crime, poverty, and ghetto life don’t really intrude. Since it has long been a neighborhood of the rich and the powerful of the city, it has been spared some of the more doleful effects of city life. It doesn’t have walls that you can see, but they are there, strong, high, and well guarded.

Traffic, that bane of New York life, is controlled in the Heights. To the west, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, once planned to cut through the Heights directly to the Brooklyn Bridge, was rerouted by a deft application of money and power; placed below along the harbor. To the east, all traffic coming off the Bridge is pushed along Cadman Plaza to Court Street and off to Atlantic. This forms the eastern border of the Heights whose edge is further delineated by the ramparts of Brooklyn City Hall, Courts of all flavors, and a rag-tag collection of government structures that exemplify the Fascist Overbuilding movement of the early 70s when, expecting ‘The Revolution,’ governments built towards gun-slits rather than windows. The south of the Heights is sharply drawn with Atlantic Avenue, a street given over to a long strip of fringe businesses and a corridor of Islamic-American mosques and souks and restaurants. The north is quite simply the Brooklyn Bridge and its approaches that shelter the now slowly evolving sector devoted to overpriced raw loft spaces and bad art known as DUMBO, for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.”

The best thing about the Heights is the Promenade. This is a long pedestrian strolling area that runs from Remsen on the south to Cranberry on the north end. It’s a brick walk high on the bluff above the Expressway below. Over the baroque railing, you can see far out into the harbor, beyond the Financial District and Wall Street on the tip of Manhattan, beyond the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to the distant silhouettes of the cranes and wharves on the Jersey Shore. You can see north up the East River past the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge to, maybe, the merest wisp of the Williamsburg Bridge. Across from the railings are a selection of gardens and backyards with water fountains and shaded benches. It is one of those hidden, off-to-the-side areas of respite that are secreted across all the seven boroughs of the city. You discover it by being taken to it by someone else who has already been there.

“The wind came when the pillar of fire became, in what seemed a moment outside of time, a pillar of smoke. We had been standing on the Promenade that morning in our thousands watching death rage at the center of a beautiful September morning. It was a morning with a clear and washed blue sky; the kind of rare New York morning when you can believe, again, that anything is possible in that city of dreams that so often dissolve into disappointment.

The Promenade is a fine place on any day but best on a Sunday afternoon when the weather is clear. Then you can stroll with your fellow citizens and catch a bit of the constant breeze or a bracing wind. Under most conditions, this wind is one of the best elements of Brooklyn Heights. Usually, you just take it for granted — as you do all the small mercies of life in New York City.

When the wind came from the south off the harbor those who lived on the Heights got to breathe the sea air first before the rest of the city had its way with it. And it usually did blow from the south even if there were days when it blew in from the west across the southern tip of Manhattan. At least, I think that it did on numerous days even if I only remember it from one.

I don’t remember the wind from that day because it blew hard and long. The winter, spring, and fall brought many blizzards and storms to the Heights with winds that would howl over the roofs and pulse in the chimney of my parlor floor apartment. In winter it would slam against the stones of the facade and rattle the windows while rolling snow so fine against the door that a dusty drift would work its way through the weather stripping and into the foyer by morning. [continue reading…]

THEN

NOW

The Tower of Voices, a roughly 93-foot-tall concrete and steel structure, contains a wind chime for each of the 40 passengers and crew members who were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, and represents the final phase of the Flight 93 National Memorial. Each chime will generate its own distinctive sound.

At the end of April in 2006 a couple of friends asked me to go with them to see “United 93,” but I declined both offers saying I wasn’t sure that I needed any reminders other than what I saw in New York on that day. In the end, though, I went to it as I went to the funerals, alone.

When people who were in New York on that day talk about it, it always seems to be focused on the day itself. Nobody talks much about the days and the weeks and the months that came after that day in New York City.

In a way, that’s understandable because what happened for days and weeks and months after was pretty much a slowly diminishing repeat of that day. Things got better, got back to the new “normal.” The wax from the candled shrines was scraped away, and in time — quite a long time actually — even the walls and fences full of fading flyers asking if you had seen one or the other of those we came to call “the missing” were gone.

Most of these ghastly portrait galleries were simply washed away by the snows and rains that followed that autumn day. Some were covered in long sheets of clear plastic duct-taped and sealed.

I pose you your question: “What would you do, an ordinary person in an extraordinary moment when life and death, good and evil, were as clear as the skies over America on September 11? “

It was as if somehow preserving them for a long as possible would in some way preserve the hope that those in the towers who had been turned to ash and dust were, somewhere, somehow, still merely missing. Some were even laminated and replaced more than once on a chain-link fence that ringed Ground Zero forming a patchwork of Kinkos-copied faces framed by wire and the hole in the sky. [continue reading…]

Note: I don’t remember how soon after 9/11 I saw this (or something very close to it) on the new and fresh WorldWideWeb. It would have been very soon after 9/11 — a week or two. At that time my day job was as the Vice-President in charge of Penthouse.com. As you can imagine it was, in those early much more innocent days, a popular paysite and it made a good deal of money for Penthouse.

At that time bandwidth was a very expensive part of putting a large site online and I bought bandwidth by the trainload.

At the same time, this was not a “video” but something made of coding called “Flash.” That made this video very very large and very expensive to have online for a private individual. I found the man who created this and hosted it and who was being rapidly impoverished by the bandwidth charges. Because I had “extra bandwidth” I took this on and the memorial was hosted by Penthouse right up until the time Penthouse crashed and burned a year and a half later. (It was purchased, ironically, by the hosting service that provided the bandwidth, later to be known as AdultFriendFinder.)

I hosted it because it was something I could do. In those days there was very little you could do, but what you could do you did.

