Mrs Morrison's Hotel

Rejoice, Rejoice

2011-09-30T01:03:00.000-04:00

I guess it was because of Rosh Ha’shanah that I got to thinking of this really neat Israeli-gospel-folk-rock I downloaded the other day, but I was playing it earlier on the iPod, and bouncing and clapping to it as I sat here working because it is just that kind of music, and then the wind started streaming in over my shoulder and blowing my hair around, and it was a northwest wind with its charged-up ions and everything and that always charges me up even more.

But it all seemed somehow of a piece, and it sent my mood up to one of those toweringly exultant moments when you are so glad of the joy of creation, and Creation, that you just want to get up and fling back your head and dance with the world, and dance love to the world. I am exalted by those moments when they come: you can put yourself in the way of them, and even teach yourself to reach them at will, but you can’t really plan for them, they just happen for you. And they are more wonderful by far when they just come like that, out of nowhere, like a great wind out of Aldebaran.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or a Christian or a Pagan or whatever, the joy all comes from the same place, the same Power. And everything you do becomes prayer and praise to that Power, and you can call the Power Adonai or the Goddess, or even not believe in it at all, but it is the real and undivided Power no matter what people think. And people are foolish to try to separate it out the way they do, or to deny it, to selfishly hug their little crumbs of it to themselves when really they could have the whole cake if only they tried sharing for once.

I often start thinking like this around this time of the year, as the sun heads south again and the days begin to draw in and the air gets chilly and the leaves start to turn. It fills me with joy that never grows old or any the lesser, because I know that it will always be there and always be like that.

Because it’s work that does it for me also. I am so lucky to have an art that is at my fingertips, as a friend reminded me recently. Her own art requires other people for its fulfillment, and she was thinking wistfully that it would be nice not to have to rely on the whim and will of others before she can perform it. I don’t have to worry about that. Sure, I like to have readers, and the more the better, and the smarter the better. But I would write even if I didn’t. I don’t write for them, or even for me, or even for my gods, though all those certainly figure into it. I write for the Power. I write for Creation.

And it’s THAT that makes me want to dance. You come dance too.

New Moon Baby

2011-08-29T13:11:00.002-04:00

You were born during a New moon

The moon is dark in this phase, because the half that's illuminated by the sun is facing away from Earth.

- what it says about you -

You want to leave an impression on people and make your mark on the world. When you love an idea, you'll work hard for it, sometimes even dropping whatever it is you're doing to go on to the next new great thing that's captured your imagination. The more freedom you have to chose what you're doing, the busier you'll be.

What phase was the moon at on your birthday? Find out at Spacefem.com

Oxford Experience Blues

2011-08-20T12:00:00.006-04:00

I may have mentioned that I would be spending two weeks in England this summer...here's the report.

Well, where to start? London, I guess, where I landed after an uneventful flight and proceeded to steal another woman’s luggage! In my defense, it looked EXACTLY like my new big tapestry bag (except a little pinker, where mine is more purplish), even to the identical black leather luggage tag. What are the odds? So I didn’t realize it (except to wonder to the driver why my bag looked a bit pinker than I recalled, and the wheels made a strange new funny sound) until I got to my hotel in London and actually checked the tag, then fished into an outside zipper compartment to pull out a long black wig!

Oh noes! Holy crap! Not mine! Back to the airport, hysterical. I figured the other lady wouldn’t have been NEARLY as stupid as I was and taken mine in return, and my bag was probably still there and not halfway to Scotland by then, and it was indeed there, parked lonely as a cloud by the luggage carousel. Shamed, I slunk off with mine in tow and left the other (which the airport people were incredibly cavalier about, “Oh, just leave it over there, luv”…I could have had it stuffed with explosives). What drama.

London was...well, I think I may be done with London. For one thing, even though I know it’s the height of tourist season, it didn’t seem very British anymore. NYC is a polynational city too, of course, but I did not at all like the way I hardly ever heard English spoken by British people on the street or the train. And every tenth woman I saw was in niqab or a burqa. I don’t think I’m a racist, but it disturbed me very much...

Bought very little. Too ruinously expensive and nothing looked any good anyway. Even Harrods disappointed, though it was worth going there just to view this simply appalling huge bronze statue of Diana and Dodi releasing a bluebird of happiness, or the albatross of public opinion, or the seagull of something-or-other, whatev, that Dodi's father, former Harrods owner, erected in their honor in a prominent position...tackiest thing EVER.

I did indulge myself in Marks & Spencer prawn mayonnaise sandwiches (Rennie's favorite!) as per usual, a complete bargain for lunch or hotel room snacking. The hotel (the Royal Park, on the north side of Hyde Park two blocks from Paddington Station) was lovely and a decent price for London, but then again I did book back in February...current summer room rates on TripAdvisor were over the moon.

Went to the Tate Britain to see the Turners and Pre-Raphaelites, and walked in Kensington Gardens to visit the Peter Pan statue and the Diana memorial fountain. That was it, really.

On Sunday July 24th I went by train to Oxford (again, not hearing a single English-speaking voice the whole way), and checked in at Christ Church College, where I was to be in residence for the whole week of The Oxford Experience, as the program is called. Christ Church is known as “the House”, from its Latin name Aedes Christi, House of Christ. Founded by the infamous Cardinal Wolsey in 1525, refounded by his equally infamous enemy Henry VIII in 1532, it has the most gorgeous architecture, and is the largest but far from the oldest college in the university and therefore has not much really medieval stuff going on. Even the college chapel, which is actually the Oxford city cathedral, and huge for a chapel, though quite small for a cathedral and largely Norman, is built on the site of much older structures.

I stayed in Peckwater (Peck for short), a lovely, large, U-shaped building from the early 1700’s, all classical-looking tan stone, kind of like the White House north façade, Staircase 8, Room 6. Rooms in Oxford colleges are usually arranged opening vertically off a staircase, not horizontally off a corridor as we have here, generally two to a landing; if you want to visit someone in the next stair over, you have to go downstairs, go outside, walk next door and go up---you can't just walk down the hall. Each student has a bedroom (with sink) and a sitting room (with small fridge), and accommodations vary tremendously. Worn but functional furniture, though some rooms have antiquey-looking pieces. My first room, rejected instantly, was a claustrophobia-inducing ground-floor one where the windows barely opened and the tourists passed by only feet away; I whined and moaned and was rewarded with a TWIN suite, two bedrooms (small) and a sitting room (large and airy), on a third-floor (what the Brits call second floor) corner, windows and window seats all over the place, overlooking Peck Quad on one side and Canterbury Quad on the other.

But. No bathroom. A toilet two flights up in the attic, and showers and more toilets and a single bathtub in the BASEMENT six flights down. The flights were longish ones of 12 steps each, two to a floor, switchbacking...aarrgghh. I never could find the same shower twice, and only once came across the laundry room: the cellar of Peck was a maze of twisty passages and weird doors. Like the Tardis. And several times I ended up in the basement of the next staircase over. Some of the other stairs in my building had toilets and/or shower rooms on alternating floors, but not Peck 8. I know it's student accommodation, but it still seems stupefyingly primitive. True, only six or eight students live on each staircase, so there's not that much competition for facilities, but all the same...

I have been advised that next time (if there is a next time) I should book a room in the very Tudor-looking Meadow Building, to my taste by far the nicest-looking dorm, though supposedly the most unfashionable when built in the 1800's, when Peck was the real des. res. I would have grabbed rooms in Meadow like a freaking shot if I'd had a choice (or better information): first-floor (our second floor), with en suite bathroom and a view over expansive and bucolic Christ Church Meadow (which was full of big round hay bales from the recent harvest). I shall keep it in mind.

But the Great Hall and Tom Quad, the big front Christopher Wren quadrangle and gatehouse, were simply glorious. The first time I went up the famous stairs (used in the Harry Potter movies), I was bitterly disappointed not to find Professor McGonagall waiting for me at the top. It was splendid.

Food was pretty good, especially at dinner, though they were quite stingy for breakfast: one egg, one sausage, no hot breakfast at all on the last day, just croissants and toast and stuff. I’m not used to eating three sit-down meals a day, in company, so that was a little weird… But dining under the gaze of all those ancient portraits and under that hammerbeam ceiling (I sat at the Gryffindor table as often as possible, of course, Ravenclaw when I had to, though the movie Hall was merely based on the Christ Church one and expanded by one table, and they really don’t like the Hogwarts comparisons, too bad!) was A. MA. ZING.

Oh, and there was Morris dancing, which I love, in Tom Quad one night after dinner, and tours of the college and the town, and the House has its own art gallery full of Old Masters, and I spent a lot of time in the Cathedral, not just the Cathedral gift shop. Pretty darn fun. The town was FULL of Asian teenagers on tour or attending summer school all over Oxford: I don’t think there was a single Japanese, Chinese or Korean adolescent left at home. They were delightful, if noisy, and I have never SEEN traffic like Oxford traffic, foot or vehicular. Well, it’s a medieval city and not made for modern hordes.

But sitting in my William Morris-print-covered window seat at 9:05 pm (Oxford University, being five minutes west of Greenwich, keeps its own time of five minutes later), windows open, leaning on the sill and listening to Great Tom, the immense bell in Tom Tower at the gatehouse, ring out its nightly 101 strokes for the original 100 scholars plus one added later, was truly magical.

Classes began at 9:15 Monday, after breakfast. Two classes per day. First one ran to 10:45, then there was coffee and tea and bikkies in the Junior Common Room (undergraduate rec room), and then another class from 11:15 to 12:45, and then lunch in Hall. After lunch, we were free to do as we pleased until dinner, which for me meant just roaming around Oxford, one of my favorite British cities. I visited Balliol College (alma mater of Turk Wayland and Lord Peter Wimsey), Magdalen (pronounced maudlin) College, Merton College (where Tolkien taught for many years), Jesus College (T.E. Lawrence) and a few others, and some Inspector Morse/Inspector Lewis locations, like the Sheldonian Theatre and the Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Library and a few ancient pubs, and shopped rather more than I had in London. Corny as it was, I bought numerous Oxford- and Christ Church-related items…and didn’t get to see half of what I had planned on.

My class, "King Alfred and the Vikings", was, I have to say, deeply disappointing. To begin with, my tutor, one Dave Beard, had an Attitude as well as an Agenda. He trashed Celts (“there were no Celts”), fans of Celticness (“Celtic loonies on the Internet”) and Templars (“they don’t exist in modern days, despite what crazy people think”), all this despite me raising my hand instantly to protest. Hey! Celtic loony AND crazy Templar over here, thank you ever so much! So that pretty much turned me against him, and rightly so, on the second day of class. By his own admission, he was an archaeologist, not a historian (despite him also teaching a History of the Vikings in Britain class online), and therefore claimed that he couldn’t answer most of my very specific questions. Helloooo?? Which was, after all, the reason I was there??? Duh. Also he was way too fixated on Saxon town plans and stonework and other boring crap that just about put me into a coma. And the course material was, in my opinion, waaaaay too much King Alfred and nowhere NEAR enough Vikings.

So I learned a couple of things, but mostly I tuned him out, and refused to “contribute” (shakedown) to his “gift” (extortion) at the end of the week. Why should I, after he had trashed my religion, my ethnicity and my Order? I'd never have been able to live with myself if I had caved and done so. Stupid pretentious git, and I certainly didn’t give a damn what the other students thought of my refusing. And the program will be getting a very sharp letter from me regarding him, you just bet it will. Too bad he’s the program director. Then again, I doubt I’ll ever be going back, so I'm burning no bridges giving him the pointy end of the stick. I was told that The Other Place (as they call Cambridge) has a similar, and superior, program---three courses over two weeks, and choice of college---so that's possible too, and I hear it's even more beautiful than Oxford, but I have no emotional attachment there the way I've always felt about Oxford…we’ll see.

Anyway, I discovered that you can stay in Oxford colleges like Balliol, Magdalen, Keble and Wadham, among others, without being obliged to sign up for a course, so I may try that next time. The staying in college part was the best part, and it would be fantastic to crash in Turk's old dorm room, or Lord Peter's, or dear Oscar Wilde's...I did wonder who had stayed in my rooms over the years, and hoped to find ancient graffiti carved in the walls, but no such luck.

But the people, at least some of them, were nice, though most were five or ten or even fifteen years older than I. We had a snooty Australian cow of a girls' school principal who sat next to me in class (held in the tutor’s office in Peck 2, seated all round on comfy chairs and sofas), whom I rapidly grew to detest, but two older men, Bob and Bill, were very dear and kept me feeling involved in the class and not invisible, and another guy, Herb, was nice too. Some of the women (Yvonne, in my class, and Lena, from the class on the Brontes) were also quite pleasant.

Still, they weren’t Our Kind of People, my friends, and perhaps I was naïve to have expected they would be. Also it was very cliquey among people who’d been there before, and not very welcoming or friendly for newbies like me; in fact, they were quite rebuffing, and most were not terribly interested in what I had to say. I did try: I was one of the younger students there, and pretty certainly the only one coming from my sort of background. (I ‘fessed up to being an author, but kept Jim strictly out of it and utterly unmentioned by name…just “my late husband” if anyone inquired, which almost no one did.)

I did get a chance to reconnect with the wonderful John and Caitlin Matthews, authors and Celtic scholars, whom I hadn’t seen for twenty years. We had lunch at the Tolkien/CSS Lewis watering-hole the Eagle and Child, known familiarly as the Bird and Baby, on Wednesday afternoon (great fish and chips!). Unfortunately, I had badly hurt my left ankle on my way there: the Achilles tendon popped on a bad step (not even twisted it, no rough pavement, just stepped down on it wrong and BLAM!) and I thought I’d torn it. Oh, the pain and the ouchiness. So that was no fun. But after lunch I went for tea chez Matthews, in a nearby village, and then they drove me back to college. Missed dinner since I couldn’t walk, though thankfully there was a pizza truck parked outside Tom Gate where I got a really excellent (even by NYC standards) personal pizza for my supper, and went to hospital the next morning to have the ankle, by now swollen and screaming, checked out.

God bless the NHS, is all I have to say, and shame on this country for having no single-payer healthcare system. The college had recommended their own private medical practice (100 quid for a walk-in visit!); I said no thanks and went to the excellent and speedy ER at the John Radcliffe Hospital, for which terrific care I paid exactly NOTHING. Not tuppence nor yet one pence. Big difference, and more shame on Christ Church for not telling people they have this option. (I did make a donation, but no one even hinted that it was mandatory, or even expected...)

Anyway, they said I hadn't torn my tendon, that it was just a severe sprain, and gave me this sort of compression stocking for my whole lower leg, called a tubigrip, a cane and some leaflets on care. I stopped at Boots, fabulous drugstore (chemists), for OVER-THE-COUNTER CODEINE PILLS and ice packs, and have been hobbling around (mildly stoned…) ever since. I’ll have it checked out by my own doctor if it’s still sore next week, but it’s improving gradually, though sloooooowly.

Needless to say, that put a damper on too much more roving around Oxford. But at least I escaped going on a boring field trip Thursday to Winchester (been there) and the Portchester Saxon Shorefort (didn’t care), so that was okay, and I spent the day in bed after the hospital. Though still a wasted day.

Friday was the last day of class, and that evening there was a reception in the Masters’ Garden (where Lewis Carroll had been inspired to write “Alice”...the Cheshire Cat's tree is still there) and a formal dinner in Hall. Oh, and on Monday night I had been invited to dine at High Table, as each student was one night during their stay: very nice. To both events I wore pearls, diamonds and my Templar breast star. You know (as Bill said sardonically), that order that doesn’t exist?? (He knew Templars himself, and we had a nice chat about it...) So sucks to you, Mr. Beard, arrogant, self-impressed academic that you are, and would you have dissed the Masons or Judaism the way you dissed the Templars and Celts? Well, maybe you would, in the depths of your ignorance…

On Saturday the lovely Liz Williams picked me up and drove me down to Glastonbury to stay with her and her husband the lovely Trevor Jones for several days in their fabulous house in the deep country, with dogs and cats and even a pony. We drove down through Wiltshire and Somerset: tea and market day at Marlborough (the wonders of Waitrose!), lunch at Avebury, in an ancient pub in the middle of the ring of stones (like the rest of the village), and met up that night in Glasto with our friend the lovely Elle Hull. A delightful evening of much merriment ensued, in the George and Pilgrim Hotel pub, and later we all had dinner at the Ashcott Inn in a nearby village. Steak and ale pie. Brilliant.

Next day Liz and I did the Viking Tour of Wessex, hitting all my Guthrum/Alfred sites: Athelney, Barrow Mump, the hilltop village of Wedmore, where the two kings signed a peace treaty, bunch of other places. Very helpful in visualizing how the land lay, even after a thousand years. MUCH more instructive than my class. And more than enough reason to justify the tax writeoff.

Monday we drove down to the Jurassic Coast, to Lyme Regis, a gorgeous old sea resort town much frequented in Jane Austen movies, where an evil nasty seagull kamikaze'd in and grabbed a piece of chicken sandwich right out of Liz's hand and we felt the need to recover from the shock with clotted-cream vanilla ice cream, as who wouldn't. Then along the coast to Chesil Beach, an amazing-looking feature (Google it!), and up inland again to say hi (it being Lammas) to the Cerne Abbas Giant, an equally amazing-looking hillside chalk figure of, er, impressive dimensions. Keep it up, sir!

Tuesday I spent mostly at Chalice Well, in Glastonbury town at the foot of the Tor, drinking sacred spring water, sitting in the peaceful lovely gardens and walking through the Healing Pool in hopes of repairing my hurting legs (surprisingly effective, so thank you, Chalice Well; I’m not limping quite so badly now, though my calf is still deeply sore and now my right knee hurts from favoring my left leg so much---sigh). I spent the last night at Magdalene (pronounced magdalen) House, a lovely guesthouse right across from the Abbey, so as to conveniently catch the Heathrow bus the next morning at 6:45.

More drama. Bus driver had to leave the M4 Motorway due to it being blocked completely by a bad accident, and then he got totally lost on his detour. No GPS. We must have driven around Basingstoke, Newbury and environs from every possible direction on every possible road (though we did pass right through Watership Down country, so that was okay, and went by Prince Charles's old school, Cheam), and were two hours late getting to the airport. Which was fine, as I still had three hours to kill before my plane left.

I tripped getting off the moving walkway and went crashing to the floor, but two very nice young men instantly ran over to help me up. And I had ordered a wheelchair to take me to the gate, but Virgin Airlines is so stupidly run that I had to walk halfway there myself, upstairs to a special “Special Assistance” room where EVERYBODY flying that day who needed a chair or had crutches or kids or language difficulties or other problems was corralled. Horrible polyglot bedlam, though I did get taken to my flight, finally, in one of those cool golf cart/buggy things. At JFK they put you in a chair right there at the check-in desk and wheel you straight to the gate, where you just sit for as long as it takes. And then the plane was an hour late. And I was wiped out from dragging about a half-ton of luggage: I never will learn to pack light, I fear. But I needed everything! And I had to buy books!

By the time I got home, about eleven pm New York time, I was exhausted. But all in all a great trip. My profound thanks and love to Liz and Trevor, for the wonderful hospitality and for tolerating my food preferences, and to Lily for the endless doggy kisses, and big hugs to John and Caitlin and Elle. My only regret is that I didn’t eat more fish and chips than I actually did…

James Douglas Morrison 8 December 1943 - 3 July 1971

2011-07-02T18:00:00.001-04:00

And woman
I’m waiting for you
So that my fingers
may kiss your long red hair
& I may touch you once again

--JDM to PKM, in a letter, June 1971

Dark Angel

From a song I wrote for Jim...and also for Jimi, Janis, Kurt...all our lost and loved ones...

Something that we never expected
Something that came as no surprise
Hand on our shoulder cold out of nowhere
Closing our dreaming, opening our eyes...

We only had you while we had you
Should have understood you could never be owned
You were just here on a one-way ticket
We never guessed you were only a loan

None of us ever thought you would leave us
We watched you bank your magical hours
Coining your blood to buy art on installment
We should have known you could never be ours

Never found yourself a place to shelter
Crashed with us when you needed a friend
Hardly even got to unpack your baggage
None of us dreamed there was so much to mend

We only had you while we had you
Didn’t understand you could never be owned
You were just here on a working visa
We couldn't see you were only a loan

Who could have thought you’d run the table
But that’s just the way your loaded dice were thrown
You were in town on a visitor’s passport
Even in our hearts you were always alone

We only had you while we had you
Nobody saw you get sliced to the bone
Nobody heard you bleed out silent
Nobody noticed you leaving alone

I only had you while I had you
Didn’t want to believe you weren’t meant to be owned
You were just mine by the grace of our loving
Even in my arms you were always alone...

© Patricia Morrison for Lizard Queen Music

Happy 41st Anniversary, Jim and Patricia!

2011-06-24T05:32:00.001-04:00

The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.

—William Faulkner

Side warm against mine in frost-time
Chest my cheek rests upon, shield-broad, steel-ribbed
Arms around me, oak-strong, sun-warm
Flanks arrow-straight, the downward highroad
Slow honeyed flare of desire spiraling round us
Love, and peace within it:
We are gathered in like grain,
Our harvest each other

—PKM, 1997

I know you
I know you
You are Valor & Desire

—JDM, 1970

© Patricia Morrison, 1970, 1997, 2011

Happy Birthday, Jim!

2010-12-08T01:15:00.001-05:00

When the sunrise colors play
In the blueness clear and high
Sing a morning song and say
We are here beneath the sky

When the sunset ends the day
and the stars are silver strewn
Sing a midnight song and say
We are here beneath the moon

Will you come with me and dance?
Will you take my hand and go?
We shall share a single glance
And we will smile, for we shall know

That never ends the day for us
Never once an end to love
Now another way for us
Now our words we send to love...

(c)2010, Patricia Morrison

California Beamin'

2010-11-30T00:28:00.001-05:00

Man, turn around and rhere's another month gone...still, it's been busy around here on so many fronts...

Just got back from a week in LA, staying with friends in Malibu. Business first, then a lovely drive up to Big Sur from Monday to Wednesday. Stayed in an adorable little cabin-style renovated motel called Glen Oaks, deep amongst oaks and redwoods, looks nondescript from outside but the rooms are terrific: stone floors in the bathroom with underfloor heating, gas fireplace in the wall, Asian decor. Clean and elegant. No TV, alas, so I will have to do some catching up online.

I saw deer outside my window when I woke up, and a flock of wild turkeys clomped around on the roof, and I tried to sleep under a barrage of acorns, like little, or not so little, bombs falling from great heights. Those oaks are TALL. Not as tall as the redwoods, though: how amazing those trees are. Also saw elephant seals in a rookery, and sea otters in the wonderful Monterey Aquarium (no humpback whales...I've watched that Star Trek movie too often), and the glorious San Carlos mission in Carmel, where Father Serra himself is buried (shoutout to Franciscans!).

We ate like kings: the first night at Deetjen's Big Sur Inn, a hippie/hobbit delight of a place where I will absolutely stay if ever I go back there, I had pork tenderloin wrapped in smoked bacon with a mushroom/apple/red wine au jus and a parmesan polenta cake on the side, with the best crab cakes EVER for appetizers. Sublime. THe second night we had dinner at this famous place Nepenthe, perched on a crag overlooking the ocean, almost as good: I had duck in an Asian BBQ glaze with basmati rice, my traveling companion had chicken with sage stuffing, and we split homemade Dutch apple pie with vanilla ice cream. And breakfasts at a tiny cafe right next to the motel: pancakes recommended.

The coastline is every bit as gorgeous as it looks on TV: ocean, rocks, trees. But I thought the Ventana Wilderness/Los Padres National Forest, which we had to pass through on the way up that terrifying Highway 1, was even more gorgeous. Huge heaped rocks, mountains shouldering their way down to the water, hairpin turns...fabulous.

Then back to LA, and home on Thursday. Altogether a most excellent adventure.

The Road Goes Ever On and On...

2010-09-25T13:44:00.001-04:00

Right now on my Facebook fan page, I'm having an online reading of "The Lord of the Rings". I assign a couple of chapters every two or three days, and then we talk about it in posts. Everyone here is welcome to join in: we're only up to Chapters Two and Three, the assignment for this weekend, to be discussed on Monday, so you can easily catch up.

We just started on September 22, Bilbo and Frodo's birthday: I reread the book every fall and spring, and it occurred to me that it would be nice to do it in company this time...

Here's the FB link, if you're interested: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Patricia-Kennealy-Morrison/120820558798

Yeah, SURE You Are...

2010-08-28T00:44:00.001-04:00

Another MySpace jackass messages me to tell me he's Jim reincarnated.

Told him he wasn't.

"Well, how would you know I'm not? I FEEL like him!"

