Boomer Dancing: “I’m your Venus”
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Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
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Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Ursula was and always will be in my heart (I forgive her indiscretions; and we both knew she was too old for me) though not my first love. Henry’s daughter (vacuous pseudo intellectual, communist) in “Cat Ballou” … No. When I first knew what love was, I was in the third grade, and my first date was at her suggestion: “I collect pennies, too.” … But, then it wasn’t as well defined as when I first saw Natalie in “Miracle …”. … Funny, how later when I was enjoying the “friendship” of almost a handful, from various backgrounds and all generous to a fault, … I was taken with and married a friend who later shared her childhood picture from when she was four – seemingly at first impression all of aura of Natalie’s charm without the precociousness but … more brilliant.
Yet, if I had not been so blessed, with the experience and good sense I now possess (while I am yet confident in my ability to fulfill a wide range of dreams), if in the next life I cannot be reunited with my wife, … I’d like to see if Cyd Charisse and I might not be able to find a loving relationship.
Ah…Cyd Charrise!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ytvJxTjTU
-just a nice, old-fashioned mohel.
Wow – that Banarama video sent me down an interweb rabbit hole – thanks of course to that spunky cutie on the far right – Siobhan Fahey. Fahey apparently “married Dave Stewart of Eurythmics in 1987; the couple divorced in 1996” and have 2 kids together. “Fahey has two younger sisters, Máire (who played Eileen in the video of the 1982 song “Come On Eileen”, a hit for Dexys Midnight Runners)”. The more you know! Lol
I was always partial to “Cruel Summer” by them. Great song. “It was ranked number 44 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the ’80s.[2] Billboard named the song #13 on their list of 100 Greatest Girl Group Songs of All Time.[3]” ….” After an exhausting morning shooting (the video) in the city (NYC) in brutal August heat, the band returned to the tavern for lunch. They made the acquaintance of some local dockworkers, who, upon learning of their situation, shared vials of cocaine with them. “That was our lunch,” said Fahey, who had never tried the drug before. “When you watch that video, we look really tired and miserable in the scenes we shot before lunch, and then the after-lunch shots are all euphoric and manic.”[5]”. Lol again!
Thank you for the Bananarama version. 👍🏻
It is the GOLD standard, after all.
Shocking Blue for me.
Come come, do I have to explain to you the obvious benefits of the Trinity?
A Bond Girl (they were called “girls” back then, and it was fine) who, unironcally, might cut your NuZz off for little provocation. Back when the Cold War was dangerous, and sex was safe.
God, I miss those days.
(Cue the John Barry, Monty Norman theme).
Whatever Ursula wants, Ursula gets!
Now, to clean up this coffee nose explosion I just had…
The boomer standard will always be the 1969 original version by the dutch group Shocking Blue . (Venus — by Robbie van Leeuwen ) . The way Miriska Veres sang lyrics as “chore desire” is forever burnt into my bong receptors.
Then again , the classic 1967 poster of Rachel Welsh (Fathom) rising from the sea hung on my wall in the pre black-light poster days. Posters of Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) from Dr. No were scarce to be found ; yet “SHE” was demandingly luscious in 1965 with an unforgettable S&M dip into the flames.
Botticellis’ Venus model Simonetta Vespucci was virginal, but I swing towards the full curved buttocks of the Velasquez /Rokeby Venus. (I have been tempted by Goyas’ Venus, slutty as she is, but Goya faced the Inquisition because of her) https://i.etsystatic.com/19024656/r/il/2ffdd6/2324365952/il_794xN.2324365952_tlif.jpg
No. Just no.
“La Maja Desnuda”. Goya ruffled a lot of feathers when he painted her.
If we are talking about stunning women of the memorable past, then Jill Goodacre from Victoria Secret rags in the early 90s has to be in the Top 10 of my lifetime. Anyone who knows me knows I prefer brown women, but Jill is white as a bedsheet, and in her youth, hotter than the surface of the sun.
Black haired women for me. Skin tone olive or off-white. Madeline Stowe will do.
Pretty young ladies are so cute when they are angry.
Here’s a tribute to yet another Venus Archetype:
Behold the badly flawed Betty Draper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_BftWMfAUQ&ab_channel=M22
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