[What follows is a slightly edited transcript of what I saw and how I felt on the 11th of September, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights in New York City. On that day I was posting to a West Coast Computer Conferencing system known as The Well. As a result, even though I was writing from Brooklyn Heights directly across the river from the Towers, the time stamp reflects PST. Real time is +3 hours.]

Tue 11 Sep 01 08:07

Saw the first tower collapse from the Promenade across the river in Brooklyn. Fine white and pale yellow ash everywhere. Lower Manhattan covered in smoke with ash still drifting down.

Military jets overhead every five minutes or so. [continue reading…]

Ashokan Farewell [HT: Howard Nelson]

“In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people…. find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.

“We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.

“We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.

“We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors.

“Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only to transmit these—the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

“How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is even now something of ill omen amongst us.

“I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country—the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice.

“This disposition is awfully fearful in any and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny.” – – Abraham Lincoln The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions

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He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
— Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

I’ve been trying to remember September 10, 2001, but it’s no go.

I know what I must have been doing, but I don’t remember what I did. I kept no notes on that most ordinary of September days. I kept many notes on the day that followed and the days, weeks, months and years that followed that day. What I do know is that whatever might have followed September 10 was taken from us all that day never to be returned or recaptured only avenged. What I do know is that “justice being served” has no part in it, and never did.

I can, of course, assume what I did — what I must have done — on a routine Monday in Brooklyn Heights. I would have gotten up and showered in my strange bathroom with half a tub. I would have dressed for work; maybe a white shirt and a tie and a suit. I would have walked a block and a half to the Clark Street Station and taken an elevator 11 floors beneath the surface of the earth, ridden a train deeper still under the East River, and gotten out at Penn Station, walked across the street and taken the elevator up to the eleventh floor, and worked my way through my day before repeating the journey back to Brooklyn Heights. I must have done those things and done them without knowing it would be the last time I would do them in a heedless fashion. It was just the pattern my life had come to in all the long New York years leading to September 10.

I can, of course, look and see what the nation and the world was concerned with on September 10. John O’Neil, the FBI’s leading counterterrorism expert was dining at Elaine’s Restaurant on the Upper East Side, and telling his fellow diners, “We’re due. And we’re due for something big. Some things have happened in Afghanistan….” O’Neill would be dead within 24 hours when the South Tower collapsed. On the same day, Iran denied, not for the first or last time, that it was trying to develop nuclear weapons. Down on Wall Street the Dow Jones index remained flat at the close of business and the New York Times wrote, not for the first or last time, of “the darkening economic outlook” while noting that most economists didn’t “anticipate a full-blown recession.” Overall the hottest news story in the nation concerned Michael Jordan’s pending return to professional basketball. The news that day was a case of the banal overshadowing the mundane.

It was against that background of works and days that the doors of history swung open and we all walked through them forgetting to ask, “What fresh hell is this?” [continue reading…]

Big Donut Drive-In, Los Angeles, ca. 1955
805 W. Manchester Boulevard

How Jim Heimann Got Crazy for California Architecture | Located in Inglewood, not far from the 405 freeway, the Big Donut is like any other drive-in donut shop, except that it has a 33-foot dunker attached to the roof. Towering over the traffic on W. Manchester Boulevard, the gunite-and-steel torus was erected in 1953 and quickly became a local landmark. “On any given Sunday, we’d just pile in the car and go for a ride. We’d just pull up, order the donuts, and drive through,” recalls Jim Heimann.

That was then, this is now:

This is the moment of King Charles III’s accession earlier today.

Follow the latest: https://t.co/u6MN0UbvzS pic.twitter.com/5LqsZ6zExG

— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 10, 2022

Reality check: Nothing is okay about this. pic.twitter.com/6lBSkz8z9Q

— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) September 8, 2022

The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future Even though the ban on such cults remains in the party constitution, Xi and his deputies have demanded a degree of loyalty and admiration for the leader not seen since Mao. Ever since 2016, when Xi was declared the party’s “core leader” (a term never given to his predecessor, Hu), Xi has positioned himself in front of members of the Standing Committee in official portraits. His own portraits are hung everywhere, Mao style, in government offices, schools, religious sites, and homes.

The Shadow of the British Empire – The reason the British Empire looms so large in imagination is it spawned the new Latin: English, which bids fair to be spoken on Mars. The BE features in countless Hollywood moments and is the setting of streaming period dramas. It is even a movie convention that aliens from other planets and genius-level baddies speak in perfect received pronunciation. It is hated because it culturally it lives on, in the classics, in the culture, in the language. For critical race theorists, there is nothing quite so deserving of their enmity as something that even their speech is made of. [continue reading…]

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My family and I had just moved into our house on Lake Street in Glendale, California. I was six years old when the first TV set — black and white with a roof aerial — came into the house.  The above TV staples ruled my afterschool hours on a daily basis. But the first television that I remember being told to watch and which I watched, for hours, with my mother, father, and brother was the live broadcast of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953.

The Coronation was impressive enough for me to retain memory traces of the room we watched it in, the set itself, and my mother’s continuing narration on the various dresses the Queen and company were wearing. It came, she was crowned, and my child’s mind promptly forgot all about it.

Fast forward, twenty-five years and, through a remarkable series of events, I found myself the Publisher and Editor of the English edition of Penthouse Magazine in London. I lived just off the backyard of Buckingham Palace at Number 17 Eton Place in Belgravia. (That’s the same street on which the townhouse in the original Upstairs/Downstairs was located) [continue reading…]

The ad says: “You’ve seen the images. Hardened criminals rampaging without fear… No fear of any consequence at all. Instead, you are made to live in fear.”

It urges voters to “stop the woke war on police. Stop the far-left assault on public safety. Stop the radical left-wing love affair with criminals.” [continue reading…]