Doubt that very much. I know what Jim felt like...;)

Oh, and? Because there've been approximately 1,387 other morons who also think they're Jim reincarnated. (Fight it out amongst yourselves, worms...)

Also: Because I'm his wife and he's my husband and I WOULD know.

Also also: Because he's not coming back until we're together again.

Also also also: Uh, WITCH???

Yeesh. The stupid are with us always, yea, even unto the consummation of the world...

Happy Belated Lughnasa!

2010-08-03T01:37:00.001-04:00

I haven't been posting here as much as I should...so with Lammas I resolve to change that and be better about it.

In appropriate harvest news, I have finished the current book, Rennie 4, "A Hard Slay's Night", and am now free to move on to the Viking chapters my former agent asked for. If he thinks he can sell it, that's what I'll be working on. If not, either I will write it anyway and do the Lulu thing, or I will do Rennie 5, "Who'll Stop the Slain", which is the Woodstock one and which I was playing around a bit with last week...

Sometimes I get very depressed and down about it, as it seems that I'm writing in a void and not reaching anyone with these and they might as well be fanfics (which would probably reach a lot more people!). But I can't NOT write them...so there's really no choice. Except of course which one I'm working on.

Anyway, I am taking advantage of Lugh's energies and pushing on through...and I WILL be better about posting...

James Douglas Morrison, 8 December 1943 - 3 July 1971

2010-07-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

Therefore I give this song to you, who gave such grace to me...

Some may come and then abide
Others smile and ride away
Pain referred is pain denied
Let me heal just one more day

You’re gone
Like a shadow on the sun
Unscheduled port of call on the last ship
Your trip was hijacked in the middle of the run
But when all is said and done

Just because you left us long ago
doesn’t mean I don’t still miss you
Just because you’re somewhere out of reach
doesn’t mean I can’t still kiss you

Sometimes though you aren’t even here
I can feel you right beside me
Sometimes when I don’t know where I am
I know you’re the one to guide me

Remembering how love was and is for us
I will always know
Remembering how you somehow always knew
You’d be first to go

—from “Referred Pain”,
© 2010 Patricia Morrison for Lizard Queen Music

Jim and Patricia Morrison, 24 June 1970 - 24 June 2010

2010-06-24T02:19:00.003-04:00

A midsummer day's night's dream
her long hair chains his hands
his length upon her
Did the earth move
No, the galaxy shifted
Are they possessors
or just possess'd...

Forty years ago...

2010-05-05T02:59:00.001-04:00

He asked, I said yes, he wrote this...

In which he finds
a wife at last
on the Isle of Stones)

They meet in Arden
Two young lovers
He asks her to wed him
She is Sorceress
witch
his fair enchantress
Her magic is silver & golden
Circe herself upon her own island
could not equal her allure

Like Ulysses
he is held
But unlike the Ithacan
he will sail no further

There is no Penelope
& he will stay w/his lady
of the spells

5 May 1970

The Jig Is Up

2010-04-04T01:58:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid and forced to go to church every Sunday, I especially detested Easter. Because there was always some self-serving Easter message sermon to the flock about how the One True Catholic and Apostolic Church was just the bestest and the biggest and the One and Onliest, and everybody who didn’t buy into that was doomed to hellfire eternal.

This did not make sense to me, and the fact that there were seven sacraments for men and only six for women made me very, very angry. And if a seven-year-old can see the sheer wrongness of the institution, that doesn’t say very much for the institution, does it. Admittedly, I was a smart kid, but it didn’t take much to realize that any Church of Women Are the Cause of All Evil and Humans Are Born Damned to Hell by Original Sin and Anybody However Good and Moral Who Is Not A Catholic Is Likewise Damned to Hell is no church I wanted any part of. And no god I wanted any part of.

So here’s my Easter message to the flock:

If the Catholic Church, as it loudly self-proclaims itself to be, is really the church of Jesus (however you conceive him to be), then I put forth the proposition that Jesus (however you conceive him to be) would want nothing whatsoever to do with this rotten, corrupt, evil, seething mass of hypocrisy, and would, were he to return (in whatever form you conceive him to be), promptly and without hesitation kick the living, well, bejesus out of the predatory, self-important, self-aggrandizing hierarchy that supports, condones and covers up the mass-scale rape of innocent children by its own minions.

The Church of today is no more than a shill for its own passion for power and money and control. The Passion of its founder means nothing to them; in fact, if he ever really did come back, they’d crucify him before he could even open his mouth. And they’d be right in their own interest to do so, because he would condemn them to the hell they don’t seem to believe applies to them.

I don't have any children, and if I did I would never in a million years have raised them Catholic. But I would have sliced the dick off any so-called priest who molested them, and stuffed it down his throat. And when I now read the vile, self-justifying apologia issuing forth like sewage from people who seem to think that the Church is above the law of any land, and apparently above the law it claims for itself (“Suffer the little children…”), it makes me want to wave my hand and destroy it.

According to their latest, ever more desperate defense, we shouldn’t blame the Church for these thousands of cases of raped children, because child abuse goes on all over the place and has for centuries and this is no worse than that. Do you people even HEAR yourselves? Any clean, healthy mind of ANY faith has to be revolted at the twisted, evil logic that came up with that one. And the further twist that anyone who tasks the Church for it is somehow anti-Catholic...well, that’s simply beyond anything.

So I don’t want to hear any whining from Catholics about Oh we’re not all like that and most priests aren’t like that and we do a lot of good for the world. Because yes, that is quite true: you’re not, and they’re not, and you do. Absolutely.

But if you want to be the good guys you vaunt yourselves as being, then you have to do a lot better than that. You have to rise up and vomit these miscreants forth. You have to stand up for what YOU believe in, not the sycophantic ravings of the lackeys of Rome. You have to let it be known that you won’t support any hierarchy that condones and covers up child rape. You have to grow a spine and some balls and you have to speak out against it and let it be known amongst the lands and the peoples thereof that you will not endure this one more moment.

Oh, but then anyone who tries to hold the Church accountable is accused of Catholic-bashing. Oh, please! Don’t even TRY to play the victim card, Ratzinger. You lost the moral high ground when you chose to defend the violators and not the violated. When you decided that saving the Church’s sorry ass was more important than justice for the Church’s innocent victims. How is it bashing to hold the Church to merely the law of the land, let alone its own self-proclaimed moral superiority? Better than everybody else? Oh yeah? Well, let’s see it, then.

But the Church has never had a moral leg to stand on. It killed its own (Cathars, Templars, Inquisition in general). It killed those not its own (Muslims, Protestants, Pagans and everybody else). It preached for centuries that Jews were deicides who murdered God (not even their own god, mind you...). It had a sweet little secret handshake deal going with Nazi Germany: you look the other way, Adolf, and so will we. (Et tu, Benedictus? More like “Sieg heil!”) It twiddled its bejeweled thumbs while Jews, Roma and other defenseless people were taken away to death camps. It arranged for Nazis to escape trial for their war crimes, and now it enables child rapists escape the rightful consequences of their actions.

Is there no end to the utter hypocrisy and sanctimonious filth of this evil, barbarous sect, this long-outdated medieval relic? Will no one rid us of these troublesome priests?

Supposedly the Vatican had no knowledge of the child abuse. Well, any priestling who says so is a lying liar who lies. They knew, right enough, and they tried to make it go away by ignoring it. Some moral compass you’ve got going there, Rome! You posture and preen as the world’s guiding light and moral authority, but your authority is founded on nothing but pure muck. And people are finally realizing that they’re sick of it.

The Church is at present “investigating” American nuns: to see if they’re abject and submissive enough, to make sure no uppity women are sassing back at priests and the Pope, and to reinforce all the misogyny that has been rampant in the institution ever since Jesus took a powder. I suggest they turn some of that inquisitional scrutiny on themselves. Can you IMAGINE how fast a nun who tried to officiate at a Mass would be kicked to the curb? Light-speed, baby! So why haven’t any of these spoiled pederast rapist priests been tossed out like the garbage they are?

I have no idea how this will play out. Probably the way it always does: the Church will continue to cover its nasty ass with both hands, squealing like a stuck pig; money will be paid to some of the victims, which will do nothing to alleviate their pain; and the vile business will go on as usual.

But you know, maybe not this time. Maybe this time the wrath of the Goddess will come down upon the petty, vile, evil little men who have denied Her and Her power for two millennia, and blot them and their offenses from the face of the earth. I’d very much like to see that. And I’d do anything I can to make it happen.

Something About Mary

2010-02-18T17:46:00.020-05:00

I am SO not supposed to be doing this. Mary was the one who had promised to do it for me...yet here we are.

And, because she loved words so, here are some she loved. I didn’t write these first ones. But they are mine nonetheless. And hers also.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

I met Mary Herczog (that's her, with her dogs Hayley and Bix) in 1992. We had met over the phone in May, when I was in L.A. on my book tour for my memoir Strange Days and she phone-interviewed me for Venice magazine. We hit it off immediately: that separated at birth, Anne of Green Gables race-that-knows-Joseph kind of immediate connection. Bestest friends forever, which is how everyone who ever knew her felt about her, and all of us were correct to feel so. But we didn’t meet in person until she was in NYC that Thanksgiving.

We were booked to have dinner at the Telephone, a wonderful British pub a block away from my apartment. I walked in, and there she was, sitting on the banquette, looking just as she should! And the rest, as they say, was history, oh yes indeed.

Over the 18 years of our friendship (the exact number of our age difference, ooooh cosmic!), we talked and visited and emailed endlessly. We talked about love, and hate, and jewelry, and chocolate, and books we'd read and books we'd written, and the British royal family, and food, and dogs, and travel, and chocolate, and figure skating, and rock&roll, and chocolate, did I mention chocolate?, and just about everything that two smart and wicked friends talk about.

I went out to L.A. every other year or so to stay with her for the fabulous Oscar parties she and her rock critic husband, Steve Hochman, would host: guests had to bring food that had some relevance to a nominated movie...as you may imagine, the menus were spectacularly idiosyncratic.

She consoled me when I was going through hideously painful stuff about Jim that vile people were throwing at me, and counseled me through any amount of other difficulties, and I like to think I did the same for her.

I got to help her a bit with her wonderful book Figures of Echo (which was made into a Lifetime movie called "Custody", not much like the book but go rent it), and to put her as a character (Mariota) into my own book Blackmantle, and to halfway base another character (Prax) in my rock&roll mystery books on her, and to dedicate the first of them, Ungrateful Dead, to her, because she'd pushed and nagged and bribed and threatened and cajoled and encouraged me until I finished it: “For Mary Susan Herczog, who bossed me around.”

And she bossed me around FOREVER. She got me to do things that no one else in this world or any other could have gotten me to do. And she stopped me from doing things that I soooo wanted to do, bad things, when she was the only one who could have...she’d just lie down on the tracks in front of the locomotive until I promised not to.

And either way, she was always, always right.

In 1997, when the cancer had just been diagnosed but not revealed yet to her friends and family, I had a terrifying prescient dream, which I recounted to her, reluctantly, and which of course she instantly wrote about in one of her L.A. Times articles about the cancer experience, because she knew a good story when she heard one: I was alone in a dark scary house, with knives in my hands, screaming for her and Steve, trying to protect her against some terrible, malevolent thing that was moving around outside and wanted to get in. They weren't home, and so I set my back against the door, and I resolved not to let it in, and I woke up hysterical and shaking from head to foot.

I was staying at my friend Phyllis Curott's house when this dream came to me, and I told her about it, and all day long I had this horrible sense of wrongness, that something was terribly amiss with someone I loved. So I cut the visit short and went home and steeled myself to phone Mary and tell her, and when I did, she was silent for a moment, and then said, "Did I mention I have breast cancer?" And we both freaked a little. Well, a lot.

And so the dark malevolent thing got in no matter what any of us could do.

But once it did, she was the most amazing warrior in the world as she dealt with it. She battled it with courage, and with wit, and with all the strength she had (which was a LOT), for twelve years. During which her style was not cramped in the slightest: global travel, food porn, a house in New Orleans...she did it all.

In early January, before she publicly announced the rapidly deteriorating situation, we had a long talk, when the decision was made to not pursue more punishing chemo that wouldn’t help anyway, and I think I got to tell her all of how I felt. Which of course she already knew. And whatever I didn’t say, she knew anyway. Because, as we all know, she always did.

Strangely, then, I did not sense her actual going, and usually I’m deeply attuned to that kind of thing. But for weeks before that, I did sense her moving away from us, like the moon, like the outbound tide. I saw pictures of her taken a couple of days before she died, the day she received her master’s degree (straight A's, unprecedented in the school's history, not even an A-minus among them) in theology from Claremont, "God school" as she called it, how terrifically wonderful an achievement was that, and I could see immediately that she had her skates on, that she was ready to roll.

She died on Mardi Gras morning: how perfect for someone who so loved New Orleans and all its traditions, and how perfectly Mary.
Yet, for all her spirituality and theological learning and leanings, she was unconvinced about the afterlife, or said she was.

But I’m not, and I can SO see her riding joyously into Aslan’s country atop a giant flower-bespangled parade float, in a gorgeous gown and of course a lovely diamond tiara, with adoring and cheering multitudes hailing her as their Queen. Or being met by Dumbledore in the spiritual King’s Cross station, and boarding a train that will take her On. Or dancing in the ruins tonight, and every night. And that’s what I think, no matter what.

She lived in her extraordinary lifetime about eighty-seven normal people's lives, all of them crammed with incident. She was more vividly alive than anyone I’ve ever known, and funnier and braver than anyone I ever met. I was prouder to win one praiseful word from her than a spate of them from strangers, and I loved her very, very much.

So, a few words more that we both treasured…

What though that radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from our sight
Though nothing can bring back the hour
of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, rather find
strength in what remains behind
In the primal sympathy,
which, having been, must ever be.

‘Bye, my darlingest Mary! When you meet up with Jim, well, you know what to do...

Mary Susan Herczog, 31 March 1964 - 16 February 2010

2010-02-16T17:44:00.000-05:00

My dear and much beloved friend Mary died this morning at 11:11 am California time, in her Los Angeles home, after a 12-year battle with cancer. She was surrounded by her family and friends. Several days ago, she was presented with her master's degree in theology and philosophical studies from Claremont School of Theology. She was the author of many books and the reader of many more. She leaves her husband, Steve Hochman, her mother and siblings and nieces and nephews, and many, many grieving friends.

She was the bravest person I have ever known. May her journey thrive

A Day We Were Together

2010-02-14T01:23:00.001-05:00

"Love hides in the strangest places
Love hides in familiar faces..."

---Jim Morrison

Happy Valentine's Day, honey, and thank you again for the diamond heart...and everything else.

Burqa's Sneerage

2010-01-26T19:09:00.000-05:00

I see where France wants to pass a law banning the burqa, and all the usual suspects are having fits about it. Including me.

Now, it might seem racist or sexist or religionist or whatever to try to legislate against “traditional” ethnic clothing, but don’t let the bleeding-heart libertarians fool you. This is about WAY more than a walking tent. It’s really about whether the West is going to be allowed to stay Western. Because, make no mistake, we’re under siege.

The burqa is merely emblematic of a raft of utterly unacceptable practices used in Islam purely and simply for male thugs to control women. Charming things like genital mutilation, “honor” killings, religiously approved polygamy and other such prehistoric attitudes clutched to male Islamic bosoms as a means to allow them to refuse being assimilated into the Western country under discussion: France, the U.K, the Netherlands, Denmark, the U.S., Scandinavia…

The burqa is NOT traditional except within a very small sphere of fundie reactionaries and in the utter civil-liberties hell that is Saudi Arabia. It’s purely political and totally unreasonable: the Koran does NOT demand it, imams have spoken out against it—gosh, they’ll probably be put under fatwa for it! Since that’s the way Islamics tend to do things—and the West has every right in the world to not put up with it.

I notice that women in Islamic countries are not allowed to do all sorts of things, like drive, and work, and be educated, and divorce their husbands, and, yes, go out in public without wearing a black shroud. So Islamics really have no business whatsoever complaining when they’re forced to abide by OUR rules, in OUR countries. They make the rules where they live, and expect outsiders and immigrants and even tourists to comply; so how dare they bitch and moan when forced to comply with the rules in ours? Turnabout is fair play.

But not, it seems, for them. Doesn’t work that way for them, oh nonononono! They issue death decrees against political cartoonists and try to kill them. They HAVE killed filmmakers who “offend” them. Resident U.K. Islamics are trying to get a separate system of justice set up just for them, superseding the fantastic British common law that has endured since Magna Carta and imposing Shari’a. Not on!

And you know, if this sounds racist, I don’t fucking care. Because it isn’t. It’s fair commentary on horrible and immoral practices. Yet that’s the card they all play, the racism one, whenever anyone dares to utter a syllable of criticism of their precious primitive ways. So, primitive AND thin-skinned… Can’t take it? Too bad! Grow up and join the rest of us.

If Islamics living in France insist on the burqa, then I think the French government should fine those who impose it on women. Severely. Or deny them citizenship. Or deport them. There’s apparently no way to make things better for those women, and the males (they’re not men…) will probably just make it worse for the ones under their domination. Countries suffering under the Islamic onslaught might also do well to reconsider letting any more of them in, too; but that’s a whole other rant, as is the rant against homegrown nonsense along these very lines preached and practiced by rabid young converts who attend terrorist mosques.

If ignorant immigrant Islamics insist on bringing their 1st-century goatherder attitudes with them when they move for economic reasons into 21st-century Western societies, they need to be firmly shown (a) the error of their ways, and (b) the border, on their way back home to the medieval satrapies they fled. They’re only here because they can make more money and live more comfortably than they can at home without ever having to participate in our national lives.

Listen, when you come to the West to live, you live by OUR laws and OUR ways. Not yours. As many immigrants of many cultures do. If you can’t manage that, or don’t want to, stay in the desert, or go back to it.

What REALLY gets up my nose is that Islamics pass off all this as "religion." It's not. It's primitive, sexist, racist cultural practices, and it has GOT to change. Before it destroys everybody. Oh, wait, isn't that what they want, and what their "holy" book tells them they must do?

Well, Christians and Jews got past being told in THEIR book to stone to death people who wear cloth of two different threads or plant two different crops next to each other and to sell their own children into slavery.
I'm sure that a race of people who invented higher mathematics and had public street lighting and public gardens in Spain when the rest of Europe was living in filth and ignorance can certainly manage to take the parts that have real spirit and relevance, and leave behind the rest.

If they want to.

Islam badly needs and requires a Martin Luther, or even a Dr. Martin Luther King...

A Day to Remember...

2010-01-25T14:14:00.001-05:00

This afternoon 41 years ago (41! How did THAT happen?) Jim and I met for the first time. I was in his hotel suite at the Plaza to do an interview, the only one he did that day.

And because no woman ever forgets the first moment she met the love of her life, I was wearing a dark-velour tunic, brown leather pants and sand-colored suede boots, with tigereye scarab earrings and a long gold chain; he had on his concert clothes from the Madison Square Garden show the night before---a rough unbleached white cotton peasant shirt, black jeans and black Frye boots.

What a day...and after.

MLK

2010-01-18T15:57:00.000-05:00

"We are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Thank you, Dr. King...

Happy Solstice!

2009-12-21T15:47:00.002-05:00

Frost doth gleam and wind doth blow
To join the Wild Hunt we shall go
To honor Lord of Ice and Snow
This cold December morning.

With Solstice here we'll celebrate,
this sacred time and have much cheer.
We will bring warmth, we will bring light,
unto the darkest time of year.

The mistletoe will be cut down
with sickle from the sacred tree.
A kiss I'll give to you, my love,
a pledge of friendship made to thee.

For greater than the will of man,
or want of that which can be done,
it falls and shines on where we stand,
beneath the great unconquered sun.

For this is now our turning point,
the shortest day, the longest night.
We'll look unto the months to come,
when the sun will grow both strong and bright.

A versèd crown all decked with green
that tells of winter's tales and mirth
will bring great gladness and much joy
to all who walk upon this earth.

And greater than the will of man
or want of that which can be done,
it falls and shines on where we stand,
beneath the great unconquered sun.

---Steeleye Span

Ave Sol Invictus!

Love Him Madly...

2009-12-15T00:17:00.002-05:00

From Chapter One...Rennie and Prax are at the Whisky A Go-Go, primo L.A. rock club, for the debut of their friend Tansy Belladonna's new band...

As the crowds shifted and parted again, carrying them to the edge of the empty dancefloor, Rennie’s eye was caught by someone sitting alone at one of the little tables near the stage. He looked extremely familiar, though she couldn’t immediately place him: very tall, thick straight streaky blond hair, great hair, all the way down to strong-looking shoulders, neatly trimmed full beard. Quiet clothes, most unrockstar-like: cocoa suede shirt, black jeans, Frye boots; no flashy Navajo jewelry or anything, just a handmade leather cuff carrying a simple watch and a small pendant visible in the open neck of his shirt. And really handsome. As he became aware of her gaze, he inclined his head gravely and lifted a glass in salute.

“Praxie, who’s that, do we know him, do we want to know him?”

Prax shook the feathers out of her eyes and looked. “Oooh, it’s Turk Wayland, idiot girl! I haven’t seen him in ages, his hair’s gotten so long, and the beard, come on, let’s go sit with him.”

“What on earth is he doing here? Didn’t he dump Tansy like five minutes after she dumped Bruno for him at Monterey, before Lionheart went out on that big tour? Come to think of it, we never even saw them together much. They’re not back together?”

“Yes he did, and no they absolutely are not, she’s with Bruno again, you know that. He’s probably just here to be gallantly supportive—he is a Brit, that whole perfect-gentleman trip. And I never could figure it out in the first place, Turk and Tanze: if she weighed twice what she does, his I. Q. would still be the higher number, and they both said it wasn’t the sex so who the hell knows. He’s not with anybody now that I’ve heard about though of course he could be who’d let something like that go to waste TURK!”

They had reached his table, and Turk Wayland was rising courteously to his feet to greet them. Rennie couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized him, though, as Prax had said, the hair was much longer than when they had last seen him, and the beard didn’t help. Didn’t help the recognition factor, that is; the gorgeousness factor, now that it helped a lot. Not that he had needed any help there either: he was quite ridiculously good-looking clean-shaven. Perhaps his brief flutter with Tansy had aged him; he looked more serious than he had at Monterey. Or maybe that too was the beard: he was only a couple of years older than Prax and Rennie.

He was one of the most sublimely talented of rock princes—a guitar god of the highest order, just about as famous as it was possible to be. But he’d always stood apart from his peers, held himself deliberately aloof, even, resulting in a reputation unique in the rockerverse. He rarely drank, seldom did drugs, never acted out in public, never got busted—if he hadn’t been so completely cool he’d be totally square—and he possessed an intelligence that in his profession was equaled by few. The rock star that never was on land or sea. Except, of course, he was.

All of which meant that he was pursued by groupies as a rock Holy Grail, or maybe Unholy: legend had it that the austere Englishman never indulged himself with groupies as his colleagues did, so scoring him would really be a coup de fucque, though, Turk being so unlike other rockers, the groupie girls didn’t understand him at all, and the fact that he refused to sleep around their ranks confused and scared them.
Which only added to his mystique. So no groupies; but by all accounts he never seemed short of female companionship: models, actresses, lady rockers like Tansy.

As for his music cred, that was beyond legend. Classically trained at the Royal Academy of Music, he had been tossed out on his ear for incorrigible rock and rolling, as he amusingly recounted in interviews. It didn’t matter: he had already found gainful employment as the founder, leader and trail-blazing lead guitarist of the blues-rock band Lionheart.

Since his teenage days with British blues outfits he’d been nicknamed Slider, for his bottleneck prowess and the flash and filigree of the sustain-fueled technique that had made him a star. Now he was a superstar, also dating from Monterey, when Lionheart had wiped the floor with everybody but Joplin and Hendrix—and those two had watched and listened with their eyes on sticks and their jaws on their knees.

His real name and history were as yet not in the public’s domain, or even known among his bandmates and friends; for all intents and purposes, ‘Turk Wayland’ was it. No antecedents, little backstory: to hear him tell it, or not tell it, he’d sprung fully formed and Stratocaster in hand from the brow of Dionysus, who if anyone was the rock god he was. And really when you thought about it, that was all anybody needed to know.

“Praxedes, how nice to see you, it’s been much too long…” Upper-class English accent, deep and pleasant baritone voice. He took Prax’s hands and leaned over the table to kiss her on both cheeks, then cut his glance sideways. “And I know very well who this lady is—”

Rennie looked up—way up, he had to be at least six foot three to her five-six, strange she hadn’t remembered how tall he was—to meet a pair of alarmingly aware and intelligent cobalt-colored eyes, strange she hadn’t noticed before how intelligent…

Oh Holy Mother of God! He’s SMART! There’s nothing walking this planet since the dinosaurs went boom that’s more dangerous than a rock star with a brain…why do I have the feeling this guy is going to be big, big trouble?

They did the double-cheek Eurokiss, murmured mutual courtesies—we met briefly at Monterey you wouldn’t remember, oh but I do, at the hotel Saturday night and then we all had breakfast at that diner on Sunday morning right before we heard about the last murder, love your work, love your work, heard so much about you from Tansy, me too also from Tansy, what are you doing in L.A., oh I live here now, what a coincidence so do I. Prax sat them all down and waved a waiter over with drinks, and she and Turk immediately dived into shoptalk, Rennie content just to listen.

Lionheart had a huge chart-topping album out at the moment, Clarity Road, their first for Centaur Records, who had snapped them up at Monterey and rush-released the LP. But when Turk mentioned their next, now under construction, Rennie couldn’t keep the eyeroll under control.

“You’re calling it COCKCHAFER? For the love of God, Montresor! They’ll never let you get away with it—the suits at the label.”

Turk smiled straight at her—not the usual calculated-to-a-millimeter rock-star-bad-boy-guaranteed-to-make-you-curl-your-toes-and-drop-your-knickers smile, but the real one, the slow warm one that reaches the eyes and says Right, you pass the test, you’re obviously a person, maybe we can talk after all—and Rennie almost fainted.

Dear God, you could raise crops in those dimples… Well, take your best shot, guitar stud, but I’m telling you, you won’t land a glove on me! I’ve been prettyboyed by pros, so bring it on!

“Of course they won’t,” he agreed, dropping his voice another octave, although that really didn’t seem physically possible. “Especially our dear label president, Freddy Bellasca. Ah, I see you’re acquainted… Well, it’s just strategy, the title. You toss out something outrageous that you know you haven’t a hope in hell of getting approved; then when you’re shot down, you cunningly suggest as a ‘compromise’ whatever it was you really wanted in the first place and now stand a far better chance of getting.”

“A clever ploy.”

“You’d be surprised how often people fall for it. But it’s not what it sounds like, you know—‘cockchafer’. Means a great huge—bug. Giant grasshopper, cicada, sort of thing. Makes a disproportionately big noise when it flies. It seemed to fit us. Oh, and I too am an Edgar Allan Poe fan, by the way.”

Ohhhkay, gloves coming off now… Rennie smiled and stirred her drink with the tip of one index finger, glancing up at Turk; then, still holding his gaze, she put the finger in her mouth and slowly drew it out again, lips pouting kissily around it, soft inner lower lip turned out, fingertip lingering in one final flick. They’d never had a serious verbal sparring session before; but gauntlets had clearly been flung, and now all that seemed about to change.

“I think Road is maybe the best album I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said then, voice pitched deliberately low, slow and challenging.

Turk looked down, then up, then away, and his face both brightened and colored.

Oh my paws and whiskers, he’s SHY, I don’t believe it, this could be fuuuuuun…

“Exactly what do you admire so much about it?” he asked, swinging his gaze back to clang across hers like a naked sword, though there was a glint of amusement in there too. “I’m not fishing for compliments—I’d just like to know what people actually mean when they say something like that. We hear that sort of thing so often, I thought I’d ask. Now that I have the chance.”

So much for shy. Obviously an opponent worthy of her steel—she liked that so much in a man. Though she didn’t quite cackle and rub her hands together, Rennie settled down with something like enthusiasm to a song-by-song dissection of the groundbreaking, earthshaking Clarity Road, which had released in December and was already being hailed as one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time and space.

With equal enthusiasm, Turk fluently disputed her every word, taking the opposite viewpoint to whatever she said purely for the pleasure of arguing with her. Prax just sat there, looking back and forth like a Wimbledon spectator as the arcane musicological points—they were hurling genre influences at each other like javelins, everything from medieval plainsong to Delta blues—were served, returned, lobbed, volleyed and scored, a knowing grin overspreading her face.

After awhile, Rennie noticed that some people across the room were waving Prax to come over and Prax was showing signs of wanting to join them. She grabbed her friend’s arm and spoke in an urgent mutter, while Turk courteously excused himself and left the table to fetch more drinks.

“Praxie, don’t leave me, whatever will I talk to him about?”

“Sweetness, he’s flirting with you like a Southern belle! He’s doing everything but bat his eyelashes and I’m sure he’ll do even that if he has to, yes, and hasn’t he got long ones too, his eyelashes, I mean. If you were both in the third grade your pigtails would be in the inkwell by now. And we all know what that means. Two smart people being intellectual all over each other’s ass when even a blind albino cavetrout can see that each other’s ass is all they’re thinking about—man, the unresolved sexual tension is killing me here…”

“I’ll get you some brandy and a fan, shall I?” said Rennie acidly. “Before you swoon clean away?”

Prax laughed. “You’re not exactly pushing up the gain on subtlety yourself, O Queen of Nuance! That cute little one-finger exercise—I can’t believe you actually did that, you’ve been having sex with him ever since you sat down… Put us all out of your misery, will you? Just go fuck his brains out and get it over with. No? Well, okay, but believe me, he’s dying to talk to you without me around—and, indeed, to fuck your brains out. Mark my words.”

“But he—”

“You talk to people for a living, remember? Best not too much about Tansy, obviously—though do tell him how sweet and chivalrous you think he is to come cheer her on tonight even though he dumped her. Well, maybe not that dumping bit. Oh, wait, I just remembered, he’s into all that English history crap you like, talk to him about that. Yes, that’s it.”

Heartlessly, Prax went off to join her friends, and Rennie glared narrow-eyed after her, thinking daggers. Not turning, but obviously feeling the stings, Prax waved backward over her shoulder, and Rennie laughed.

Turk returned with two large gin and tonics, and sat down beside her a lot closer than he had when Prax was with them, in fact so close that their thighs were touching hip to knee under the tiny table. Oh, that old trick…

Rennie Stride had seen very little of Turk Wayland since Monterey. She certainly hadn’t encountered him enough to form an opinion—other than the standard critic assessment of his incredible talent and the standard chick assessment of his equally incredible looks—so she didn’t have sufficient data to effectively make one now.

But if he was flirting, and it sure seemed that Prax was right about that—and hmm, how had he known to bring back only two drinks?—it was on some higher plane or deeper level that wasn’t flirting at all. Then again, probably every intelligent woman who had ever done anything so abysmally stupid as fall for a rock star—and you’d be surprised how many there were—had thought the same thing.

Turk sipped at his g&t and set it down again, and then he put his arm around the back of her chair, where she felt the light contact right through his suede sleeve, heating up her bare shoulders like an electrified boa.

“I hesitate even to mention it,” he said then, “as I understand from Prax and Tansy both that you’re a bit sensitive on the topic, and who could blame you, but I must admit I’m curious. You certainly seem to have a flair for—”

“Murder?” Rennie’s smile was cool, but her green gaze was downright frosty; she’d been wondering how long it would be before that came up. It always did. “Yes, it does seem to happen a lot in my vicinity. That was how Praxie and I became friends: she was accused of three, count ’em, three, murders up in San Francisco. Well, actually formally busted on only two, but she was on the scene for three, and eyebrows were raised… Not to mention the ones I was around for at the Avalon Ballroom and Winterland and the Matrix and the Be-In in Golden Gate Park. Plus the murders at Monterey—but you were there too, you must remember those.”

“I do indeed. But as I recall, it was you who proved that Prax didn’t do those first San Francisco ones.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t prove who did, not until he tried to kill me. Tansy helped me out a lot, oddly enough. She can tell you all about it.”

Ah, the classic chick fishing expedition: practically dare the guy to talk about the ex, to find out if she’s really the ex or still just the pre-ex…

But Turk shook his head. “Tansy and I aren’t together. Not since last summer. I’d have thought she’d told you? She and Bruno Harvey have been back on again for months—he loves her so much, and it was great for Turnstone when they were a couple. Intraband romance doesn’t usually work, too many power struggles, but for those two it somehow did. Now that she’s solo, who knows? Maybe it’s better for them to keep their professional and personal lives separate. At any rate, after we broke up, I went home to England for a while; when I came back my band went out in support of the new album, and we just came off the road two weeks ago. I haven’t even seen her in all that time.”

Well, that’s something. And yes, she did tell me… Last June at Monterey, Tansy Belladonna had taken one look at Turk Wayland and listened to him play eight bars and had dumped Bruno for him on the spot, though she and Bruno had remained close friends and good bandfellows. But Turk and Tansy hadn’t lasted: by the end of July they were over; he’d ditched her, Tansy had said cheerfully, and he had never uttered a public word about it.

And then, amazingly, in a move which nobody from one end of rock to the other understood, just around Halloween, with their first album topping the charts, Tansy herself had ditched Turnstone, in favor of this new assemblage, which she’d insisted on calling Moonfyre, oblivious to the thunder of eyes rolling from the Sunset Strip to Carnaby Street. And in a few minutes now, Moonfyre would be making their L.A. debut—though the rock-insider morning line had been stash your bread and wait for the album, studio tricks are the only thing that can save this.

“No wonder Praxie and I haven’t seen you around. Very decent of you to come tonight, then.” Rennie looked sidelong at him, suddenly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, that came out really snotty. I meant it honestly.”

Turk smiled again. “We’re still friends. She’d do the same for me.”

“We’re going backstage after the set,” offered Rennie. “Come with us. Just to say hello. I’m sure Tanze would love it if you dropped in.”

He took another, longer, hit on his drink. “Let’s see how the night goes first.”

Rennie, who like most women was a past master at interpreting cryptic guyspeak, recognized that Turk had just spoken from that mysterious point of masculine entrenchment where the male mind was made up and further female prodding would only annoy, and she was an experienced enough campaigner to know when to break off.

Mission accomplished, anyway…

She changed the subject by brute force. “Prax tells me you’re really into English history. That would be because you’re historically English?”

Turk’s countenance kept its pleasant expression, but his eyes went the color of gun-blued steel, and he looked at her from under the blond bangs like an antelope checking out a waterhole for lurking leopards. He seemed to have gone on sudden red alert, though she couldn’t imagine why; his undeniable Englishness seemed a safe enough topic…

“Yes, I expect it would,” he said levelly, sounding even more Brit than he had before. “Historically or otherwise. And enthusiastic fans make a good deal more of it than I do, if you take my meaning.”

Rennie nodded comprehension; for enthusiastic, read obsessed. “That’s how it’s getting to be in rock. You can’t have secrets or a private life anymore, no matter how hard you try.”

This time he visibly struggled to keep his smile from becoming a grin, though whatever the inside joke was, he wasn’t sharing.

“Well, I like to think I’ve managed so far. And when you and I are married we’ll keep it that way.”

They both froze, aghast, neither having the faintest clue as to where that had come from, or why. Rennie recovered first.

“Okay, if you insist, but won’t it be a lot less complicated if we just fuck?”

Turk burst out laughing, and the moment was saved. He had no idea why he’d said that. It had just popped out of his mouth, probably by way of his crotch with no brain participation whatsoever. But whatever he had been going to say next was lost, as a faint backstage commotion caught their attention. Nothing that would alarm anyone sitting farther away than they were, though at the next table Chris Sakerhawk looked up curiously. But to Rennie’s experienced ear, there was something familiar about the tone of the subdued turmoil, something horribly familiar…something just horrible…

Like Rikki-tikki-tavi, like any good reporter, Rennie’s motto was ‘Run and find out’. She never hesitated, but with Turk right behind her, dashed straight through the curtain. The backstage space was full of crew and roadies and equipment, as usual for half an hour before a show, perhaps a little fuller than usual. On the far side was the open staircase that led up to the dressing rooms and offices in the loft above the stage. But Rennie and Turk both stopped, well, dead in their tracks, brought up short by the almost incomprehensible scene that met their eyes....

Almost Here...

2009-12-05T14:41:00.000-05:00

Write Wing

2009-11-14T14:37:00.001-05:00

A little writing advice that was passed on to me and that I pass on to you, for NaNoWriMo, since every Mo is WriMo for me: every scene must serve two out of three purposes. Exposition, character development or plot advancement. (Backstory can come in under any of these.) Occasionally you can pull off a triple-purpose scene, or indulge yourself in a single-purposer. But two out of three is the Way.

To me, exposition and backstory are two different things, but you may not see them the same way. Exposition is laying big structural story framework (could be past, present or future), while backstory is fill-in parenthetical stuff that is useful and fun, if not necessarily critical to the tale. It's hard to quantify the difference, but I know it when I write it.

The advice has a long pedigree: my first publisher, James Frenkel, passed it on to me when I was writing "The Throne of Scone"; I recently reminded him of it and he said HE'd gotten it from sci-fi author Vernor Vinge, who'd gotten it from someone he couldn't remember. So it's Ancient Tribal Wisdom for sure, being handed down in the ancient tribal style.

Anyway, it's the best piece of writing advice I ever got, and I thank whoever originated it, and I pass it along every chance I get.

All Praise and Honor

2009-11-11T15:45:00.000-05:00

A heartfelt thanking to all who serve or have served in uniform. I may not always agree with the war, but I totally support and admire the warriors, and pray for their safety on the field of battle and their safe return therefrom.

And a special salute to my dad, a POW in WWII, Jim's father the Admiral, my uncles, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, great-uncles, my cousins and my friends.

The Axeman Cometh

2009-11-07T14:50:00.000-05:00

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been putting in a lot of rock research time lately on the new series. Most of it is stuff like looking up did they have microwave ovens in 1967 (they did; they were called Radaranges, brand-new from Amana, I even remember them) and when was Crosby Stills & Nash put together (mid-1968, out of dissolutions of Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds and the Hollies) and who was at the Fillmore East in early December 1969.

But a lot of it is to do with figuring out who my co-protagonist is and what he sounds like.

I already know what he looks like. He’s English, 6-3 or -4, blond hair to his shoulders, no beard then later a beard. Sort of a cross between Keith Urban and the young Michael York as Guthrum the Dane (in “Alfred the Great”) and the adult High King Peter of Narnia in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” movie. Smart: he graduated from Oxford. Talented: attended London’s Royal Academy of Music and is one of the top five lead guitarists in the world.

When we meet him in the second book, “California Screamin’: Murder at Monterey Pop” (he’s namechecked in “Ungrateful Dead”, with his band Lionheart—Rennie Stride is a big fan, from their earliest, more folk-rocky days), it’s June 1967 and he’s 24 (born 28 September, 1942), and has been playing professionally in England since he was 17. In the last three or four years he’s become a star, but he and the band are not yet on superstar level. And he has a Big Honking Secret which you will have to wait for the third book to find out.

He’s got flaws—fits of moodiness and silence, an explosive temper when he allows himself to indulge it, occasional staggering arrogance—but really he’s pretty well balanced. He has a sense of humor about it all: he doesn’t go in for the usual rock star crapola—no groupies for him (well, a few, but only in his very earliest days, when he was still a teenager), does almost no drugs, hardly ever drinks, doesn’t act out.

And there was never anyone even REMOTELY like him in rock & roll. Hey, that’s why they call it “fiction”…and I don’t even go for blonds.

His name is Turk Wayland, and he’s the leader/founder/lead guitarist of the hugely successful band Lionheart. Think Cream/early Stones/Yardbirds only with a symphonic and intricate twist, influenced by classic blues and equally classic ur-rock like the Ventures.

After much investigation, I learned lots more stuff about him: he had a year of classical music training at the Royal Academy of Music in London, then was tossed out for incorrigible rocknrolling, which is when he went to Oxford. So very intelligent and very well educated.

But what’s been the most fun is figuring out how he and his band actually sound.

There are six guys in Lionheart: lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards/violin, drums, lead vocal. The band started out more folky than one might expect (a cut on their first album, “Knights of Ghosts and Shadows,” is adapted from “Tom o ’Bedlam’s Song”, “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son” and that poem about “Boys and girls come out to play, the moon is shining bright as day”).

But they rapidly evolve, through exposure to and friendship with early British bluesers like Mayall, Clapton, Keith Richards, people like that, into hard bluesrock with a touch of symphonic psychedelia.

And as I write him, I have found out that I need to hear him. He did lead vocals in the early days, then as he got more into guitar, he switched to backup vocals, then to hardly singing at all onstage.

To get the sound straight, I’ve spent many happy hours listening to old favorites, though of course Turk’s an original. He’s gotten real enough in my head, though, that I can actually see and hear him play, and I’ve written something like forty-plus songs for Lionheart (well, he helped).

I think he sounds most like John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service, legendary yet vastly underappreciated lead guitarist of the ditto/ditto San Francisco band of Dead/Airplane/Big Brother vintage. With a bunch of Clapton thrown in and a lot of other stuff that comes from no one but Turk.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t sound a bit like Jorma Kaukonen and he doesn’t sound a bit like Robby Krieger. Which did surprise me, ‘cause I love their playing and back in the day they were by far my favorite guitarists to listen to (Cipollina was third). But they’re just not Turk.

Listen to Cipollina on the Quicks’ studio version of “Who Do You Love,” heck, the half-hour live version too. That spectacular lead-in is totally Turk.

Turk’s a huge Ventures fan, too, as so many of the first wave of rock guitar studs were. “Pipeline” particularly, but also great stuff like “Walk Don’t Run” and “Apache.” In the real-world timeline, he would have been in a prime place to have been influenced by that sound early on.

There’s also folkier work of his (banjo) on the Black Pig Border Morris’s “Coal Hole Cavalry”, which you can get on iTunes, and I strongly urge you to do so. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.

As I say, it’s been barrels of fun. In the sixth or seventh book, “Fixin’ to Die: Murder at the Fillmore East,” Lionheart plays Madison Square Garden to wrap up their big tour: a three-hour show with another hour of encores, closing with a twenty-minute medley of “Peggy Sue,” “I’m A-gonna Love You Too”, “Who Do You Love”, “Not Fade Away” and “Gloria.”

Man, I would KILL to have been at that show…and people do…

Oh, and I’m having famous professional rock and roll guitarist friends vet the tech stuff for me; I don’t want the guitar geeks to march on my house with pitchforks and torches.

And, as part of the writing process, as I do for Rennie and indeed all my characters, I give Turk stuff. First he wanted my tooled leather duffel bag that I bought at Woodstock, big stiff latigo leather thing, weighs a ton; then he started eyeing Jim’s huge turquoise and silver Navajo bracelet and funky leather briefcase and cocoa shearling coat. All of which he got. (Well, Jim’s not using any of it—and I’ve got plenty of luggage…)

Then Rennie got into the act: she wanted to make him (more correctly, wanted me to make him) a couple of strings of beads, which I did, and there was a heavy silver Chrome Hearts-style ID bracelet with a lion on the clasp that she gave him as a gig gift for the Whisky show in the third book. (He reciprocates, of course. He gave Rennie some very handsome stuff, which she’s nice enough to let me borrow…)

I drew the line at the gold-plated Strat and the black Porsche convertible, though. Fictional characters should only be allowed to demand so much. I think he understands. Not sure Rennie does, though: she wants Turk to give her some diamond bracelets…and I’m sorry to say he has…

Happy Samhain!

2009-10-31T15:45:00.000-04:00

To my Celtic (and Keltic!) friends, a happy and holy Samhain. May this new year bring us all the desires of our hearts, and thank you for being my friends in this place.

For Whom Nobel Tolls

2009-10-09T23:01:00.003-04:00

I am absolutely crippled with laughter at the sight of assorted slot-mouthed lipless right-wing nutjobs foaming like rabid lemurs at the fact of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Oooooh, the grapes are so very very sour today! Because never in the entire span of a million trillion billion universes would their little Shrub have gotten one of his very own.

Indeed, even his daddy couldn't buy him one. Oh my paws and whiskers, the utter stinging squealing chagrin of it all! Just open wide and take it, Bushbaby and company...it's good for you! And delicious for the rest of us to watch and be entertained by.

Can't you just see those little rosebud lips of his pucker up like an anus being approached by, say, a red-hot poker, like King Edward II? Yes, you can! And I bet it hurts even more! He's having a hissy fit all over Crawford, Texas! I can feel the tremors from here as he stamps his tiny feet! Oh, the horror! Oh, the spite! And he's passing all this on like a case of the cosmic crabs to Rush and all the other little Repugsluts.

Not that they needed his inspiration to begin with, doing quite enough of that sort of thing on their own. Let 'em tear their hair plugs out! I'm sitting here with my feet up eating bon-bons and watching with delight and righteous glee.

But I'm not really surprised. These, yea verily, are the very same people who only LAST week were dancing up and down, pogo'ing in delight to see America "lose" the Olympics and putting the blame on Bam. HUH??? They're GLAD when things don't go their own country's way? And that's patriotic HOW?

Well then, they should be freakin' ECSTATIC about the wars (Bush), the economy (Bush), unemployment and job loss (BUSHBUSHBUSHBUSHBUSH). But no. Somehow, through magical Republican-white-male-Christian-rightwing "thinking", all that gets displaced to Obama...amazing how these toads can contort themselves into such positions.

And yet they're the ones who go on and on about "Bush derangement": "Oh you just say those bad things 'cause you don't like him for no reason", as Rachel Maddow points out in an excellent piece now on YouTube. What about Obama derangement, you repellent worms?
But they'll never see the beam in their own eye, just the mote in their neighbor's...that's from the Bible, so it MUST be true.

Oh, and they're the same people who aren't gonna let their kids get vaccinated against swine flu and actually TAKE THEIR KIDS TO SWINE FLU PARTIES so they can catch it and be "naturally immunized." Yeah, sure, Einstein, if your kids don't DIE OF IT.

Pity the parents can't die instead, but then they've already bred and reproduced, so perhaps this is the only way to chlorinate the gene pool. But children, even those of proven moron dirtbags, dead of swine flu is something I'm not eager to see, though...and I won't be gloating when it happens.

And, and, and they're the ones who bravely assert that they're not going to cooperate with the census! Wow, what a bold stand! So...that means they won't be officially counted as American citizens (which I, personally, don't think they are anyway), which means they won't be added into the representational mix, which means they'll have fewer people in Congress...oh, right, okay, yeah, I can live with that. Carry on.

So there's a Nobel laureate in the White House tonight, and that makes me glad. Okay, maybe it IS a bit premature, but so what? So was Desmond Tutu's: apartheid didn't fall for TEN YEARS after he got his NPP for trying to get rid of it. And lots of other people who got the Prize are in the same situation. So that dog won't hunt.

I consider this a big, giant-sized "FUCK YOU GEORGE W. BUSH, FOR THE LAST 8 YEARS!" wafted our way by the civilized side of the world. It could only be better if it came covered with chocolate sauce and fresh raspberries...

As for the turning-blue, breath-holding, foot-stomping hordes, if we can't watch them explode like shattered croissants, can we just beam them off to a nice distant planet somewhere? Failing the Rapture they're all so breathlessly anticipating, of course...

That Ol' Devil Tune

2009-09-20T18:33:00.001-04:00

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Rock-n-Roll/shame.htm

Check it out! I am so flattered and honored, not to mention crippled with laughter, to be included in the Doors listing here.

However, I'm not "a devout Wiccan witch". Though I am certainly devout, I'm a devout Celtic Pagan priestess.

I just LOVE it that the thing that gets the Doors on the list is ME! What about "Mother, I want to..."??

And I never played with the Doors, either, so I really shouldn't be there except by association. What, you didn't catch me sitting in with them on tambourine and tuba? At the same time??

Or perhaps they think Jim and I are the same person: so hard to tell those longhaired boys from those longhaired girls...

And don't miss Jimmy Page and his Satanic decorator!

9/11/01 - 9/11/09

2009-09-11T13:00:00.001-04:00

Remember, people: Men of science walked on the moon; men of faith stole airplanes and flew them into buildings.

Never forget.

On Hiatus

2009-08-25T22:29:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a break from here and LJ and FB and MySpace...

I'm wasting way too much time online and I HAVE to seriously concentrate on the current book and I have a paying freelance project that's going to take up most of September and into October.

I'll drop in from time to time, hopefully.

See you later...

Hate Reign O'er Them

2009-08-25T13:46:00.001-04:00

From the NYTimes Magazine:

http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/is-it-ok-to-blog-about-this-woman-anonymously/

An interesting discussion. Having had more than my fair share of anonymous bile directed my way, I can certainly relate to the issue.

Just because you happen to be a public figure should NOT mean it's open season on you for every hating, mentally deficient, deeply disturbed wacko who walks the earth (with knuckles grazing the ground).

It's easy for people to say Oh, grow a tougher skin, don't take it personally, but, you know, that's really hard to do when the attcks are ABSOLUTELY aimed at you personally. If you haven't experienced this kind of thing yourself, STFU. You know not whereof you speak.

Civil discourse may never have been a possibility on the Internet from the start, as opportunities for malice and toxicity are afforded these days to an extent never dreamed by the poison-pen letter writers of old.

Sucks.

Haggis For Brains

2009-08-23T15:45:00.000-04:00

I am very disturbed indeed about the release of the Lockerbie bomber by the Scottish government. It seems utterly incomprehensible that they would spring a convicted mass murderer on "compassionate grounds" when he showed not a scrap of compassion in his murderous actions and if not caught would certainly have continued them.

And I wonder what the Scots were thinking. And I wonder if there isn't more to this than meets the eye: a deal for Libyan oil? A means of covering up irregularities in the arrest or trial? I just can't see any POSSIBLE reason why a richly deserved life sentence should have been tossed aside after a mere eight years and the terrorist pig returned home to be allowed to die in the bosom of his family.

Now I see Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond is claiming that many affected families who are not American are just fine with this decision. Which, frankly, sounds far less plausible than the Loch Ness Monster (in whom I totally believe, by the way).
People who lost loved ones and their homes when the plane fell out of the sky think it's okay that the terrorist goes free? I just don't buy it...

When did a life sentence for mass murder become a "Rot in jail forever until you become terminally ill with cancer and then we'll send you home to die with your family because we're so compassionate and we don't want you to suffer needlessly" sentence? I am ashamed of my Scottish roots, connections and admiration.

And if he ISN'T dead of cancer in three months as promised, I hope somebody takes him out harshly and painfully, then wraps him in a bacon shroud and lets him explain himself to Allah, god of peace.

Yeah. Right.

Back to the Garden

2009-08-14T14:37:00.001-04:00

I see where Woodstock is all over the news this week. Forty years, but sometimes it seems like...eighty. Or four hundred. I don’t think anyone who wasn’t there for it, or at least alive and tuned in to it, can really understand what it was all about. Hell, I was there myself, in a privileged capacity (rock critic) even, and I’m still not sure I do.

Timing, as usual, was everything, and my college roommate Susie Donoghue (who also wrote for my magazine Jazz & Pop and later became managing editor of Rock) and I majorly lucked out all the way. We missed the epic traffic jams (because we knew the back roads from driving back and forth to school years earlier). We had a place to stay off-site (some college friends in a nearby village put us up in their big old house in their two clean,comfortable guestrooms and fed us lavishly and listened to our horror stories). We had a Mustang and a press sticker which got us in and out. We had performers’ passes that admitted us into the musicians’ pavilion, where there was food and drink and drugs in plenty and even not entirely disgusting places to go pee, and let us hang out on the actual stage itself.

I wouldn’t say we enjoyed ourselves, even being the privileged rock princesses that we were. It was too intense for that. And after all, crazed with sugar lust on Saturday night, I did almost pull a hunting knife on Joan Baez for the last dish of ice cream left in the caterer’s freezer. (She graciously ceded it to me, making me feel terrible...my apologies, Joanie, however belated!)

Peter Townshend (or perhaps it was Roger Daltrey) says he always knows when people were really at Woodstock and when they’re just wannabes claiming they were. Because everybody who was there says how mediocre the music was, and everybody who wasn’t says oooh wow outtasight how amazing the music was.
And he is absolutely correct in his assessment. Autohype is a powerful thing, especially in retrospect.

I didn’t get to hear a lot of the music right up close in front, sticking to the pavilion as I did. Oh, I HEARD everything, you could hear it for ten miles around. It was like a background-noise soundtrack, or Niagara Falls roaring along. When it was happening at all. And you really can’t hear the music all that well when you’re right there onstage with it.
So I wasn’t always paying intense critical attention, and when I did, the music always seemed substandard, not their best work—though under the circumstances any music at all was a miracle. But I guess if you were a kid from the boonies who’d never heard those bands live before, it was a total trip.

It wasn’t part of my job to immerse myself in the zeitgeist: I was a reporter, I was there to report. I had to maintain a certain distance, cast a cold eye on the proceedings. I won’t get into it here too much: if you want the whole desperate (and rather amusing, if I do say so myself) story, go read my book “Strange Days.”

I did go out of the pavilion from time to time to wander around, of course. But if you were at all sensitive to vibes, it was like being pinned down in East London under the Blitz. Nobody was hostile, quite the contrary; it was just the sheer tonnage of stonedness that pressed down on your head until you wanted to scream. So I mainly stayed in the pavilion, like Achilles sulking in his tent.

But I remember little things: sitting at one of the tables drinking Moët from a bottle that Bob Weir opened for me (living dangerously, but I watched him like a hawk to make sure he didn't dose it) while some of the Dead and Airplane played with my tiny Persian kitten, whom I was carrying around in a big suede shoulderbag I had made for the purpose. I must have been nuts to bring her, but I’d only just gotten her the week before and didn’t want to leave her home alone so soon. She seemed to weather the weekend just fine (after the first day I left her back at the house with friends Ron and Mary), and nobody slipped her acid when I wasn’t looking. Or me either.

I remember standing on the stage and looking out over the crowd, and thinking ‘Man, this is something I would NEVER want to do for a living.’

Trying not to get that damn sticky red mud all over my nice new dark-brown soft deerskin elfboot-style moccasins; finally I gave up and put some old sneakers on instead.

Shopping! I got a lovely fringed purse and some beads and a big tooled leather duffel bag (which I’m giving to Rennie and Turk, respectively, in the Woodstock book, “Who’ll Stop the Slain”).

Thinking how beautiful Grace and Jimi and Roger Daltrey looked in their white fringey outfits, and Janis in her jewel-color tie-dye.

It was a really bad-hair weekend for just about everybody, especially me, whose hair frizzes in the presence of a glass of water. The humidity was pretty much total, and between that, the rain, the wind, the mud and the looooong delays between sets, nobody was looking their best.

As for all the post-event, grandiose claims I’ve been hearing on TV all week (“Ooooh, Woodstock, we could be ourselves, it taught how to be ourselves even more than we’d been being ourselves! We could be freeeeee!” Oh bite me, you freakin' morons!), not so much.

Yeah, yeah, nobody got killed (but just wait for my Rennie Goes to Woodstock book! I’m going to change all that, oh yes I am!). Nobody starved. Nobody got beat up, really. People on bad trips got the help they needed.

But that was pretty much it. As I say, I wasn’t sitting out there in the mud, with no food, unable to move, sleeping on the ground, peeing in the woods (or ickily elsewhere). So my Woodstock experience was rather different from that of the muddy masses. Kind of like Queen Marie Antoinette, really. Let ‘em eat coke.

So I wasn’t thrilled at having to be there, but looking back, I’m glad I was. As some kind of witness for the prosecution, or devil’s advocate, if nothing else.

And I look at my Woodstock performer’s pass, hanging on my refrigerator door, and I am well pleased. We all did our jobs the best we could. And maybe that’s what it was really all about anyway.

And Out to Fade...

2009-08-13T22:22:00.000-04:00

Les Paul, the REAL guitar hero. Great job, Les! Play on!

A Room of One's Own...Or More So

2009-08-13T13:45:00.000-04:00

I had The Apartment Dream right before I woke up a while ago. Everybody in NYC probably has had this dream at some point; mine's recurring, though different every time. It's the one where you're in the back of your apartment and suddenly you discover a whole new room, or series of rooms, or a loft, or a whole other apartment, that you never knew was there. And you are so happy!

I usually find a new, modern, loft-style addition somehow tacked on to the back of my East Village Victorian-vintage railroad flat. I've had the dream ever since I first moved here in 1967...
Sometimes it's a huge, empty loft with many rooms (which makes me nervous, as the security doesn't seem up to par and I'm afraid of someone sneaking in through all the vast emptiness I can't bolt or keep an eye on), sometimes it's a sort of extension that leads down to the backyard and an adorable little carriage house... it's always slightly different.

I thought it was strictly a New York thing, a reaction to perennially tight quarters, but people all over seem to have it. Men and women alike.

Today's was a new variant: I had actually moved into a brand-new spiffy high-rise, but didn't like it much 'cause the previous tenant's stuff was still there, and then I discovered a secret door in the back of the bedroom leading to an old-style pre-war flat with pocket doors and high ceilings and antiquey detailing, and was a lot happier...

But you know, if I actually HAD all that space,I'd just fill it up as crammed and cluttered as the place I live in...

Journalism Schooled

2009-08-05T15:14:00.001-04:00

Although I'm certainly honestly glad that Laura Ling and Euna Lee, famously "lost" journalists held and sentenced by wacko nation NKorea, are free and home, I have to say I'm really not jazzed with the whole situation from the beginning.

They claim to have been "lost" while driving around and somehow, oh deary me, ended up in NKorea ? So then they're incredibly incompetent.

OR...they tried to sneak in illegally, got caught and promptly started whining for America to ride to the rescue. So then they're not only incompetent but incredibly stupid and arrogant and entitled.

Though I think that 12 years hard labor was WAY out of line, I'm really sick of feckless, reckless Americans thinking that if they break laws in foreign countries (and nasty foreign countries at that), their natural-born American-ness will save them from punishment.

So President Clinton had to go and fetch them back, like a stern dad springing his naughty teenagers from the principal's office. I just hope it doesn't cost us more than a photo op and an ego stroke.

Rebel With Plenty of Cause

2009-07-24T14:22:00.001-04:00

You've GOT to read this:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/07/24/notes072409.DTL&nl=fix

Once again Mark Morford 'splains it all to us. Because YEAH, REALLY, has God got nothing better to do than fret about the minutiae of our activities and serve as a handy-dandy excuse/rationalization therefor? Oh, I think God has a LOT more on his divine plate to worry about.

But I've always thought that. Even as a tiny parochial school urchin, oppressed by the Stormtroopers of the Vatican, the Dominican nuns of Our Lady of Perpetual Help school, I was deeply suspicious of their strident claims that God (or my tattletale guardian angel, narking me out to the boss) was watching every single smallest littlest thing I did and setting it down in a big old ledger, with which, when I died, I would be confronted.

"Really?" I thought. "I very much doubt it." And if that was true, that sure as heck wasn't any God I wanted to believe in. So, since at the age of 6 I couldn't mount a flagrant rebellion and hope to go unpunished, at school or at home, I adopted guerrilla tactics.

Hey, they MADE me do it! I behaved like Sister's perfect little candidate for sainthood in class, and, in the depths of the rebel heart that beat under my uniform, I plotted escape. I tried not to be too impatient, even though I knew it would take years. But I also knew it would come.

Oh, during my teen years, the rebellion got a lot harder to hide, because when you're a teenager it generally is, even when you have nothing serious to rebel against.
So my frustrated and baffled parents sent me for many earnest discussions with a rather sympathetic parish priest, dear Father Molloy, who seemed privately to be egging me on to revolt, actually. Being intelligent, perceptive and sympathetic in a way fairly unique for his time, he knew I was never going to be a sheep of the flock, and, rather stunningly, seemed to be more interested in my actual spiritual welfare, wherever it took me, than in making me bend to Rome.

He turned out to be not what my parents had hoped for by sending me for those little talks. They figured he'd knock some sense into me. Instead, he recognixed the sense I already had, and encouraged it, for which I forever bless his name.

He even tried to discourage my parents from sending me to a Catholic college; was in fact horrified at the idea, said it was the one sure way to make me lose my faith.
He was right to a certain extent: I did indeed stop being a Christian, though I'll always be a cultural one (that's not something you escape, ever, and I don't think I'd even want to). But I was able to find real faith, the path I belonged on. Bonaventure gave me that, along with a lot else, and I was glad. Maybe St. Francis is too, even.

And if that's what kicking back---at all the petty rules and restrictions and fears and paranoia organized religion tries to put on you, to cramp your soul and break your spirit and make you an obedient, dull, unquestioning, utterly manageable member of the cult---can do for you, then I say bring it on. What we realize ourselves NOT to be defines us just as surely as what we come to know we are. The only way to know that is to fight FOR as well as against. And we should be grateful.

Right Again, As Usual!

2009-07-23T13:22:00.002-04:00

This has been bothering me my whole life. I'm not alone!

Sun and warm weather bring sadness and withdrawal for those with summer-onset depression

By Rosemary Black
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Thursday, July 23rd 2009

The same sunny skies that make summer a favorite month for so many people cause others to withdraw and become depressed.

Summer-onset depression, a warm weather variation of what’s called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, often starts in the spring and tapers off between September and November.

It’s a relatively new disorder. Dr. Alfred Lewy, director of the Sleep and Mood Disorders Laboratory at Oregon Health and Science University, said the first real studies to see if a summer version of SAD exists were conducted in 1991, according to ABC News.

That research showed that sufferers tended to experience different symptoms than their cold weather SAD counterparts.

“In people with summer depression, you see a decreased appetite and insomnia; with winter depression, you get an increased appetite and increased sleep,” Lewy told ABC News.

It’s nowhere near as common as the winter version of seasonal depression, says Richard Shadick, Ph.D., psychology professor and director of the Counseling Center at Pace University.

“It tends to have a late spring onset, and folks tend to suffer through the hot summer months,” he says. “Summer’s very nice for many people, but some people hate oppressive heat. They are very sensitive to heat and they get headaches because of the bright light.”

Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert says he starts seeing patients for summer-onset depression in late spring as people begin to dread the long hot summer. Sleep difficulties, weight loss, irritability and a lack of interest in activities are common, he says.

“The contrast to the summertime norm of people being outside and enjoying activities only highlights the symptoms,” he says. “There is an obvious physical connection to this disorder as the heat leads to exhaustion and lethargy.”

The most effective treatment, Shadick says, is a combination of medication and psychotherapy. It also helps to eat right, connect with friends and stick to an exercise regimen, he says.

Alpert advises sufferers to stick to a schedule, get up on time and follow a to-do list.

And, he says, plan a midsummer trip to somewhere cooler, such as Canada or Northern Maine.

“This gives the person something to look forward to and breaks up what is often seen as a long, endless, hot summer,” Alpert says.

As more is known about summer-onset depression, other treatments may be available, Lewy tells ABC News. Lewy is investigating whether treating patients with melatonin could be effective at relieving symptoms.

Another option? Goggles - and not just underwater.

“Summer depression may eventually be treated with dark or orange goggles that block out blue light,” Lewy told ABC News.

Or a sure cure? Hang on til next winter, complete with ice storms, blizzards and subzero wind-chill factors.

Harry Potter and the Cinematic Kool-Aid (SPOILERS)

2009-07-22T13:26:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen the movie yet (or read the book...is that even possible??), stop here. Now. Go no farther.

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Okay. You've been warned...

I was disappointed. Not even in an angry way, just in a "meh" way.

The Burrow is TORCHED?? And yet nobody mentions it once they're back at Hogwarts...it's as if nothing had happened...where are the Weasleys going to live?

No Dursleys. No Dumbledore funeral!!!!! (Though I'm not really as upset about that as I thought I'd be...) No Lucius. (That DOES upset me...) No Bill and Fleur. No Scrimgeour. No "Other Minister" scene up front.

So cheesy, the bit where everybody held up their wand to salute Dumbledore, like the end of a 70's rock concert. Couldn't they manage lighters? Or fired off flaming streamer trails into the sky or something?

Too much repetitious Draco in the Room of Requirement. Though Tom Felton was terrific. And for all the people complaining that DR, EW and RG are getting too "old" for their parts, Felton looks about 30...

Alan Rickman is phoning it in. Maggie Smith looks much aged from the last one. I still don't like Michael Gambon as Dumbledore.

Those two boys who played Tom Riddle were awesome, and looked eerily like one another. (The younger one, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, is Ralph Fiennes' nephew.)

Very dark. Lighting-wise, I mean. Hard to make out what was going on. And if that was some stupid directorial decision ("Oooh, it's such a dark book! I know, let's shoot it through a paper bag, to make it LOOK dark too!"), he deserves to be hanged from the Astronomy tower.

I just wasn't very impressed or involved...odd, that.

As dear Dr. Johnson once said, "Worth seeing? Yes. But not worth GOING to see."

Piping Up at the Gates of Dawn

2009-07-13T15:02:00.001-04:00

I have just read the most profoundly preposterous twaddle I've seen in a very long time (comments no longer being accepted, otherwise the author would have gotten an earful).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/books/10willows.html

All about two annotated versions of one of the books I love best, "The Wind in the Willows."

My issue---putting aside suggestions of it all being about upper-class Edwardian Britain quashing lower classes, which may or may not be a matter for lawful debate---is with the alleged sexualization of the relationships.

GREAT GODDESS DEFEND US! Is there no END to the banal stupidities of alleged literary types??? Ratty and Mole's relationship is in no way homoerotic, any more than Frodo and Sam's, and I'm getting more and more revolted by moronic deconstructionists trying to foist a sexual subtext onto everything that comes along.

As for the "sexuality" allegedly present in the Piper chapter, no. Just. No. Ecstasy, certainly: it brings tears of joy to my eyes every time I read it. But "sexual"? Hardly!

Again, this relentless sexualization has GOT to stop. Before it irredeemably taints and smears every lovely thing in literature with its sneery, sniggering ickiness. Makes. Me. Sick.

Iquitarod

2009-07-06T15:50:00.000-04:00

It's what she does. She quit five colleges before apparently graduating from a sixth. She quit being mayor of Wasilla to run for VP. Now she's quitting being governor of Alaska to run for...what? Surely she must know by now, after three generations, that withdrawal doesn't work for her?

She says she has a higher calling. Queen of the Rapture, maybe? If only! Lord, please make it so and put her out of our misery, let our prayers come unto thee, even though most of us here don't worship thee. We can ASK, right??

So let her cross that bridge to nowhere, or sit on her front porch and look at Russia all she wants, or field-dress some moose, or her husband, whatever she likes.

Since she's obviously not going to hide herself in the tundra, I say we have some fun with this. I do SO hope Letterman doesn't shy away...

James Douglas Morrison, 8 December 1943 - 3 July 1971

2009-07-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.

---Swinburne

Happy Anniversary to Us!

2009-06-24T13:24:00.001-04:00

24 June 1970

Married on Midsummer Day...like Aragorn and Arwen...

I used to think it was a Muse
I wanted
Then you came along
& you are not the inspiration
but the deed itself
I've fucked straw in my time
& thought it gold
But you I put on like a jewel
I wear you like a rose
---JDM, 1970

(c) Patricia Morrison

No Tents Allowed

2009-06-23T14:54:00.003-04:00

"We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity," Mr Sarkozy told the special session in Versailles.

"That is not the idea that the French republic has of women's dignity.

"The burqa is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic," the French president said.

Voila un vrai homme et un brave aussi! Good for you, Sarko! It's about time someone took a firm stand against the creeping Islamization of the West.

Islamic clerics do not agree on the Koran-mandated necessity of the burqa or the niqab (a burqa is the full-length body covering with a mesh screen over the eyes, a niqab is the black full-length enveloping veil with slits for the eyes...), and even the hijab (scarf head covering) may not necessarily be required.

Muslim men require their women to cover themselves with sheets because they (the men) cannot master their own "impure" desires and thoughts, and so they insist that their women control their thoughts FOR them by removing the "temptation".

Hey, it's not the fault of women if Muslim men are a pack of juvenile lust-crazed horndogs who can't keep their minds out of their pants (or hers) every time they see a woman. How insulting is that, to both men AND women?

Grow up, guys, and join the 21st century. Show some REAL respect for women, because otherwise why should women show respect for you?

It continually confounds me that Muslims move to the West for a "better life" or whatever the hell, presumably one involving more personal freedoms, and then they get their knickers in a twist because the West won't accommodate their medieval and inhumane culture. You can't have it both ways, people! YOU must accommodate yourselves and your beliefs to US. Otherwise go back to the desert.

I believe with every fiber of my being that any so-called "religion" that allows women to be stoned to death for being out in public without a male companion, to be the victims of "honor" killings, to be kept illiterate and immured indoors, to be divorced at will, is no religion at all. And certainly not one that pleases Allah, or whoever.

That's not a religion. That's male medieval control freaks with their heads in an 8th-century tent and their souls stuffed up a camel's anus.

An Iranian woman writer (exiled) pointed out the other day that it really didn't matter WHO was the president of Iran, because she would still be subject to all the anti-woman laws regardless of who was in office, that Mousavi was cut from the same bolt of "religious" cloth as Ahmadinejad. She could still be stoned, imprisoned, killed, veiled, kept from living a normal life, all in the name of Allah.

Well, I think Allah really hates this. At least, if he's a good god, he SHOULD hate it. And if he doesn't, what woman would want to worship him? I hope he strikes them down harshly, these sour-faced mullahs and all who cleave to them and their vile teachings..

In fact...wasn't Allah originally female? Al-Lat, the (female) Sun? A GODDESS??? I do believe I read that somewhere. It's probably not true, but it's nice to think that perhaps SHE will finally take vengeance and obtain justice for Her murdered and mutilated daughters.

Sumer Has I-Cumen In, Lhude Sing Goddamm

2009-06-21T16:28:00.002-04:00

Happy Solstice! I HATE summer, but I'm happy because now the days are getting short gain, and WINTER is on the way! Yay!

Rock On, Axeman!

2009-06-16T13:50:00.003-04:00

June 17, 2009

Bob Bogle of The Ventures Dies at 75

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — Bob Bogle, the lead guitarist and co-founder of the rock band The Ventures, known for 1960s instrumental hits like “Walk, Don’t Run,” “Perfidia” and the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” died Sunday. He was 75.

Don Wilson, the band’s other founder, told The News Tribune of Tacoma that Mr. Bogle had become ill over the weekend.

The Ventures sold millions of albums and heavily influenced other rock guitarists. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. The hall’s Web site hailed The Ventures as “the most successful instrumental combo in rock and roll history.”

“Walk, Don’t Run,” written and first performed by Johnny Smith in 1955, reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart for The Ventures in 1960; a revised version, “Walk, Don’t Run ’64,” reached No. 8 in 1964.

The band’s instrumental version of “Perfidia,” a much-covered song by the Mexican songwriter Alberto Domínguez, was also a hit in 1960. (Charlie Parker, Mel Tormé, Glenn Miller, Nat King Cole and Linda Ronstadt, among others, have also recorded versions of it.)

The Ventures scored yet another hit in 1969 with their cover of the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” the long-running police detective show that had its premiere in 1968.

The band got its start in 1958 in Tacoma. Mr. Bogle initially played lead and bass and Mr. Wilson played rhythm guitar. They were soon joined by Nokie Edwards, another guitarist, and the drummer Howie Johnson, later replaced by Mel Taylor.

“Our aspirations were to pick up nothing heavier than a guitar,” Mr. Wilson said last year. “But it just mushroomed into something where we became internationally known.”

The Ventures were particularly popular in Japan, where Mr. Wilson and Mr. Bogle played as a duo during their first tour in 1962 because the promoter couldn’t afford to pay the other two band members.

The two Americans made such an impression, Mr. Wilson recalled last year, that when the band came back in 1964, “there were 6,000 people at the airport.” He said he didn’t realize at first that the Japanese fans were there to see The Ventures.

Turk's hero. Sad. I remember hearing them back in the day, when I was in high school, and buying the singles 'cause I was so impressed with the sound. You couldn't dance to some of their stuff, at least not easily, though we did anyway, but DAMN it was fine to listen to. That lead riff from "Pipeline" is one of my all-time faves, right up there with the "Layla" riff. Well played, sir!

It's Published!!

2009-06-08T14:52:00.000-04:00

"California Screamin': Murder at Monterey Pop"...Now available on Lulu: 5724397 item number

It'll take a while (few days? couple weeks?) for it to be available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble...but it's done and it's up!

I'm honestly not sure what the price is...Lulu has a new pricing system that drove us crazy...but it's certainly not more than the price of the first one, and as usual Amazon has a discount on it.

So there it is, and huge props and thanks to James Allen Davis for his production work and to Andrew Przybyszewski for the beautiful cover artwork and design.

I'd be grateful for any reviews, of course, at Lulu and Amazon...

And now on to Book 3! And 4! And more!

Dancin' in the Ruins

2009-06-07T13:44:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about where I want to end up. (Don't worry; nothing wrong and I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon...I actually enjoy considering this stuff, and updating/revising my will, to change who gets what, is one of my fun things to do when I'm bored. And I don't find it morbid in the slightest.)

Cremated, of course. But not stuck in some dreary suburban mausoleum. I'd like to be (mostly) scattered around amongst some of my favorite places. It would be incumbent upon my friends to get me there, natch, and several have already kindly volunteered: a real Magical Mystery Tour. Or Tragical History Tour.

ANYway.

Glastonbury Tor would be nice. Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland. The Rock of Cashel, Ireland. The rocks at a certain beach in Malibu and the top of a certain hill in Ojai. Jim's grave, of COURSE. And also nearby, so I can protect him.

But perhaps most of me wants to end up in St. Bonaventure Cemetery, Allegany, New York. It's this terrific old cemetery, on the hill behind where my old dorm used to be, with the same gorgeous view of mountains and campus I had from my dorm-room window, and I really think I could get into being there forever. Maybe actually on the site of the old dorm, maybe just scattered on the top of the hill, maybe a little niche for an urn and a plaque with some words; haven't decided, though I suppose I should look into it. There's also a clearing on the side of a mountain overlooking the whole scene, called the Heart, 'cause it's heart-shaped; might be nice to be there too.

If I had an epitaph, though, I think it would be this:

"It doesn't matter if we turn to dust
Turn and turn and turn we must
I guess I'll see us dancin' in the ruins tonight
Dancin' in the ruins
Yes, I'll see us dancin' in the ruins tonight"

Because we would be, you know. Dancing. Us. That night and all nights.

And it seems just about right. So remember, please.

Blunder on the Right

2009-06-02T13:06:00.000-04:00

From the NYTimes: this guy is an amazing commentator...

June 2, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Howls of a Fading Species

By BOB HERBERT

One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.

It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.

Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.

It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.

The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there’s a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can a president nominate such a candidate?” Limbaugh asked.

Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is “a Latino K.K.K. without the hoods and the nooses,” said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.

Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!

Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.

Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”

Never a peep did you hear.

Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?

We’ve heard ad nauseam Ms. Sotomayor’s comments — awkwardly stated but hardly racist — about what she brings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have we ever heard the awful, hateful position on race offered up by William F. Buckley, the right’s ultimate intellectual champion? He felt comfortable declaring, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, that whites had every right to discriminate against blacks because whites belonged to “the advanced race.”

Right-wing howls of protest? I think not.

Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination is a big deal because never before in the history of the United States has any president nominated a Latina to the highest court. Only two blacks have ever been on the court, and the one selected by a Republican has been like a thumb in the eye to most African-Americans.

The court is a living monument to America’s long history of exclusion based on race, ethnic background and gender. Where is the right-wing protest against that?

It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving into some sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gender nirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.

Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling.

Me again. I wish this column could be nailed to the doors, nay, the FOREHEADS, of everyone who espouses this kind of toxicity.

It seems Darwinianly fitting that the Nazgul Trio of Limbaugh, Gingrich and Rove should be unhealthy, pasty, disgusting-looking creatures whose outsides are just as nasty as their insides: outer ugliness matching inner ugliness.

I can't really add anything to what Mr. Herbert has so brilliantly said, except to note with pleasure and hopefulness that these are the outcries of a dying breed, going kicking and screaming into rightful extinction and still never realizing how truly dead they are, and have always, indeed, been.

California, There You Go!

2009-05-26T19:52:00.001-04:00

I am hugely disappointed and greatly pissed off about the CA Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. And maybe somebody could help me figure it out...how are 18,000 gay marriages legal and 36,000 gay Californians lawfully wed, and all the people who didn't get in under the wire now can't be the same?

It's not even "separate but equal." It's separate and UNequal. And it totally sucks.

I can't believe that California is such a backwards bigoted state as to allow its Constitution to be appropriated to special interests by a simple majority vote. A majority of simpletons, actually.

And who the FUCK do the Mormons and the Catholics think they are to try to impose their narrow-minded, mean-spirited, hypocritical values on everybody else? National Defense of Marriage? You can kiss my royal Irish Pagan ass! Here are thousands and thousands of people who would like nothing BETTER than to be married, and you godfreaks are preventing them. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. Nobody's making you wed a gay person. So why won't you allow gay people to wed?

If your church doesn't want to marry gay people, fine. Then don't come around with your hand held out begging for money from the government. You live by the sword, you die by the sword; your own god said so, and what could be fairer than that?

I wonder who the Mormies and the RCs will go after next in California. If it's so bloody easy to tamper with that state's Constitution, I bet the next target will be Mexicans. Or Arabs. Or Jews. Or Pagans.

So come on, like-minded Californians! Get your act together and trample these bigoted weasels underfoot like rotten, poisonous grapes. Grind their hypocrisy into the dirt and dance upon their faces.

And gay Californians and other outraged citizens of that state, don't pay your state taxes. Why should you? You're legally discriminated against, after all. Are you going to actually pay them to make you sit in the back of the bus? Hit the state where it hurts the most; it's fiscally almost bankrupt anyway. We see too that it's morally bankrupt as well.

If I didn't have so many friends in California, I'd like to see it sink into the Pacific.

That's all.

For now.

Jesus Weeps...

2009-05-24T21:42:00.002-04:00

This is from the Times of London. I am speechless with fury, revolted to the point of vomiting, and also not surprised one little tiny bit. (I'd put this behind a cut, but I lack ths skill...)

May 25, 2009

Catholic Church is living with one foot in Hell

Don’t look away: it’s unbelievable that we still haven’t learnt the lessons from systematic child abuse in Ireland

Libby Purves

Understandably distracted by our own little crisis of trust, we have perhaps not taken in the apocalyptic import of a bigger one across the Irish Sea.

Perhaps it is a vague sense that we knew it all; perhaps reluctance to engage with the horrid details of the Ryan report into child abuse by Irish clerics. Perhaps some think it is old history, a 1950s horror. Maybe there is even a decorous sense that — as a new Archbishop of Westminster is enthroned here — it is tasteless to dwell on the wickedness deliberately concealed by his Church right into the 1990s. Or maybe our own child protection system now looks so shaky that we cannot bear to contemplate the toothless, deferential Irish respect for the priesthood that enabled thousands of children to be starved, raped, enslaved and beaten even as Ireland moved into its tiger economy in the new Europe.

But don’t look away. There are wider lessons. Ireland is at least looking squarely at it now, and trying to understand how history twisted its public values into obeisance to unanswerable clergy, so that cruelty and child rape became endemic. It was not only in orphanages and schools but in parishes where families dared not protest. For it was the courageous Colm O’Gorman who helped to prise this all open, when he spoke of his repeated rape, at 14, by Father Sean Fortune in his home village. He successfully sued the Church and challenged the Pope (whose nuncio hid behind “diplomatic immunity”).

The victim was accused by the Vatican of being part of a conspiracy; “Canon Law” defences were invoked and the first report — the Ferns report — ignored. “How can it be,” asks Mr O’Gorman, “that a church hierarchy who comment on a children’s film [Harry Potter] can fail to comment on a report, commissioned by this State, that found Rome culpable in the rape and abuse of Irish children?”

Now the wider, more terrifying Ryan report has met with almost equal evasion and the Church — which raked in millions from government subsidy over decades — has even managed to slough off most of its financial responsibility.

I am not exaggerating; rather the contrary. The Ryan report, merciless and forensic, finds the crimes “systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary”. It speaks of the deliberate protection of priests and religious by their hierarchy; of inspectors and police backing off respectfully and senior clergy refusing to help the inquiry. It says that the order that housed the worst sadists, the Christian Brothers, made only a “guarded, conditional and unclear” apology, and cut a deal that no individuals should be named.

The children’s own testimonies are too harrowing to repeat: beaten, stripped, humiliated, hung from windows. Some got pregnant, some killed themselves. Sexual attack came not only from their keepers but visiting functionaries; one little boy who spoke of being assaulted by an ambulance driver was beaten by the nuns “to get the evil out of him”.

Enough. There is no defence, the evidence is overwhelming. It was a sickness of cruelty, exploitation, official cowardice and inward-looking hypocrisy traceable all the way to the Vatican. Catholicism has not been cleaned up, only lightly dusted. Some Irish dioceses have become properly robust, and Cardinal Seán Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, speaks of being “deeply ashamed”; but I do not notice him pointing his condemnation upwards or rejecting the culture of hierarchy and obedience, anonymity and deniability.

Our own new Archbishop, Vincent Nichols, expressed due horror, but then enraged survivors by praising the “courage” of clergy “who have to face these facts from their past”. Incredibly, in an interview on Five Live, he also observed: “it is a tough road to take, to face up to our own weaknesses. That is certainly true of anyone who’s deceived themselves that all they’ve been doing is taking a bit of comfort from children.”

Weakness? Comfort? God save us! It gives an insight into why the Church, quick to absolve, blithely moved known abusers on to fresh fields and fresh victims.

“They had their own laws that were written to ensure they were never in the wrong” says Mr O’Gorman, simply. And they covered their backs: when the former Archbishop of Dublin was told that he could be liable if abusers were returned to parishes, he did not prevent this happening. He just took out an insurance policy against financial losses from such claims.

It has been an Irish disaster, but has lessons for us all about the perils of respectful naivety. Archbishop Nichols, after his predecessor moved a paedophile priest to Gatwick, where he offended again, said that little was known about paedophilia then; well, he still knows little if he can talk about men “taking a bit of comfort from children”.

This is pure celibate silliness: we are not talking about cuddles here, but rape. I grew up with the Catholic doctrine of forgiveness of sins, I know the territory: but to forgive your own team and ignore their victims is not holy. It is corrupt.

When good people are smug and bad ones are slippery, great evils grow. When any institution slaps on a self-approving label — whether it is “Holy Catholic Apostolic” or like our MP’s, “Honourable” — and uses it to defy cynical inspection, the weak will suffer. What seems not to be fully understood by the hierarchy is how much damage this has done.

It gives me no pleasure to say so: I was raised a Catholic, and know what high ideals of gentleness it expresses, and how beautifully.

I learnt at 12 years old not to believe in the automatic holiness of the religious, in a South African convent where nuns hit us and spoke contemptuously of “kaffirs”. I then learnt not to condemn the lot, when I moved back to a kindly, intellectual English convent where they honestly tried to live the holy dream. I have always been able to believe the tales of evil without rejecting the whole shebang.

Many Catholic clergy do great good. The remarkable Colm O’Gorman, after decades of struggle, does not reject the ideal either: he says he wept for Father Fortune’s suicide and hopes that in afterlife he finds forgiveness.

Now that’s holiness for you, and without a smug label round its neck. And until the institutional Catholic Church recognises that, abases itself, pays up, allows whistleblowing and faces the unthinkable, it remains a disgrace. Until it learns humility, it has no hope at all. It is a Church living with one foot in Hell.

Me again...

And may they all rot and burn there for all eternity. They apparently don't believe that sin applies to them...won't they be surprised!

It is absolutely beyond me that anyone calling themselves a human being could condone and countenance such behavior.

It is beyond belief, in some other GALAXY, that men and women who pretend to holiness and cloak their festering souls in the name of Jesus could practice such cruelties on innocent children.

And it is beyond even this UNIVERSE why people of good will and clean heart continue to support and make excuses for such an evil, evil institution.

And I fault the Irish, too---my own people---for still being the superstitious, priest-ridden, forelock-tugging serfs they've always been, forever knuckling under and groveling to anyone who wears a cassock or a habit.

Why Catholics who still believe in decency (I know you're out there somewhere...) do not rise up in a body and speak out loudly to condemn and overthrow this TRULY Satanical yoke of hierarchy is a mystery and a revulsion to me.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, kowtowing and concealing and enabling such unbelievable evil, and the God you profess to believe in will account it against you for unrighteousness. Fear THAT, if you can't summon up any pity for these poor abused souls.

You people make me sick. And if I could wave my hand and destroy with a single flaming blast the Church that approves and condones this abomination and so many others, I would. Without even blinking. As it is, may the righteous curse of the Goddess be upon it and all its minions.

Karma, man, y'know?

Take It As It Comes

2009-05-21T15:01:00.000-04:00

My friend Steve the rock critic sent me this. It's the doc that a team of Brits was filming back in December, I think it was; I may have mentioned it here.

It was probably the best interview anyone has ever gotten out of me on the subject. Because you're only as good as your interviewer, and this guy Tom was absolutely incredible. He kept on focus about Jim and his role in the Doors, in the world, and only then in my life; no gossipy crap here.

Questions nobody else has ever asked me: how I perceived (and reviewed) the band as a rock critic; how I felt about them as a personal-favorite act. Good stuff, and I think I gave good stuff back. We'll see.

Interesting that they're promoting me in this pr piece. Oh well, it'll just be something else for the haters to grab on to and take shots at me about...but know what? I DON'T CARE.

FINALLY, for once I got to talk about Jim as the amazing artist he was, in the context of his time and mine; what he meant to people, for good or for ill. That's not anything I've ever really been able to get into before, except in "Strange Days", and that was of course of necessity colored by the personal factor: the love and the grief and the wrath.

Here I got to talk about Jim as an artist-hero and also as a flawed, brave, tragic person, and hopefully it'll help make him real to a whole lot of people who persist in seeing him as some sort of icon. He hated icons.

I'll be interested to hear what the other critics have to say...Goldstein loved the Doors and gave them their first big publicity, but he kind of went off them toward the end, I think, more out of sorrow than anger. I don't remember if Christgau was a fan or not.

Anyway, something for you to maybe check out. I hope I can summon the strength to watch it myself. Oh, and I'm wearing a jewel Jim gave me, so that's something for the jewel porn fans among you...;)

THE DOORS
From The Outside
Brand new documentary featuring those who knew the group and its members best

Available on DVD
July 14, 2009
Through MVD Visual

MVD Visual and Sexy Intellectual are pleased to announce the home viewing release of The Doors "From The Outside" for North American distribution on DVD.

This brand new documentary film tells the story of The Doors, not from the perspective of the surviving members - as has been told so many time before - but from the recollections, memories, stories and anecdotes of those who knew the group and its members best.

The panel is headed by a woman who was as close to Jim Morrison as anyone ever was; his widow Patricia Kennealy-Morrison. Patricia has rarely spoken on film about her relationship with Jim, or about her own memories of The Doors. This is a once in a lifetime contribution from someone who knew just about everything that went on.

Also interviewed is Billy James, the man who 'discovered' Jim Morrison and an early incarnation of The Doors. Billy signed them to their first deal with Columbia Records, and gained the trust and respect of the entire group. Here he tells-all about those very early days when The Doors were known only to a select few.

Richard Goldstein - editor of Village Voice and close friend of the band is on hand too with his anecdote - heavy version of events, as is Mark Benno, the legendary blues musician whose searing guitar graced the L.A. Woman album.

The very finest Rock journalists and writers, and those who lived through and were affected by The Doors' music as it was being released also contribute to this most original documentary film. In this regard, we are joined by Robert Christgau, Johnny Rogan, Dave DiMartino, Ritchie Unterberger, Doug Sundling, and Jim Morrison's biographer James Riordan.

The program is further enhanced by the rarest footage of the band in existence, classic live and studio musical performances, seldom seen photographs, news clips, location shots and much more.

EXTRA: "Conversation with The Lizard Queen" featurette, in which Patricia Morrison reveals her own views about Jim Morrison as an artist, a poet and a visionary.

Hi Res Cover Art

Sales Sheet

Selection #: SIDVD547
UPC: 823564517292
Street Date: July 14, 2009
Retail: 19.95
Run Time: 139 minutes

A Jihad By Any Other Name...Is A Crusade

2009-05-19T01:38:00.002-04:00

From the San Francisco Chronicle

Pentagon reports no longer quote Bible

Monday, May 18, 2009

(05-18) 16:21 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --

The Pentagon said Monday it no longer includes a Bible quote on the cover page of daily intelligence briefings it sends to the White House as was practice during the Bush administration.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he did not know how long the Worldwide Intelligence Update cover sheets quoted from the Bible. Air Force Maj. Gen. Glen Shaffer, who was responsible for including them, retired in August 2003, according to his biography.

For a period in 2003, at least, the daily reports prepared for President George W. Bush carried quotes from the books of Psalms and Ephesians and the epistles of Peter. At the time, the reports focused largely on the war in Iraq.

The Bible quotes apparently aimed to support Bush at a time when soldiers' deaths in Iraq were on the rise, according to the June issue of GQ magazine. But they offended at least one Muslim analyst at the Pentagon and worried other employees that the passages were inappropriate.

On Thursday, April 10, 2003, for example, the report quoted the book of Psalms — "Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him. ... To deliver their soul from death." — and featured pictures of the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down and celebrating crowds in Baghdad.

"Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand," read the cover quote two weeks earlier, on March 31, above a picture of a U.S. tank driving through the desert, according to the magazine, which obtained copies of the documents.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, on Monday said U.S. soldiers "are not Christian crusaders, and they ought not be depicted as such."

"Depicting the Iraq conflict as some sort of holy war is completely outrageous," Lynn said in a statement. "It's contrary to the constitutional separation of religion and government, and it's tremendously damaging to America's reputation in the world."

Well, now, isn't THAT a big old relief? I cannot BELIEVE they were doing this all along. What part of "separation of Church and State" do they not understand? This is absolutely outrageous.

I'd like to beat THEM into plowshares. Or at least beat them WITH plowshares...

I bet they never thought the part where Jesus says "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord' shall enter the kingdom of heaven" ever applied to them...

La Fheile Bhealtinne Sona Dhibh!

2009-05-01T00:48:00.002-04:00

Which is to say, Happy Beltane!

I must say, the high holydays of our faith always give me such a wonderful feeling of continuity back to our ancient past...as the song sings it...we're still doing as our long-ago ancestors did, and even allowing for modern quirks and tweaks and retconning, they would still recognize what we do today. A joy and a comfort, to be sure.

Cup of Wonder, Jethro Tull

May I make my fond excuses
for the lateness of the hour,
but we accept your invitation,
and we bring you Beltane's flowers.
For the May Day is the great day,
sung along the old straight track.
And those who ancient lines did lay
will heed this song that calls them back.

Pass the word and pass the Lady,
pass the plate to all who hunger.
Pass the wit of ancient wisdom,
pass the Cup of crimson wonder.

Ask the Green Man where he comes from,
ask the Cup that fills with red.
Ask the old grey standing stones
that show the sun its way to bed.
Question all as to their ways,
And learn the secrets that they hold.
Walk the lines of nature's palm,
crossed with silver and with gold.

Pass the Cup and pass the Lady,
pass the plate to all who hunger.
Pass the wit of ancient wisdom,
pass the Cup of crimson wonder.

Join in black December's sadness,
lie in August's welcome corn.
Stir the Cup that's ever filling
with the blood of all that's born.
But the May Day is the great day,
sung along the old straight track.
And those who ancient lines did lay
will heed this song that calls them back.

Pass the word and pass the Lady,
pass the plate to all who hunger.
Pass the wit of ancient wisdom,
pass the Cup of crimson wonder.

Rock She Wrote

2009-04-27T20:45:00.002-04:00

As a break from editing Love Him Madly: Murder at the Whisky A Go-Go for fall release, I’ve been writing songs again. More specifically, for Turk Wayland and his band, Lionheart. Now that he’s on the verge of becoming the co-protagonist I’d always planned for him to be, I needed something to back up his rep as a gifted and talented songwriter.

Of course, I’m not a songwriter, gifted or otherwise, not by profession anyway. I’m a novelist and an essayist/columnist/ad writer/blogger/VERY occasional poet. So it’s been an interesting creative exercise to write Turk’s songs.

At first I thought I’d just have a few lines here and there, tossing them into concert situations for verisimilitude. Turk quickly disabused me of that little notion. No, he said quite firmly, he wanted COMPLETE songs. And a lot of them. And man, did he know how to push! I don’t think I’ve ever taken quite as many orders from one of my characters (not even Aeron!) as I’ve taken from Turk. He wouldn’t let me write anything else until he’d wrung a few songs out of me. And then a few more, as long as I was in the songwriting zone…

I really love it when that happens, of course. When all of a sudden I’m not calling the shots for the book but the book is calling them itself. It’s what all authors hope for and long for, and the thing is, you can’t ever plan for it. It either happens or it doesn’t. You can put yourself in the frame of mind for it to kick in, but all you can do after that is trust it.

And it’s not just writing the songs, oh nooooooo! I set up a whole discography, progressing a fictional band from their first album to superstar status: figuring how many songs on each, what kind, more folky, more bluesy, instrumental, whatever, long-form pieces and little short 2-minute singles. Then I laid out their album release history as well: maybe two albums a year very early on, then one a year, as the albums and musicians alike got more sophisticated and the work took longer to get out.

And factoring in tours, too. I created a complete touring schedule for late 1969, starting with Lionheart at Woodstock and running through the big knockout four-hour show at the Garden in early December. Did I ever have fun with that…I even designed a Lionheart logo and had it printed up on a mug and a t-shirt; bands did very little merchandising in those days, but I wanted some merch for myself, at least. And later there's always cafesociety.com...

Anyway, getting back to the songs. As I’ve said before, they come from a very different place than the books do, and Turk’s songs come from a totally different place than, say, the pieces I wrote for Taliesin or Morric. Jim once told me that he always knew when something came to him whether it was a poem or a song, and not just because one came with music and the other didn’t. I dutifully agreed—after all, he was the pro—but I didn’t really understand until a few years ago, when I started writing for Turk.

I have about fifty of them now, thirty or so of them completed, the others in various stages of construction. They were a bit folkier and simpler when he started, and by this stage of his career they’ve gotten much more complex. They’re very Sixties-sounding, too. Nothing protesty, lot of love songs.
I’ve been using some Airplane songs for models, especially the looser, free-form ones like “Hey Frederick” and “Eskimo Blue Day.” Also Cream, Stones, Beatles. There’s one or two I’d absolutely love to have someone like Eric Clapton do, and I can hear in my head what they’d sound like. Though nobody, not even E.C., is the guitarist Turk is. John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service and James Williamson of the early Stooges probably come the closest; Sandy Bull too, though he wasn’t a rocker.

But the songs are Lionheart’s and nobody else’s. They’re not Doors songs manqué, either; I have some unpublished Jim songs lying around (including some extra verses we wrote together for “People Are Strange”…), and these are NOTHING like them. I can’t even say they’d be the songs I’d have written if I’d been the rock musician in the family and Jim had been the novelist. They’re the songs Turk writes. I just type them up for him.

I wish I were a decent guitarist or singer, so I could make little demo tapes. But I can’t play or sing well enough for that. I do have the hooks and the lead lines in my head, though, so maybe one day I could work with a real musician or band and finally hear what the songs would really sound like. Well, sort of. Nothing will ever be as good as the Lionheart I hear when I’m writing.

But that’s the whole point, really.

Mole's Spring Cleaning

2009-04-18T21:18:00.003-04:00

I've been kinda down for weeks and weeks (Kathleen excepted), so I haven't felt much like doing anything but wallowing. Anyway, I was reading "The Wind in the Willows" last night as I fell asleep, and woke up inspired to clean my own little hole in the riverbank.

Which mostly meant to FINALLY get the old Toshiba TV set out of its precarious perch on a small table in the living room (it's been replaced by a new 28" Sony HD flat-screen, and into the kitchen so I can give it to my upstairs neighbor. It's only about six years old, not digital but still works great, and has a built-in DVD player and VHS player/recorder. And the neighbor had a tiny 13" set, so this is an improvement. And with the converter box that goes with it this one'll be fine come the big digital switcheroo in June.
The new set is awesome: cable quality picture in HD without having to get cable.

ANYway. Moving the set meant I first had to unload this big heavy Jacobean armoire of all the china and crystal and the three silverware chests so I could move it so the TV set could fit through the doorway which the armoire is right next to. Which meant I had to sweep all the dust and loose change and water bottle caps and whatnot. And toss out a ton of old trash: broken bits and bobs, old receipts from 1982, worn-out t-shirts I kept because they might be good to wear under jackets when it rained (never bothered), ancient extension cords, shoals of mismatched buttons, manuals to appliances I don't even HAVE anymore...you know how it goes.

Still not finished: there's a huge chest in the living room that needs to be cleared out (full of old vinyl records), not to mention under the bed. But the energy shift is FANTASTIC! It feels so much lighter and cleaner already, even though I really didn't get rid of a lot of stuff yet, and will probably continue the clean over the next couple of weeks. I kind of also got inspired because though it was nice and tidy and hoovered when Kathleen and Bruce were here, it could have been sooooo much better. And now it is.

Next up: the back room. Books to the Housing Works Cafe, clothes to local charities and the senior center, if they want stuff. Kathleen says she's absolutely ruthless in such matters and will be happy to help when she's back in town after the next installment of pilot shooting, but I'd be ashamed to have her see the horror. Reader mail since 1984, old suitcases, clothes I've never had on my back, clothes I haven't worn for years, books I haven't looked at since 1963...it all goes!

I could put some stuff up on craigslist, but then people would know where I live...so, no. We have a certain area of the ground floor hallway where people put furniture and things to recycle to neighbors, so I'll leave the big things down there. I've left out a ton of stuff over the years (chairs, printers, typewriters, clothes, a big old china hutch with glass front when I got the much nicer antique armoire), and picked up some too (carved Tudor-looking dining room chair with leather upholstered seat and back, nice little filing cabinet); it's all very Green.

Then I think I'll finally get around to fixing up this tall bookcase I have: it's just a plain pine one, light-color finish. I got it for 20 bucks on craigslist, in the neighborhood. But I want to paint it dark brown and get some fancy "carved" molding to put on the shelf edges to Tudor it up so it'll go with the rest of the furniture... And maybe some new sleeping pillows and a nice light summerweight bedspread.

ANYTHING to not write! But I will get back to that too. There're just so many little chores to do first...

Yay!

2009-04-12T21:08:00.000-04:00

My friend Kathleen is here! She's been filming a TV pilot ("Empire State", with David Morse, Michael Nouri and Gail O'Grady) a bit north of here (please spare a bit of mojo for it to get picked up and also filmed here in town, instead of some pathetic wannabe "city" subbing for NYC. Yeah right... Which means NYState and NYC have to continue tax credits for production: it costs them millions and brings in billions, not to mention all the local jobs...), and is going to be around for a few days.

Some East Village-y stuff tomorrow, then we'll see about the rest of the week. We've never done the Circle Line tour round Manhattan, or the Statue of Liberty, or South Street to look at the old ships...but it'll probably be shopping and eating, as usual. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

UPDATE: Monday, we went shopping at some East Village vintage stores (Gabay's and Tokyo Joe's), had hot choc and pastries at Veniero's, hung around my place. Which only the imminence of K's arrival got me to tidy up, and I must say it does look nice. It wasn't dirty, you understand; just messy. Like Aeron's chamber at Fian academy, it looked as if the goats had got in. And set up housekeeping. Shouldn't take me long to trash it up again...

Tuesday: we had lunch at Veselka, this great Ukrainian coffee shop on 2nd Avenue, with my friend Michael: pierogis (M), turkey pot pie (K), corned beef hash with 2 poached eggs (me). All the food is made fresh on premises, even the baked goods (if you're in NYC and have never been, give it a shot), and it was nummy as usual and we were there for two hours just laughing and talking.

Then we walked around a bit in a misty drizzle, and admired the Callery pear trees which are in full flower, and hit Butter Lane, a new and fabulous cupcake cafe, for customized cupcakes. You can have American or French buttercream frosting in your choice of flavors (but is there anything, really, but chocolate??) and your choice of vanilla or chocolate cake. So I went with choc American buttercream with vanilla cake, and so did Michael, and Kathleen had key lime frosting with I think chocolate cake. Dee-lish.

Bruce Abbott, Kathleen's husband, arrived last night from LA, so they're going to a Broadway matinee today, and then we'll see. He's attending Chiller Theatre, a horror con in Parsippany NJ, this weekend...he starred in the two Re-Animator movies and is a guest on the program.

So we'll have some more fun stuff before they leave.

UPDATE 2: Bruce and Kathleen and I hung out at my house, then went to have lunch at Frank, a tiny Italian restaurant on 2nd Avenue: yummo meatballs and pasta and stuff, with phenomenal bread. The restaurant has a dynamite playlist: we heard the Who, the Beatles, my favorite Tom Petty song ("Learning to Fly"), bunch more good stuff.

And then..."Ladies and gentlemen, from Los Angeles California, he Doors!" and Jim crashes the party. "Roadhouse Blues", which was fine. But geez! Can't he leave us alone half an hour to have lunch in peace??? It always happens...he's just gotta get in on the fun. And even have himself announced, just to make sure we didn't miss his presesnce...Kathleen says it happens all the time, ever since the movie. Just Jim, checkin in, keeping tabs...

Then back again to my house for a while and a visit to my jeweler friend Gregg Wolf. Kathleen had to go do some looping for an indie flick she's in with William Hurt, called "The River Why", and Bruce had to go out to Parsippany for the horror con. She's going home tomorrow and he'll leave on Saturday.

So great to see them! They both look gorgeous, and if K's pilot sells and they can shoot it here, they'll be here a lot more. Yay!

Pirates of the Not-Caribbean

2009-04-11T19:34:00.001-04:00

I'm sure most if not all of you have been reading about the pirates off the coast of Somalia, taking ships and crews hostage for money...

It's amazing, really. For the first time in a couple of hundred years at least, pirates are systematically working an area of the world's waters. Oh, there have been pirates recently in other places, like Indonesia, but the Somali pirates are much, much more systematically into it and better equipped.

So now there's this American, Captain Richard Phillips, who's being held hostage under threat of death and who actually tried to escape by jumping overboard after all his crew were released. But the pirates caught him and dragged him back. What a guy! Let's hope he comes safely home. Send in some Navy SEALS to sneak aboard the little lifeboat thingy where they're holding him and slit the pirates' throats.

But here's what I'm wondering: since this area is known to be so dangerous, (a) why are there no warship convoys to escort merchant ships, and (b) why don't the world's navies just blow these guys out of the water? They're PIRATES. They've put themselves beyond the pale of the protection of law. Give 'em a warning (or not), then explode them out of existence.

I'm only for pirates when they're Captain Jack Sparrow. This sort of thing must be stopped. Come on, run out the long nines and knock holes in them until they sink!

Another Impostor

2009-04-09T03:26:00.002-04:00

http://www.facebook.com/srch.php?nm=patricia+kennealy&sid=98ab18373ccc72a0559b3d4b7e6b3a41

That's the link to the latest goddamned impostor, this one on Facebook, using MY name and MY picture and posing as me. In France, allegedly. Yeah, right.

I have filed an email complaint with Facebook, but since I'm not a member I can only get a limited amount of information.

Anyone reading this, please complain to Facebook if you can, or will. I'd appreciate the support.

I am not now and have never been a member of Facebook, and I'm very angry indeed that some little piece of garbage is out there pretending to be me. Yeesh. Get a life, you lying sod!

Oh, and this is my only Blogger/Blogspot, and I have only one LJ, and only one MySpace page. Just so you know.

Call Me...Patrishmael?

2009-04-07T18:20:00.001-04:00

This is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Thanks to MDF Mary for sending it. You don't have to have read the book/seen the movie to appreciate it, but it makes it soooo much better.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0b6dd500-1d9b-11de-9eb3-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss

Too bad my friend David is no longer quivering with us: he'd have LOVED this, and probably would have wanted to go there next year.

We were both big M-D fans, and used to fling "Oh yeah?? Well, the Whiteness of the Whale to you too, pal!" at each other all the time.

Pope No-Hope

2009-04-03T14:45:00.001-04:00

Mark Morford, once again:

Pope, extra ribbed

Benedict says condoms make AIDS worse. God recoils in shame

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, April 3, 2009

What sort of wretched deity is this? What sort of tormented, clenched God must you believe in to cause you to openly promote ignorance and death for the sake of power and ideology and fear -- always, always a deep fear -- of love and sex and basic human connection?

Let me try to be a little more specific: Is it not some form of strange self-torture, a kind of brutal spiritual immolation, to believe that God is this gloomy, obsessive micromanager, so petty and vindictive regarding what you do with your body that you/he will let people die for the sake of it? Do you have any sort of answer?

Shall we ask the pope?

"The 81-year-old Benedict doesn't mingle with reporters individually but stands before them in the rear section of the plane flanked by aides, and responds drily to the questions."

What a touching image. It's just one of the takeaway lines I took away from the recent story about Pope Benedict and his first, "troubled" trip to Africa, about how he generally handles -- or rather, mishandles -- questions about the grand scheme of worldly things like the soul, war, the role of God in everyday life and whether or not he might be some sort of dangerous underworld automaton sent from the Netherrealms of Ignorance to inflict guilt and desolation upon the world.

It must be true. It's a question I'd want to pose, anyway, were I standing at the back of that papal aircraft staring down this dour and ideologically archaic man who seems very intent on not merely cementing slippery human divinity in the hard concrete of 1500, but also shoving it off a bridge to watch it sink to the bottom, just for good measure.

Perhaps you think I'm out of line. Perhaps you think I'm being too hard on the ultraconservative, disengaged 81-year-old pontiff.

Perhaps you did not read about how Benedict once again condemned condom usage in AIDS-ravaged Africa, apparently one of the last continents still deeply susceptible to the Vatican's insidious, pre-historic sexual ideology, and apparently the one major region that's singlehandedly keeping the church in the news these days because, dear God, are the rest of us not just about done with this sort of myopic sexual hysteria and dangerous misinformation? It would be nice to think so.

But wait, there's more. The pope did not merely say, as the church has yawned for a thousand years, that any form of contraception is wrong. Would that he were so quaint and easily dismissed.

Benedict actually took it a shocking, deadly step further and announced to sick, poor, dying Africans -- 22.5 million cases of HIV and counting fast -- that condoms could actually make AIDS worse, and that everyone should, instead, do what he and his sour band of unhappies have done for the past 2,000 very repressed years and simply not have sex, unless you are married and unsoiled and maybe not even then, because if there's one thing his very cruel God will not tolerate, it's humans doing things with their bodies in any way other than what some vindictive bishop scribbled into an insufferable rulebook about a thousand years ago.

Still out of line? Are you thinking, come on, the pope might not be all that hip to the basic health issues of this lifetime, but so what? He's largely irrelevant to the lives of everyday Catholics. He's just a surreal figurehead, a sad spectacle parading through the streets of foreign cities in his gold-dipped shoes and a scepter made of tears. Who cares about his harmful lies, really?

Perhaps you're right. Perhaps we shouldn't really give a damn for places where people are dying of diseases that could, at least in part, be easily prevented by simple sexual information and education, but which are instead being made worse by the appalling lies of someone who claims to have the Almighty on speed dial. What does it matter? Don't we have larger issues to worry about? Have you seen the housing market?

Perhaps you wish to point out all the good the church does in the world, the various charities and outreach programs and shelters for the poor and so on. And you know what? You are absolutely right. There are some lovely people at play in the fields of the lord, even if that lord is a bit of a domineering, patriarchal megalomaniac who's never really satisfied.

There is other good news: Some bishops already operate in open defiance of the Vatican's ignorance and publicly disagree with the pope's silly pronouncements. What's more, plenty of Catholic charities already freely distribute condoms to those living with AIDS (though of course, not to schools or to healthy sinners).

Very well then. Perhaps we should look at it differently, and use Benedict as our grand reminder that the general Rule of Divinity still holds true: the more you claim to be some sort of inviolable authority on things sacred and holy, the less you are to be trusted and the more we should all hope and pray for your urgent obsoletion. Simple enough?

(Cross reference the pope with, say, the Dalai Lama, widely considered to be one of the most divinely luminous beings on the planet, a man who claims, well, absolutely no divine authority whatsoever. His only claim? A deep humility shot through with astonishing kindness and love, a man who is always learning, always open to new ideas, the fluid and illusive nature of this life. What a contrast).

But don't just take my word for it. Listen to the foreign press -- American media being generally too timid and nervous to dare criticize the church too aggressively -- where response to the pope's condom stance was one of open-throated disgust and outrage.

"When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record," The Lancet, one of the world's most respected medical journals, said in an editorial.

Or maybe you agree more with former French prime minister Alain Juppe, who said that "this pope is starting to be a real problem" because he lives in "a situation of total autism." Or maybe German Green European deputy, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who seethed, "We've had enough of this pope," and described his condom comments as "close to premeditated murder."

There you go. Not even Obama would have the balls to say something like that.

So, what can you do about it all? Can you support Spain as it announces, one day after Benedict's deadly edict, that it will donate one million condoms to Africa? Shall you join the multitude of international Facebook protests? Shall you merely sigh and shake your head at the ongoing small-mindedness of major organized religion, and wonder when we might finally evolve past it? Absolutely.

Meantime, maybe we can simply hope, when this pope's bitter, conservative reign is over and white smoke next rises from the Sistine Chapel, it will in celebration of someone who, if not exactly progressive and open-minded and full of joy at the deep pleasures of this life, will at least be, at bare minimum, not someone who so cruelly demeans it.

Wow. Just...wow. Perhaps when that smoke rises, it will be the indicator of the funeral pyre of something rancid and rotten that has long overstayed its time.

RIP Manny's

2009-04-01T20:18:00.001-04:00

I see where Manny's Music Store, that West 48th Street musicianly mecca, has lost its lease and may have to close.

This makes me so very sad. Manny's was where I bought my first real guitar (a lovely Goya, back in 1964) and my first SERIOUS guitar (a Martin D-8, I think it was, or a D-28? A big honkin' dreadnought, anyway!). And I recall happy times there with musicians of my acquaintance back in the day...EVERYbody shopped at Manny's, from Dylan on down.

I even put Manny's into one of my rock murder mystery books (nothing you've seen so far yet; it's not until Rennie and Turk move to New York in Book 6 or so, and he goes up to Manny's to buy yet another axe to add to the eighty or so he already owns, to her puzzlement and dismay).

But that's what people did at Manny's. They had a "you try it, you buy it" rule, so guitarists looking to buy had to make do with "Old Yeller", a by-now-extremely-battered yellow-finish Strat. Not helpful if you wanted to buy a Gibson, I guess. But the people who played Old Yeller included Clapton, Hendrix, McCartney, Harrison, Cocker and Garcia...most of them now dead. (Including Paul.)

Anyway, Manny and his wife, who owned the place, were really nice, and I got a decent professional-courtesy discount on my Martin (the most expensive thing I then owned). since my publisher, Pauline, was tight with them. The store may not close altogether; it's still being determined if the current owners want to be bothered with moving to a new location. It would be great if it stayed around.

A girl and her axe...maybe I should finally go and buy that black Strat I keep dreaming about, before they close. Turk would want me to...

Bookishness

2009-03-29T12:50:00.003-04:00

1. Do you prefer to read hardcover or paperback books? Hardcover or larger sized paperbacks? Borrow?

Neither a book borrower nor a book lender be I. (Except sometimes I borrow from my mom and sister. And I ALWAYS return books I borrow, within days. And if I do lend, I insist on the book's return. Which doesn't happen, and I learned the hard way, so that's why I don't lend but rather buy copies for people if I want them to read something.)

If I want to read a book, I buy it. Always hardcover, unless it's just a piece of fluff like a mystery to read on a plane or if I want to read the book NOW and I can't find or afford a hardcover at that moment. Doesn't have to be new; I buy from second-hand bookstores and eBay all the time. Which makes no sense, since I refuse to borrow books from the library around the corner, or indeed any library; I get all grossed out by who's had their grimy, germy paws all over the book.

Anyway, having neither unlimited book income nor shelf space, I'm careful about what I do buy. I like to think I already own pretty much all the books I'd ever want anyway...several thousand at last count. And any new book has to get along with the other books, or out it goes. Yes, I'm insane; I know.

2. Do you have a favorite place to read in your home?

In bed, which is also where I write (like dear Sir Winston Churchill) and watch TV.

3. Do you have a favorite place to read away from, or outside of, your home?

Reading to me is a sacred function, so I don't generally do it promiscuously in public. I get so absorbed and taken outside myself while reading that I don't like other people seeing me do it. I won't read on a bus or train or in a car, and I don't even like to read on planes, though if it's cloudy or dark out, I will; I prefer to pop on the iPod and look out the window instead.

4. Do you snack while you read?

You bet, and I am very careful not to mess up the book. Not just snacks, but full meals, even, and it often amuses me to tailor the food to the book: buttered scones and hot cocoa for English cozies, nice crispy bacon for LOTR.

5. Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

Depends. Generally no, as I was taught from childhood that you didn't ever mark up books, and I didn't have a lot of them to begin with back then (though I had more books than anyone else in the house), so I treasured them and tended to keep them immaculate.
As I still do: when I'm done reading a book, you can't tell I ever read it. Hardcovers stay pristine through many rereads, but paperbacks tend to get really beat up, yet another reason why I'll buy HCs if I can.

I will highlight only a very few working reference books, such as ones I used while writing my Keltiad, and still I almost never WRITE in them; that's still a deeply ingrained no-no.
I will dog-ear, very sparingly, and generally just favorite passages, for ease of finding them again, never just to mark my place; my Aubrey-Maturin books probably have ten dog-ears apiece.

And I would NEVER, not with a gun to my head, mark up or dog-ear an old, rare, first-edition or otherwise valuable book, of which I'm proudly boastful to say I have lots. They're read carefully and carefully shelved after reading. I'm leaving them all to the St. Bonaventure library, with a few bequests to friends.

6. How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

I read so fast, there's generally no need to mark my place because I just roll right on through to the end in one sitting. If I do have to stop reading, I tuck in the front or back dustjacket flap to mark my place. Or else I just remember where I left off. Very occasionally I'll use a bookmark, if something's to hand.

And I have to read a book as soon as I get it home, because if I don't, how will I know where to shelve it?

7. Fiction, non-fiction, or both?

Judging from the shelves in the book room, probably 50-50.

8. Hardcopy or audiobooks?

Always hardcopy. I can't stand having someone else's voice get between me and the book. I like to hear my own voice reading it in my own head.

The same way I feel about religion, actually...nothing between me and Deity.

9. Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

I can stop whenever I want to. Really. But I never do, and since, as mentioned above, I'm such a fast reader, I very seldom need to. Or, indeed, want to: I read the last Harry Potter in seven hours flat, as I recall, because I could, but also because I couldn't bear the idea of going to bed Not Knowing What Happened.

10. If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? Write it down to look it up later? Just try to infer what it means from the rest of the sentence, and keep going?

In all modesty, it's been many, many decades since I've encountered an unfamiliar word.

But if I did, it would undoubtedly be something technical: medical or computer or some such. So if it didn't respond to my Latin knowledge trying to ferret out its meaning, I'd probably just press on and look it up later, if it was a problem.

11. What are you currently reading?

Just finished "Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster", by Alison Weir, and "Girls Like Us", by Sheila Weller (a triple, interwoven bio of Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell and Carole King), and am rereading "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded," by Simon Winchester, and "Body of Opinion", by Susannah Stacey.

12. What is the last book you bought?

"The Wanderer", the posthumously completed fourth book of Cherry Wilder's Rulers of Hylor series. It's good, and it was interesting to get closure on some characters, even if it's not the closure I wanted, but I could really tell where Cherry left off and Katya Reimann, a far less talented writer, took over to finish it.

These days, the shelves just can't take any more, so the rule is that for every book I buy I must deaccession at least one, preferably two. This is no problem: I donate them to the Housing Works Book Cafe, usually, at least the general-interest ones.
When I get around to dispersing Celtic books, as I will shortly, they will all go to homes where they'll be appreciated and welcome. I really don't need most of them anymore; Keltia is so well established now that the books are their own references. When I get some time down the road, I'll put up a list and you guys can put in requests; I'll just ask for the cost of postage and an envelope.

Same with myth/shamanic/otherwise Witchy books; I just have no more need of those either, and I seldom if ever reread them. So they'll go too. There's also some pricey astronomy books (mostly on stars) that somebody might like.

The rock books I'll keep for Rennie use and reference, and the fiction/poetry/history/bios stay always.

13. What is your all time favorite book?

That's like asking which is your favorite child. There are far too many to list, depending on mood and reason and season.

14. Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can read more than one at a time?

I prefer to be literarily serially monogamous. It's disrepectful not to give a book your full attention; that would be like talking on your cellphone while on a date. Though I can, and often do, read while watching TV. Never anything I'm really into, though. And I NEVER listen to music while reading a book; that's disrespectful twice over.

15. Do you like re-reading books?

I reread continually, for love of the books and for comfort. There are great swatches of hundreds of books I know by heart. If it's not worth rereading, it's not worth reading in the first place.

BONUS: Are there certain themes/ideas/qualities you tend to be drawn to in books?

Hmm. I guess it's more the themes/ideas/qualities that repel me from certain books: nastiness, gross-outs, vampirism (blood or psychological), anything icky, sticky or oversexedly porno, hard-boiled crime stuff, police procedurals, political stuff, graphic violence or autopsy stuff, unpleasant authors, boring characters, uninspired or overly fanciful names (especially in fantasy; those ones with apostrophes and unpronounceable spellings, like R'lehyr'tan'iss or K'r'inn A'le'XannR, or just stupid ones like RainbowLilac Silverwindmistdancer of the GreenpleasantvalenearAvalon).

I always scan the first chapter of a book before I buy it; if I don't like the tone, or the names, it stays unbought.
That rules out a lot, though not half so much as you'd think...

And I have never EVER in my LIFE read the last chapter first to find out "how it ends." The end means nothing without everything that goes before it; what's the point? Besides, I really hate spoilers...why do people want to ruin their own pleasure?

Spring On Horseback, Like A Lady

2009-03-23T15:11:00.001-04:00

I wish! But I did see some horsies today, the NYPD kind, and very handsome beasties they are too. The horses, not the cops. Well...

ANYWAY. The apple tree across the street, my favorite street tree on my block, has sprouted tiny green leaves, so I guess winter is over and done and the voice of the turtle will soon be heard in the land. I never did get my big giant humongous snow...though the weather people claim it was a snowier than usual winter. I doubts it, yes I does.

I won't put the winter things away just yet, though...

A Black Day For Ireland

2009-03-17T20:27:00.004-04:00

...was the day the slave Sucellos, later to be called Patrick, showed up on its shores.

I have no patience with the green-haired, green-beered, shamrockery-spouting "Sure and begorrah" morons who have co-opted this day, so don't anybody be wishing me a Happy St. Paddy's Day or the road rising to meet me or any other faux-Irish-accented claptrap.

I hate Patrick. And all his works and all his pomps. HATE HIM. He was a tool of the pope and the author of pretty much all the manifold wrongs that have befallen Ireland since his day. (I'm not named for him, btw. I consider myself named for my great-great-grandfather. So there.)

Patrick ushered in the cultural imperialism and militaristic occupation of England, pope-endorsed, that has fucked Ireland up almost beyond repair for the past 800 or so years.

Patrick decimated and stigmatized all the lovely indigenous Irish traditions and religious practices that had prevailed since the Celts first arrived there. He did this by cynically Christianizing them, and many of the Irish, wishful to please and little caring if they had yet another name for the Goddess, caved. To their disgrace.

I wrote a whole book about this. "The Deer's Cry". And I'm STILL pissed off.

So on March 17, I celebrate rather Pan-Celtic Day. I wear Morrison tartan, and Celtic/Keltic jewelry, and I stay miles away from the vomitous, and vomiting, hordes of Irish-for-a-Day amateurs that infest Manhattan every year on this day.

That's all.

Oh, and since the "snakes" he allegedly drove out were really Pagans, possessors of the Serpent Wisdom, let us lift our voices in a mighty shout: Bring back those snakes!

The Best Songs I've Heard in AGES...

2009-03-13T15:47:00.000-04:00

Last night, on the trainwreck I can't stop watching that is "Grey's Anatomy": "A Storm Is Going to Come", by Piers Faccini. FANTASTIC, and already being played endlessly on my iPod.

Other wonderfulness:

"Ballad of Hollis Brown", Iggy and the Stooges. AMAZING guitar work by James Williamson. Song is just him, Iggy's vocal and a beat box. Unbelievable.

Also, Iggy's "The Passenger." Can't stop playing it.

"Coal Hole Cavalry", Black Pig Border Morris. Eerie morris tune set to a march beat. I borrowed it for Turk in Rennie 2. And thanked them in the Acknowledgments, of course!

"Bring On the Wonder", Susan Enan/Sarah MacLachlan. Heard this on "Bones", and it's just gorgeous.

Probly a few more. I'll add as I think of them...

(I've also been playing the hell out of "Ma Baker", by Boney M, but that's probably an acquired taste...)

Tibet: Fifty Years On

2009-03-10T19:15:00.000-04:00

A great song...about a terrible crime that continues to this day...

Listen to my story. got two tales to tell
One of fallen glory. one of vanity
The world's roof was raging, but we were looking fine
'cause we built that thing and it grew wings
In 1959

Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above
Desolation angels
Served it up with love
Ignitin' strife like every form of life
Then moved by bold design
Slid in that thing and it grew wings
In 1959

It was blood, shining in the sun
First: freedom!
Speeding the American claim
Freedom; freedom; freedom; freedom!

China was the tempest; madness overflowed
Lama was a young man
watched his world in flames
Taking glory down by the edge of clouds
It was a cryin' shame
Another lost horizon: Tibet, the fallen star
Wisdom and compassion crushed, in the land of Shangri-La

But in the land of the Impala, honey, well,
We were lookin' fine
'cause we built that thing and it grew wings
In 1959
'cause we built that thing and it grew wings
In 1959

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
In 1959...1959...1959...1959...1959...1959...1959
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times
1959.

---Patti Smith, "1959"

Arma Feminamque Cano

2009-03-09T14:27:00.000-04:00

The arma in question being our present First Lady's. Apparently the voice of the flabby is being heard in the land, as to whether Michelle Obama should cover up those gloriously well-toned biceps.

Of course, we're only hearing this voice from the flabby-minded as well as the flabby-armed. One David Brooks, Republican apologist and renowned bottom-feeder, actually told NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd that Mrs. Obama should "put away Thunder and Lightning."

He ACTUALLY NAMED HER BICEPS!!! What a howling dork is this. I bet his own biceps are pencil-thin and can barely manage to raise themselves to comb his thinning hair. He's lucky Thunder and Lightning don't punch his lights out for saying that.

He's not the only one yammering for the First Lady to cover her limbs, though. When she wore that super eggplant-colored sleeveless dress at the session of Congress the other week, all sorts of idiots were baying like junkyard dogs about how "inappropriate" the dress was. Oh please! She looked fantastic. They're just jealous that Laura Bush was never so toned in her life. Hell, GEORGE was never that toned...or his mum and dad either.

I totally envy Mrs. O those upper arms. Nobody sees mine, of course, at my age, but though they're certainly not as fine as hers, they're pretty darn strong, and I use free weights on a regular basis, not to mention pull-down bars (60-75 pounds depending on how buff I feel that day, which is not Laird Hamilton class but pretty good for a chick) and rowing pulls and other instruments of torture at the gym, to make and keep them so. Even the bodybuilder gay guys approve.

But the public (in certain quarters) hostility to Michelle's display of armature fascinates me. Did these sexist cretins think Jackie Kennedy's far more extensive display was equally unseemly? As a young teenager, I remember noticing how many lovely sleeveless evening gowns and elegant sleeveless daytime dresses Mrs. Kennedy wore in her White House time, and how gorgeous she looked in them. Not toned like Michelle, of course. Nancy Reagan, ditto; and even Mamie freakin' Eisenhower!

(For a primer on First Lady style down the ages: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-sferrazza-anthony/michelle-obama-the-first_b_171246.html )
(And for rational comment on Michelle's sleevelessness: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bonnie-fuller/michelle-obamas-sleevegat_b_171172.html )

So perhaps THAT'S the rub. It's fine for a First Lady to show her guns if they're not POWERFUL guns. Well, you know what you can do with that...

Michelle Obama could probably knock David Brooks out with one swing. The fact that Barack Obama is perfectly happy living with and loving a woman of strength (in ALL ways strength) just makes him look even better.

So, Michelle sister, you just go right on wearing those dresses and showing off those splendid appendages. Maybe a call to arms...such arms...is just what we need.

Dowager Boomer

2009-03-04T00:03:00.000-05:00

That's me! And today, March 4, is my 63rd birthday. Which is fine. I couldn't get the Trader Joe's chocolate ganache cake I sought (they were all out of it), but I found a most worthy substitute: TJ's Chocolate Dilemma, a glorious box o' cheesecake, comprising 2 slices each of marble, triple chocolate, plain and chocolate-chip. What perfection. This weekend, I'm going to my mom's (to congratulate her, as I do every year, on having produced such a wonder child), and she and I and my sister and my two eldest nieces will celebratorily consume all this chocolatey goodness. (There's a Chocolate Lava cake as backup...)

But more importantly, today is, how perfect is THIS, National Grammar Day! And Conanne the Grammarian rejoices that it should be so. This day of all days is so designated by SPOGG, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, a fine and upstandingly correct organization. I encourage all of you to join.

And as a birthday gift to me, a personal boon and favor, perhaps people could resolve to finally break themselves of the "between you and I/me" betise...it would do a lot to clean up Dodge.

That's all.

In Like A Lion

2009-03-02T03:30:00.000-05:00

I hardly dare mention it, for fear of making it go away...but...it looks like......SNOW!!!!! And a lot of it. What a nice birthday present, a few days in advance...

The weather droids are saying maybe DOUBLE DIGITS in town...a foot or more!

1:00 pm

Well, the snow has wound down for the moment, but we're expecting another shot of it later this afternoon. We have about 9 inches, so maybe we'll hit a foot. It looks lovely, and I've been out already once today. Came back after a brisk walk around the corner past St. Mark's Church while the snow was still falling; newly inspired to work on Rennie, just not the next book, but the one where she moves to NYC and into a house right across from said church. A snow scene, naturally.

I love writing cozy scenes like that. Perhaps you've noticed. Scenes where the weather is a major player, and people are all cozy and warm inside, usually eating something nice.

So in the pursuit of verisimilitude, I've just had lovely baked ziti and meatball leftovers from last night's order-in (I'm SO lazy...), and will watch a soap opera or two, and then I shall put my monster Sorel snowboots on and go out again, to trudge up to 3rd and 14th and Trader Joe's.

I am hoping, probably vainly, that it won't be crowded today, but I know my fellow New Yorkers, and they're all thinking exactly the same thing I am. Which means the usual queue wrapping around the store like an anaconda...but I need that chocolate ganache cake for Wednesday. Well, okay, not really "need". Just want. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Miami Price

2009-03-01T17:51:00.001-05:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Doors at Miami. Which, to my mind, was THE single watershed moment in the downfall of the band, a hugely contributory factor to Jim's out-of-control death spiral, and an equally huge factor in our own relationship.

May those whose political agendas were responsible for it rot in hell, or at the very least reap the karma they so richly deserve. A million sorrows that we were the ones to pay for it...no suspended sentences here.

Heck of a Job, Clownie!

2009-02-25T16:24:00.001-05:00

I'm getting really sick of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. First he decides to be all obstructionist with the President's stimulus package, backing away from the table and deciding he's far too good to be accepting federal money (this while his state is suffering, thanks to him). Then he tries to come all over presidential quality by strutting down the hall of the White House and giving his rebuttal to President Obama's speech last night.

Which was just another regurgitation of the same sour party line they've all been spouting. Haven't they heard? THE REPUBLICAN PARTY LOST. THE PEOPLE REJECTED IT. At least enough of them did, thank all gods. IT DOESN'T WORK. IT GOT THIS COUNTRY INTO THE MESS IT IS NOW IN. What part of that don't they understand?

Basically, he's a jerk, and a mean-spirited jerk at that. And if the people of Louisiana do not rise up in a body and vomit him forth then they deserve him and everything he does for them. Which is a big fat nothing.

I mean, what kind of governor turns down free money for his state, where a great city still lies in ruins thanks to Republican policies (or lack thereof) and the unemployment rate is high and people are unbelievably poor and struggling to begin with? A vain, arrogant, self-serving and uncaring one; likewise the govs. of Texas and Mississippi.

Even Ah-nuld said that if Louisiana and Texas and Mississippi don't want the federal money, he'd be happy to take it for California.

Is pleasing the neocon Dark Lords of 2012 so important to these creeps that they would let their people suffer? What the hell is the matter with Republicans?? McCain, Palin, Jindal... Would they really rather see this country go down the tubes entirely than bear a hand and support Obama's policies? Which may or may not work...I'm no economist...but at least it's SOMETHING, and not more of the same swill that's been pushed down our protesting throats for the past eight years.

Yeesh.

Way Down, Below The Ocean

2009-02-24T14:16:00.000-05:00

Sorry, I keep forgetting to update this blog...

I see where Google Earth is emphatically denying it has discovered the location of Atlantis. (It's in the Pegasus galaxy, of course, as we all know very well!).

Apparently a recently released image shows startlingly regular lines, like a street grid, just off the western Africa coast, in the neighborhood of the Azores. Which is, as many of you may know, one of the historically possible locations of Atlantis...beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

I have to say I'm really enjoying this. Oh, Google Earth is braying that the regularity of the lines is due to some mechanical reason, that's just the way the pics are taken, ship tracks or something. But I wouldn't be so sure.

Still, Plato is really specific about the structure of Atlantis: three rings of land, two of sea, concentric circles, etc. So a New York-like grid the size of Wales, with eight-mile-long "streets", probably isn't it.

But it's lovely to think about, and who's to say that Google Earth won't discover Numenor one of these fine days? (Oh look, that was my house, right over there, the one with the columns...)

Everything Old Is New Again

2009-02-09T14:39:00.001-05:00

February 10, 2009, The New York Times

For Catholics, Heaven Moves a Step Closer

By PAUL VITELLO

The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”

In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.

The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (where Martin Luther denounces the selling of them in 1517 and ignites the Protestant Reformation) simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied world.

“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

The indulgence is among the less-noticed, less-disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it. You can get one for yourself, or for someone else, living or dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1857 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.

It has no currency in the bad place.

“It’s what?” asked Marta de Alvarado, 34, a bank cashier in Manhattan, when told that indulgences were available this year at several churches in New York City. “I just don’t know anything about it,” she said, leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral at lunchtime. “I’m going to look into it, though.”

The return of indulgences began with Pope John Paul II, who authorized bishops to offer them in 2000 as part of the celebration of the church’s third millennium. But the offers have increased markedly under his successor, Pope Benedict, who has made plenary indulgences part of church anniversary celebrations nine times in the last three years. The current offer is tied to the yearlong celebration of St. Paul, which continues through June.

Dioceses in the United States have responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This year’s offer has been energetically promoted in places like Washington, Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., and Tulsa, Okla. It appeared prominently on the Web site of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which announced that any Catholic could receive an indulgence at any of six churches on any day, or at dozens more on specific days, by fulfilling the basic requirements: going to confession, receiving holy communion, saying a prayer for the pope and achieving “complete detachment from any inclination to sin.”

But just a few miles west, in the Archdiocese of New York, indulgences are available at only one church, and the archdiocesan Web site makes no mention of them. (Cardinal Edward M. Egan “encourages all people to receive the blessings of indulgences,” said his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, who added that he was unaware that the offer was missing from the Web site, but would soon have it posted.)

The indulgences, experts said, tend to be advertised more openly in dioceses where the bishop is more traditionalist, or in places with fewer tensions between liberal and conservative Catholics.

“In our diocese, folks are just glad for any opportunity to do something Catholic,” said Mary Woodward, director of evangelization for the Diocese of Jackson, Miss., where only 3 percent of the population is Catholic. At church recently, she said, parishioners flocked to her for information about indulgences. “What all do I have to do again to get one of those?” she said they asked.

Even some priests admit that the rules are hard to grasp.

“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the designated site in the New York archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence — “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”

Getting Catholics back into the confession booth, in fact, was one of the underlying motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul II described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the weekly Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of ‘personal sin’ back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.

“The good news is we’re not selling them anymore,” he added.

To remain in good standing, Catholics are required to confess their sins at least once a year. But in a survey last year by a research group at Georgetown University, three-quarters of Catholics said they went to confession less often or not at all.

Under the rules in the “Manual of Indulgences,” published by the Vatican, confession is a prerequisite for getting an indulgence.

Among liberal Catholic theologians, the return of the indulgence seems to be more of a curiosity than a cause for alarm. “Personally, I think we’re beyond the time when indulgences mean very much,” said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame who supports the ordination of women and the right of priests to marry. “It’s like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube of original thought. Most Catholics in this country, if you tell them they can get a plenary indulgence, will shrug their shoulders.”

One recent afternoon outside Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Forest Hills, Queens, two church volunteers disagreed on the relevance of indulgences for modern Catholics.

Octavia Andrade, 64, a retired secretary, laughed as she recalled a time when children would race through the rosary repeatedly to get as many indulgences as they could — usually in increments of 5 or 10 years — “as if we needed them, then.”

Still, she supports their reintroduction. “Anything old coming back, I’m in favor of it,” she said. “More fervor is a good thing.”

Karen Nassauer, 61, a retired hospital social worker who meets Mrs. Andrade almost daily for Mass, said she was baffled by the return to a practice she never quite understood to begin with.

“I mean, I’m not saying it is necessarily wrong,” she said. “But I had always figured they were going to let this fade into the background, to be honest. What does it mean to get ‘time off’ in Purgatory? What is ‘five years’ in terms of eternity?”

The latest indulgence offers de-emphasize the years-in-Purgatory formulations of old in favor of a less specific accounting, with more focus on ways in which people can help themselves — and one another — come to terms with sin.

“It’s more about praying for the benefit of others, doing good deeds, acts of charity,” said the Rev. Kieran Harrington, spokesman for the Brooklyn diocese.

After Catholics, the people most expert on the topic are probably Lutherans, whose church was born from the schism over indulgences and whose leaders have met regularly with Vatican officials since the 1960s in an effort to mend their differences.

“It has been something of a mystery to us as to why now,” said the Rev. Dr. Michael Root, dean of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., who has participated in those meetings. The renewal of indulgences, he said, has “not advanced” the dialogue.

“Our main problem has always been the question of quantifying God’s blessing,” Dr. Root said. Lutherans believe that divine forgiveness is a given, but not something people can influence.

But for Catholic leaders, most prominently the pope, the focus in recent years has been less on what Catholics have in common with other religious groups than on what sets them apart — including the half-forgotten mystery of the indulgence.

“It faded away with a lot of things in the church,” said Bishop DiMarzio of Brooklyn. “But it was never given up. It was always there. We just want people to return to the ideas they used to know.”

Well, all righty then! Indulgences have always seemed to me to be a weasely thing, typically hypocritical Churchiness: yeah, sure, go out and commit a few really big bad mortal sins, as many as you like, then go get shrived, say a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys for penance, and bingo, you're good to go to heaven. Cheap, fast, easy.

I like to think the Catholic God is a bit smarter than to fall for such sharp practice, and I thought that even when I was a beady-eyed seven-year-old at Our Lady of Perpetual Help school. In fact, so scornful was I of this sort of thing back then that I stockpiled as many indulgences as I could get, through novenas, ejaculations (no, not the kind your gutter minds are thinking of...little brief prayers or exclamations of holy names, like "Sacred Heart of Jesus!" or "Mary, refuge of sinners!", each good for five or ten years off your time in Purgatory---hey, it all added up!), litanies (I still love the magnificent and beautiful one to the Blessed Mother), etc. Doubtless my skepticism negated all these straight out of the box and wiped my scorecard, but I figured hey, why not.

"The ideas they used to know", eh? Is that why Benny the Ratz is bringing back that charming prayer for the conversion of the Jews? Can Limbo be far behind? (My mother mentioned Limbo to her parish priest a few years ago, and had to pick him up off the floor, so astounded was he to even hear the name...apparently Limbo too has fallen out of fashion) Or the Inquisition? Which everybody expects?

This is exactly the kind of Church-hierarchy tricksiness that gives Catholicism a bad name. The real question should be, did Jesus do indulgences, and would he approve of such a shortcut to a free pass to heaven? I have to think the answer would be No and No. So there it is, or should be. At least the indulgences aren't being sold. Yet.

It all makes me deeply thankful for the blessedly sane, healthy ways of the Goddess and the God.

Pope Palpatine Is At It Again...

2009-01-28T18:00:00.001-05:00

From The Times of London:

Pope Benedict XVI’s rehabilitation of a British bishop who denies that millions of Jews died in Nazi gas chambers has alarmed Catholics who fear it risks dealing a fatal blow to the inter-faith dialogue promoted by his predecessor.

Over the weekend the Pope issued a decree welcoming back into the Roman Catholic Church Richard Williamson, 68, and three other breakaway bishops excommunicated by John Paul II in 1988. The bishops had been ordained without Vatican permission by the renegade French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The Vatican decree referred to the need to overcome the “scandal of divisiveness” and seek reconciliation and “full communion” with Lefebvre’s order, the ultra-conservative Society or Fraternity of St Pius X. It lifted the excommunication not only of Bishop Williamson, rector of the Seminary of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix in La Reja, Argentina, but also of Bernard Fellay, the leader of the order, Alfonso de Gallareta, and Tissier de Mallerais.

Renzo Gattegna, head of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy, said the rehabilitation of Bishop Williamson was “terrible not only for Jewish people but for the whole of humanity”. He said that Italian Jews would refuse to take part in joint prayers with Christians on Tuesday marking Holocaust Day, known in Italy as “The Day of Memory”.

Some Vatican officials are also saying privately that although the Pope’s stated aim was to unite the Church by bringing the rebels back into the fold, his move would have the opposite effect. “The Church will pay a price for this” one Vatican prelate said. “The Pope is undermining the legacy of John Paul II.”

Benedict’s actions are also reviving his old nickname when he was Cardinal Ratzinger — that of the “Panzerkardinal”, known for his hardline conservatism as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“This is not so much an act of grace as a surrender,” the veteran Vatican watcher Marco Politi said. Benedict wanted a new era of reconciliation, “but the new era has begun with a lie. The Pope has made a openly declared and unshakeable anti-Semite a legitimate Bishop”.

Lefebvre, who died in 1991, had set up “a fanatical and reactionary counter-Church which openly contested, repudiated and defamed all the crucial points of Vatican II, from respect for the Jews to modernisation of the liturgy”. There are an estimated 500 Lefebvrist bishops and 600,000 followers worldwide.

Gianni Gennari, a theologian and contributor to the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire, said it was “shameful that the lifting of the excommunications was not accompanied by any repentance whatever on the part of the Lefebvrists”.

Bishop Williamson, who has said that the Vatican is controlled by Satan and that the Jews are bent on world domination, reiterated in a broadcast last week on Swedish television that the historical evidence was “hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers”.

He added: “I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them by gas chambers.”

Prosecutors in Regensburg in Germany, where the interview took place — and where the Pope once studied and taught — have opened an inquiry. Holocaust denial is an offence under German law.

Father Federico Lombardi, the papal spokesman, insisted the lifting of the excommunications had “absolutely nothing to do” with Williamson’s views on the Holocaust. “One is not connected to the other,” he said. Vatican Radio said Williamson’s statements had been condemned by other members of the St Pius X fraternity.

This month Elia Enrico Richetti, the chief rabbi of Venice, said Jews had been deeply offended by the reintroduction by the Pope in March of a Good Friday Latin prayer for the conversion of the Jews as part of the revived Tridentine Mass. “We are moving toward the cancellation of 50 years of Church history” the rabbi said.

Other Catholic-Jewish tensions include plans by the Pope to beatify Pius XII, the wartime pontiff accused by critics of failing to speak out in defence of Jews. The Vatican insists that Pius helped the Jews while avoiding public statements that would have made matters worse, and has demanded the removal of a plaque attacking him at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

The Pope has twice visited synagogues, in the US and his native Germany, and sought to make amends with the Islamic world after a speech at Regensburg two years ago in which he appeared to suggest that Islam was inherently violent and irrational. However, he recently declared that inter-religious dialogue “in the strict sense of the word” between Christians, Jews and Muslims was “not possible”.

There are so many things that are so horribly wrong with this that I don't know where to begin... Oh wait, yes, I do: THIS GUY RICHARDSON IS A TOTAL NUTTER and should be "rehabilitated" in a rather different sort of place. The kind with padded walls.

Un.Be.Lievable.

To start on a minor note, last I heard of Catholic dogma, Mary is NOT the "co-redemptrix" (as the name of Richardson's Argentinian seminary---hey, Argentina! Where all good Nazis go!---would have it) right along with Jesus. Unless that's changed. Infallibly, of course. She was a nice Jewish girl, not the Goddess conflation and sexist confection that a bunch of skirt-wearing misogynist males have made her into. Though I kind of like the Goddess identification...inadvertent, I'm sure.

And, frankly, if I believed in Satan it would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that he was indeed in charge of the Vatican, as Richardson posits. In fact, I believe there was a long-ago heresy that held ALL organized religion to be the work of oooh, could it be...SATAN. A quashed heresy, natch.

But the rest of this loony's positions? "Alleged" Holocaust? No gas chambers? ONLY a couple of hundred thousand dead Jews? What kind of crack is this guy ON?

I get the vibe that Benny wants not to have an interfaith dialogue, but to launch a new Crusade. I also get the vibe that if he doesn't STFU, he or his successor (if there is one) will be presiding over the Fall of the Roman Catholic Empire. And he will well deserve the job.

Senatrix Populusque Novum Eboracum

2009-01-26T14:08:00.001-05:00

Forgive the possibly incorrect word endings; it's been a long time since Professor Wallace's Latin class...

Well, we now have a new person in Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate seat, and the long knives are already out. Perhaps justifiably...

I have to say, when I first saw Kirsten Gillibrand's name put into play, I thought this was a good thing. A person from upstate NYS, and a woman. We desperately needed someone to represent the interests of Outside New York City, and at first glance she seemed reasonable.

She may still prove so. I, for one, have no problem with her NRA standing: I like guns, and I believe that as long as criminals have guns, everybody should have them. Not a very liberal attitude, you're thinking (or else an EXTREMELY liberal one)? So shoot me. If I don't get the drop on you first.

She supports gay marriage rights and other such issues. As for the rest, I guess we'll find out. I do think she'll be facing hugeous primary challenges next year and in 2012, and Governor Paterson may find himself doing the same.

Not so much because of Gillibrand, though that, but because he's proven himself to be, or at least to look like, an incompetent dithering fool by his handling of the whole Caroline Kennedy as senator thing.

I didn't approve of Caroline getting the appointment, because I thought she came across as a spoiled, self-entitled little princessy bitch. "Waaah! I'm a Kennedy! My family has suffered! It's my murdered uncle's old Senate seat! Gimme!"

She had no elective experience, couldn't carry on a coherent interview in public, refused to allow reporters access (apparently with good reason), and finally either withdrew in a fit of pique, withdrew because of nanny and tax issues, withdrew honorably for the greater good of the state, or was sabotaged out of contention by Paterson's own people and a hired PR gun, depending on whose story you buy.

Oh, I tell you, New York state politics! An endless source of good unclean fun! I look forward to seeing this play out. Maybe Paterson should have appointed Capt. Sully Sullenberger. At least he demonstrates unflappable grace under pressure. If he can land a crippled jet on the Hudson, he can certainly manage the fractious Senate.

Forty Years On: 25 January 1969 - 25 January 2009

2009-01-25T02:59:00.002-05:00

Forty years ago last night, I saw the Doors at Madison Square Garden. Forty years ago this afternoon, I met Jim for the first time, and changed my life forever.

I describe it all in “Strange Days” just as it happened; the courtesy, the gorgeousness, the heart-stopping fairytale sparks when we touched hands. Now I just want to talk a little about what it felt like.

I was 22 when we met; he had just turned 25. He was wearing a white cotton Mexican shirt and black jeans and Frye boots, the same clothes he’d had on for the Garden concert the night before, and he was in one of his very longhaired periods, right down on his shoulders. I was wearing a dark-gold velour long-sleeved microminidress as a tunic over brown leather pants and cocoa suede boots and a vintage black fur coat, with tigereye scarab earrings, a long, heavy, goldtone chain knotted up and a silver and bloodstone ring (I had very little jewelry at the time, nothing expensive or impressive).

(For all those toxic weasels who sneer about how could I POSSIBLY remember things with such detail, I will say only that if THEY had been lucky enough to be with Jim, they wouldn’t have forgotten anything either…)

We talked for almost three hours, two of those completely one on one; then some other people came in. When we started, there was winter sunlight outside over Central Park; by the time we said goodbye, it was dark. There wasn’t a second in all those hours when I wasn’t completely aware of him and only of him; I was shivering inside, so intensely did fate come on, so conscious was I of him and of how this was going to play out.

I think I knew right then that we were never going to get to live happily ever after, and I decided right then, too, that it didn’t matter, that whatever joy I was lucky enough to have with him, and I knew it would be a lot, would be worth all the pain, which would also be a lot.

I was right. I’m still right.

I also think that I honored him not by sitting around and moping, or delusionally imagining that he was still alive, or pretending that he was coming back, or by losing myself in drugs and whoredom, but by taking my grief in both hands and going out to work every day to support myself, with no help from anyone and no comfort for my loss, and by going on to focus and achieve real works of creativity in my name and his and ours. By having a life, not merely an existence.

I did it for us, and I’m still doing it for us, and I will continue to do it for us until the day he comes to fetch me and we’re together again.

And it all started forty years ago today. I remember that day, and this is how Jim himself remembered it, in a letter:

In a cold chamber
in a cold stone house
in a cold city
on a winter afternoon
a young Empress
is seated in a high-back’d chair
w/roses in her lap

I remember. And he remembered too.

© Patricia Morrison

National Woodstock

2009-01-22T15:39:00.000-05:00

People hugging, singing, laughing, crying. And nobody's even stoned, as far as I can tell. Hundreds of thousands of people, millions, all feeling together for the first time ever. The Dark Knight has run the Joker out of town, and the euphoria is unbelievable.

The loony giddy feeling may or may not dissipate. But I have a feeling that people are so glad for this enormous change that even if the crazy happy goes, since that's hard to sustain, it will be transformed into a settled joy that I like to think will truly be able to accomplish stuff.

I love that he socked it to Shrub, and Shrub had to sit there and take it.

I love that it really feels different today.

I love that I saw eighty-year-old black people crying from joy and eighteen-year-old white people doing the same, though their joy came from different reasons and different roots.

I love that the Obamas look totally nuts about each other and can't keep their hands off each other in public.

I love that we actually seem to have a President who has brains, heart and nerve; who believes that ethics in government are as necessary as ethics in individuals; who apparently has begun as he means to go on.

I love feeling included in this country for the first time since I worked for Bobby Kennedy's 1968 campaign. I love feeling like an "us."

What I do not love: the flubbed oath. Either by accident (he had no copy of the oath on him, and apparently hadn't memorized it either) or on purpose (Obama voted against him in confirmation hearings), Chief Justice Roberts blew it bigtime, and forever marred what should have been a truly awesome and splendid perfect moment.

So now there has been a do-over of the oath, today, in the Map Room. It apparently didn't matter,since according to the Constitution the victor in the Electoral College becomes president at noon on January 20, regardless. So he is.

It's just a shame that so historic an event got all messed up by an idiot.

I see where some people are feeling sorry for the Boy King (as Maureen Dowd calls him) as he goes off to forever exile, and even profess to respect him for sticking to his ideals. I understand the sentiment, but cannot share it.

Well, no, that's not true, I don't understand it.

The man disrespected ALL of us: the country, even the whole world. He deserves no respect back. He dishonored his great office. He merits no honor in return. He had deeply flawed ideals and did not acknowledge or even understand those of others. He was not a public servant, but lived to serve only himself and his rich friends and dark masters. He wasn't Voldemort, just a Death Eater, but he did more to destroy this country than all of his predecessors. He forfeited his due as a president and his due as a person.

I'm glad he's gone, and I do not wish him well. And even my new President can't make me thank him for his "service." With service like that, we don't need enemies.

Some Observations

2009-01-21T21:07:00.000-05:00

Liked the style of Michelle's outfit, but not the color. The necklace was nice, though. The girls looked adorable, and I thought for a minute that Malia had a BlackBerry or some such...texting during Dad's inauguration! But it was just a camera, which was equally charming.
What must they have going on inside their heads...probably not a coherent thought.

The fluff of the Presidential oath first appalled me, then amused me when he just laughed it off and corrected the Chief Justice, who is probably going to go home and commit seppuku for the dishonor of it all.

Loved seeing the Prez looking up at and waving to the people atop the buildings of the parade route, not just acknowledging the folks right alongside the roadway.

Nice to see the First Couple holding hands all the time. And when Michelle wanted to change her waving arm from left to right, she grabbed Barack's hand with her free one, just so she was always holding on to him. Very sweet.

The Bidens seem quite pleased with it all, and I liked hearing the initial introduction of "Vice President-elect Biden and Dr. Biden". She looked very foxy in the high-heeled black boots.

Hope that Teddy Kennedy is okay after the seizure during the Capitol luncheon.

LOVEDLOVEDLOVED the Rev. Lowery's benediction. And you just bet I said Amen three times!

Did NOT care for Rick Warren, that smug, oleaginous pimp for Christ. Could he have BEEN more excluding?

Would have liked to have had a shoutout to Buddhists, Shintoists, Taoists, Pagans and Witches, though.

This gladdened my heart: from the LA Times:

On the drive to Capitol Hill, the current and future presidents passed protesters carrying signs reading "Arrest Bush." When Bush entered the grandstand with the orchestra playing "Hail to the Chief" for the last time, the crowd below began singing a different refrain: "Hey, Hey, Good-bye." One man waved his shoe.

I would have liked to see a whole FUSILLADE of shoes, a whole asteroid shower of footwear, aimed in Shrub's fleeing direction.

Parade is great so far, though some horsies would be nice. I do love a good parade, and when I was a tiny Girl Scout I marched in several, one of which I even got to carry the flag in, which was nicely militaristic.

And he gives a SHAKA TO THE KIDS FROM HAWAII!!! And so did his daughters! As his old high school's marching band goes by, Punahou on Oahu. How cool is he! Our first bodysurfing Hawaiian president!

Oh, and here ARE horses! With Native Americans riding them in full regalia. Excellent!

And bagpipes! Always a very good thing. I remember once, on St. Patrick's Day long ago, our local AOH band in Babylon, Long Island, the awesome Saffron Kilts, marched in the parade that day and then had to go straight to the airport and jump on a plane to go down to D.C. to play for the then President, Carter maybe? My sister, who knew some of the Saffs, said there was much consternation at the airport when forty men with knives in their socks tried to rush on board the plane...

Hmph. The reviewing stand emptied out pretty quickly...

If Hillary had gotten in, which is the outcome I was pulling for (and not just because of this), I would have been there right now, thanks to my wonderful honorary nephew Fernand, who worked hard for both Kerry and Hillary. Let's see, what WOULD I have worn to the ball? I think this lovely Victorian-style ballgown I have, with big leg-o'-mutton sleeves, flared out at the upper arm and tight-sleeved with buttons from elbow to wrist, Empire style with a little train and a low scoop neck, in mulberry velvet; with the aquamarine and rose diamond Victorian demi-parure Jim gave me as a wedding present. (Hey, you KNEW it was going to work its way around to clothes and jewels sooner or later...)

Okay. Now for a bit of reflection.

Obama wasn't my first choice, as you may recall from reading this blog. Or even my second. In fact, I'm not even sure he ever was a "choice" at all. I voted for him because the alternative was utterly unthinkable, and I was very happy to do so.

But I never really drank the Kool-Aid, and I still haven't. I don't know if that's because I have genuine reservations, which I don't think I do anymore (though I did, based solely on his lack of experience on a national level), or because I'm just a journo at heart and we tend to stand away and observe with wary eyes, since that is what we've been trained to do and also because it's how we are; hence our choice of career.

Of course I think it's a huge, tremendous thing, for the country and the world. I have come round to thinking that he's the right person at the right time, or the wrong time, depending on how you look at it. It's incredible, many times more so than if it had been Hillary as the first woman President, which would have been historic in a very different way, but not as unifying and euphoric as this undeniably is, even for us cynical hacks.

I think he's an admirable family man and a literate, thoughtful individual, and what he's accomplished is truly staggering. I was out in the streets of my neighborhood on Election Night, cheering with my neighbors at the victory. And I certainly wish strength to his arm in what's going to be a rugged, harsh job.

I'd be thrilled to see him turn out to be one of the greats, and as far as I'm concerned he can take all the time he needs to do so. If anyone can be, I think he's the one.

And he's Not!Shrub, which is a joy and a wonder all to itself.

So yes, I am a happy 60s chick this day. A day that, frankly, I didn't think I'd live to see.

Two Words

2009-01-20T14:36:00.000-05:00

President. Obama.

Give "Em Hell, Cenk!

2009-01-17T18:29:00.000-05:00

A man after my own wrathful heart...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/bush-drops-fake-cowboy-sh_b_158186.html

Here's his close:

Why the hell has our press gotten so timid? And when did they think their job became to reinforce the fake images and storylines of politicians rather than to challenge them? It's like they're playing their role in this scripted movie. It's almost as if they're being paid to go along with the fraud. The man grew up in a very exclusive, private boarding school in Connecticut. He was a snotty nosed cheerleader. His grandfather was a United States Senator and his father was the President of the United States of America. He was possibly the most privileged man in America. And the press helped to sell the American people on a line of bullshit about how he was a simple cowboy from a ranch down in Crawford. And it helped to get him elected!

That should be a stain on every reporter who covered him for the rest of their lives.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Harry Windsor and the Half-Wit Prince

2009-01-13T01:50:00.001-05:00

What the hell is wrong with young Prince Harry of Wales? In 2005, he was busted for going to a costume party dressed as a Nazi officer, complete with swastika armband. I can imagine his great-grandmother the Queen Mum, who stuck it out like a good 'un in London during the Blitz, boxing his royal and apparently tin ears for that one.

And now a tape surfaces of young Prince Harry calling a colleague and fellow soldier "our little Paki friend" and referring to him as a "raghead." Surely at some point someone must have told him that this is not exactly the way to foster warriorly camaraderie in the troops? I like to think that his mother would have smacked him good had she heard that...and I hope his father gave him a talking-to. Even Prince Hal of yore had more sensitivity than that.

He certainly seems to be the less mentally endowed of the Wales boys. Wills is no academic whiz, but at least he looks to have a grasp on certain realities that his younger bro appears incapable of achieving. Pakis and ragheads, forsooth! One might as well call the Mountbatten-Windsor family a pack of feckless Krauts...oh, wait...no, no, just kidding.

Anyway, the Brits have always had a breathtakingly insensitive approach to such things. It was only in the Sixties that it finally occurred to them that using "nigger-brown" as a descriptor for the color dark brown might not be an entirely terrific idea. True story! I heard and read it myself, back then: salesmen sold nigger-brown shoes, or wool coats...and there was an inn-keeper in Glastonbury once who had my jaw hitting the fourteenth-century floor with a thing or two she said in conversation. But she was from South Africa, so perhaps her prejudice could be explained, though never excused. Stupid racist cow.

Prince Harry's tin ear does not clang alone, it would seem.

So he issues yet another half-baked "apology", but I bet you dollars to doughnuts he feels put-upon and picked-on and still can't see what he did wrong. Good thing he's the spare, not the heir. Otherwise, I could see the fulfillment of something I once dreamed, long ago: King Henry the Ninth, last king of England...which would make me sad, really.

Laird!

2009-01-07T23:53:00.000-05:00

Got to meet Laird Hamilton, albeit briefly, at a book signing in New Jersey tonight. Verrrrry exciting. (Yeah, we're all somebody's groupie...)

Lovely little indie bookstore in Ridgewood, called Bookends. About 100 people downstairs for the signing: he took a few questions, mostly from people who wanted to make darn sure we all knew they surfed, and then gamely started signing copies of his book, "Force of Nature". Which is not about surfing so much as it is about his personal philosophy, and is surprisingly good: advice on exercise and eating and mind-body matters, plus oh yeah some surfing stuff too. Well written and very engaging.

As is he. Seems like a very down-to-earth guy, not full of himself or anything. Well, insofar as you can judge anybody by one of these events. He was sitting down, so didn't get to judge his height, but he certainly looked big and tall and fit enough. And the hair is fabulous.

Anyway, I'd been told that Laird's a big Doors fan, plus I had mentioned him and his wife in the acknowledgments to "Ungrateful Dead" (for inspiring me to get to the gym), so I brought copies of that and "Strange Days" to give him. When I got up to the table, I introduced myself and said I'd sign my books for him while he signed his for me, and he laughed and said that seemed fair, but did he also have to read them? I said no, no, just have them, and besides they weren't waterproof, and he allowed as to how nice it was of me and that indeed he was an admirer of my husband's work.

Then the store owner, who was standing right there, asked me if I got to keep the sword from my scene in the Doors movie. I said the only way I would have wanted to keep it was if it had been dripping with the blood of Oliver Stone, and we all had a good chuckle about that. About thirty seconds more conversation, I thanked him in Hawaiian, we shook hands and that was that. About two minutes mutual face time altogether, but that was about four times as much as everybody else got. And he wrote a lovely long inscription in the book. By then they had moved in the second shift of another 50-60 people, so he was probably signing for quite a while after. Poor guy.

There were two fans of my Keltiad there, who had brought books for me to sign, which was gratifying, so we talked a while after, and then my friends Andrew (who does the cover art for the Rennie books) and his wife Diana drove me back to their house, where we all had dinner with their lovely daughter Emma and toured the house and then Andrew drove me back to the city.

A wonderful evening indeed.

Oh, and Laird's on the Today show Thursday morning, 9:30, if anyone's awake and watching...

A Profession of Quislings

2009-01-05T16:40:00.003-05:00

I see where there appears to be a concerted effort made in and by media to drum up some sympathy for poor, persecuted, misunderstood outgoing usurper president George W. Bush.

This. Makes. Me. Sick. Leaving aside for the moment the breathtaking wrongheadedness of such an attempt, all I can say is WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, JOURNALISTS OF THE WORLD??? Did you not go through the same past eight years I did? And did you not see the egregious perversions this creature practiced on us all? The rape of the Constitution, the disassembling of the economy, the pushing of two wars and the abandonment of the first one when it got too tough, the boastful claim of "Mission accomplished", the shameless preening atop the still-smoking pile of rubble and bodies at Ground Zero...I could go on and on, but my typing fingers are getting tired.

And if you did see all this, then WHY THE HELL DIDN'T YOU THINK TO TAKE HIM TO TASK FOR IT? And, getting back to the breathtaking wrongheadedness, why now are you STILL seen to further whitewash this vile piece of trash by attempting to score him some sympathy props?

I have about as much respect for my journalistic profession at the moment as I have for Shrub himself. Which is to say not even none, but it's measured in negative increments so large as to approximate geologic time. For eight years, journalists colluded and conspired, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, at propping up his lying, cheating, stealing Potemkin-village tactics with matching ones of their own. Where was the outrage and fury as all this went down, to get us to where we are today? Where were the crusading journos ripping the lid off the noxious brew of favoritism, elitism and screw-the-people that Bush and his minions and lackeys were pouring with such success down everyone's throat? Why did none of you sputter and spit it right back in their faces?

Why? Because you were a cowardly pack of sycophants and suckups. Because you just caved. Because you'd rather quit than fight. You're far too intelligent NOT to have realized what was going on; therefore I can only assume that you accepted and agreed to this monumental screwing.

Which makes you just as guilty as the scumbags who perpetrated this mess. I am thoroughly ashamed of your failure to fight back, and thoroughly disgusted at your current attempt to soften the image of Bush, probably not out of affection for him but just to make yourselves look less like the jackasses and political whores you really are.

Not to mention the bend-over sellouts to your masters: the big conglomerates that own all media and rule the airwaves and front pages. It all comes down to money: the masters run the plantations, and the serfs knuckle under. And the few who do speak out are summarily bounced, as a warning to uppity journos everywhere: not "All the news that's fit to print", but "All the news that's going to get printed, we'll tell you."

Well, maybe that's a consideration for which journalists should validly be cut a little slack, in the cause of keeping their families fed, but in these days of the Internet, there are many other ways to get the truth out there without anyone's job being imperiled. I don't notice any renegade journalists out there: any Zorros, any Batmans, any Green Arrows, let alone any Deep Throats. Fear and money rule. And who do we have to thank for that? That's right: the corrupt Sith Lords Darth Cheney, Darth Rove and their little Darthian friends who have enriched their pockets at the expense of the American public. They conducted themselves as if we're THEIR servants, not they ours.

And by not holding those who could report these abuses to the standards of their profession, we colluded and turned a blind eye, even as we all struggled to survive. The two things should not be mutually exclusive. If people get the government they deserve, as is said to be the case by common wisdom, then maybe people get the Fourth Estate they deserve, too. Or that deserves them.

The honorable and integrity-laden firebrand journalists of the past are spinning in their graves. Whatever happened to "Speak truth to power?" Somehow over the past eight years, journalists read that as "Kiss power's ass no matter what."

I say again, you make me sick.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T12:49:00.000-05:00

A lovely and cold day, though we have no snow in town. Suburbs had a ton, but us? Zippo. So unfair.

I want to wish everyone a wondrous 2009, with health, prosperity and all manner of good things.

I don't really do resolutions, but this year I'd like to, in no particular order:

1. Get back to the gym on a regular basis; I've slacked off the last month.

2. Finish "A Hard Slay's Night: Murder at the Royal Albert Hall", so it can come out for Christmas.

3. Get the apartment tidied up. It looks like the goats got in...clothes and books everywhere. It's not dirty, just untidy. Massively untidy.

4. Hopefully get a full-time gig, or at least a regular part-time one, though I must admit the freelance editing is nice. Enough money to maintain me in comfort, lots and lots of free time to do my own stuff.

5. Clear out closets. Tons of stuff I could give to various charities. Also start deaccessioning my personal possessions: the acquisitiveness is pretty much over, now it's time to pass stuff on. Anybody want some swords? Real ones? (The Scottish broadsword with baldric and silver fittings is reserved for Jared...)

6. Install the new flat-screen HD TV. Or, pay someone professional to do it for me.

7. Buy a color laser printer. I've been using the funky local copy shop, to print stuff out; not that I print out much, but it would be nice to see stuff in the fonts in which I create it.

8. Buy a DVD/VHS player. (The old TV had one built right in, so now I need a separate one. Not that I use it all that much, but I do like to keep a tape in, so I can record little snippets of things I like when I see them. And then never watch the tapes again. But I have them!)

9. Meet Laird Hamilton. Which I just might, on January 7th: he's doing a signing in New Jersey, in the same town where my friends Andrew and Diana live, so we've planned an outing. Since Laird was responsible for getting me to the gym in the first place, I thanked him and his wife Gabrielle Reece in the "Ungrateful Dead" acknowledgments, so I want to give him a copy, hopefully. Also he's a big Doors fan.

10. Learn to cook some new stuff. Like Rennie, I can make about seven things, not counting idiot-proof fare like hot dogs and French toast and scrambled eggs. But I'd love to learn how to make some nice new things, perhaps seafood crepes and a really good boeuf bourguignon. Must be top of the stove, though: the oven has long since been turned over to storage.

I look at the long lists of inspiring tasks that people have set themselves, and I feel lazy and slothful and unchallenged. Then I lie down until those feelings pass, and they do, very quickly...and so it goes...

Wotcher, Sir Terry!

2008-12-31T01:16:00.001-05:00

I see where Her Maj, a pretty nice girl, has made our lad Terry Pratchett a knight of the realm. Well done, all!

I bet at the investiture, though, he'll be thinking of nothing but Sam Vimes...SIR Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh-Morpork...and being thankful he doesn't have to wear knee-breeches and feathers.

And huzzah for Lady Pratchett too!

I refuse to huzzah for Robert Plant, now CBE, he once having commanded me to sit on his face backstage at the Fillmore East. (I didn't.)

Big Wave

2008-12-26T23:54:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami a lot today, the one that hit around Indonesia and India and Africa after the tremendous earthquake off the coast of Sumatra.

I've been fascinated by, and terrified of, tsunamis ever since I can remember. I have dreams about them, just as J.R.R. Tolkien did, and his son Christopher as well. Nobody ever drowns in my tsunami dreams: there's always a place to hide...a house or a cave or under a bridge or something.

Not so the case four years ago: almost a quarter of a million people perished in the waters. Mostly because they didn't know the warning signs, and when the water drew way out from the shore to feed the incoming monster, they were puzzled and amused, and went out to investigate. So they were caught there on the exposed sea bed when the waves started flooding in.

Tsunamis don't come the way they do in my dreams, as towering, cresting monster waves hundreds of feet high. They're more like a change in sea level, and come in like a great sheet or shelf of water, maybe thirty or forty feet high; you can see this on some of the 2004 footage, the water just coming in and in and in faster than a person could outrun it.

And they don't always happen from earthquake displacement: the largest mega-tsunami on record, over 1720 feet high (that's SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY FEET) happened in Lituya Bay, Alaska, in July 1958. A moderate quake caused a landslide into the bay, and the landslide caused the wave, which killed only two people (sparsely populated area) and actually carried a father and son, out fishing in a small boat, over the trees of the headland and deposited them safely down again. Scary stuff.

The people who live around the Indian Ocean held candlelight prayer services today for the victims of the tsunami four years ago, the single greatest death toll from a tsunami ever, dwarfing Krakatoa (30,000 or so, in 1883, when the volcano Krakatoa exploded itself out of existence), a few hundred miles away from where the 2004 quake and waves hit.

I don't know why tidal waves, as they were called in my childhood, before scientists were aware they have nothing to do with tides, fascinate me so. Maybe I was an ancient Atlantean. Tolkien didn't know, either; he put his dreams into his account of the destruction of Numenor, and said that once he gave the wave dreams to Faramir in LOTR, he didn't have them anymore.

He must have had some kind of deep earth connection, though: in his posthumously published "The Notion Club Papers" (in "Sauron Defeated" Vol. 9 of "The History of Middle-earth"), he has a story about people in Oxford who go through a tremendous storm, partly magical, apparently, that hits Britain in June 1987. Spooky thing was, the Great Storm did hit Britain, in October of that year; Tolkien was out in his prediction by only four months, though he'd written the story some forty years before.

And I have some sort of utterly unreliable earthquake predictor going: I often get nauseated before a big quake hits, as we've talked about before, and Mensa had a group of other earthquake sensitives who worked together with the US Geological Service lab in Golden, Colorado. Nobody's predictions were in the least bit useful, unfortunately.

So a prayer and a silent moment for all those hundreds of thousands who were killed by the tsunamis four years ago, and remember: If you're on the beach and suddenly the water gets sucked out to sea, run for the hills before you are too.

Let Nothing You Dismay

2008-12-23T17:27:00.000-05:00

I can't hope to improve on this email from my dear friend Mary the beautiful and talented and brave, so I'm just reprinting it, with profound thanks and gratitude...

O Best Beloveds, I love the words associated with this season. Peace. Joy. Merry. (Oh, and feasting. Can't forget that.) I wish you all that, and so much more. Can one make merry joyfully and peacefully? Let's resolve to find out!

Thank you for being your own beloved selves. And thank you with all my heart for being along with me this past year. We have no idea what this next year will bring, but let us stay within the spirit of the season, and assume it will be heavy on the good tidings of comfort and joy. Comfort and joy, we say!

So Merry Christmas and, what the hey, God bless us, every one.

Not much to add to that except to wish you, in the words of our dear Terry Pratchett, "holly, and jolly, and other things ending in -olly!"
And thank you all for your love and friendship and support and wit and wisdom. See you in the New Year!

Patricia

Happy Solstice To All!

2008-12-21T17:15:00.001-05:00

Hearthfires burn and cold winds blow
To join the Wild Hunt we will go!
To honor Lord of ice and snow
This bright Midwinter morning

Happy Solstice to all who celebrate, and may the Light return to shine upon us all.
We love the dark. Now let's bring back the light.

Wayfarers All

2008-12-15T22:05:00.002-05:00

www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/12/16/wind_in_the_willows/index.html

"The Wind in the Willows" is one of my absolutely favorite books of all time, and this link is to a wonderful piece on it, marking its 100th anniversary, in Salon.

Do check it out: the piece AND the book. I can't imagine anyone here who hasn't read it at least once, but go take another look. It's one of my supreme comfort books in dark moments, but I also reread it when I'm happy. It works, either way.

It's a sublime achievement in English literature, and it's also just a really fun read for little kids. I remember seeing the vile Disney cartoon when I was a youngling, and when I found out there was actually A BOOK my delight knew no bounds.

As the Salon piece asserts, it has moments of genuine mystic joy ("The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter, which never fails to move me to tears) as well as celebrations of simple home comforts ("Dulce Domum", my other favorite chapter).

When I got older, and read a bit more, I found out that Kenneth Grahame's personal life was a complete trainwreck, and yet out of it he had made this. For a writer in the making, this was perhaps the first statement I'd come across of the fact that, as writers, we can make worlds out of our own sorrow and joy alike.

Thank you, dear Mr. Grahame, for making this for us.

Hip, Unhip Ho-Yay!

2008-12-12T00:57:00.002-05:00

For the past couple of years, I've been an enthusiastic follower of, and sometime poster on, the website Television Without Pity.

TWoP, as it is known to habitues, is basically a website for trashing/discussing, according to your preferences, current TV shows, and it is generally both screamingly funny and gloriously literate.

But of late I've noted a rather distressing tendency among some of its less, shall we say, sophisticated participants to cloak even the most blameless relationships in what the TWoPpers call "ho-yay"---a bit of site shorthand for "homosexuality yay!" And this gets pretty much right up my nose.

Now, before you start getting all huffy, I have absolutely nothing against gayness. I have tons of gay friends of both genders, gay characters have appeared in my books and will continue to do so, I wholeheartedly support gay marriage as a civil rights issue. I would like to see more gay characters in media, characters whose gayness is merely the way they happen to be and not some kind of shock-value ploy or grab at hipness.

And I think that to get there, this juvenile, sniggering, reductio ab absurdum attitude has GOT to stop.

Not everything is about gayness, people! Frodo and Sam expressing their deep feelings for each other on the slopes of Mount Doom? NOT GAY. Ugly Betty cooking dinner for her roommate Amanda, as a kindness after a bad day working two jobs? NOT GAY. Doctor Gregory House and his friend Wilson playing pranks on each other? NOT GAY.

It does a disservice to such characters and their creators to contextualize them so, and it doesn't do much for gay people either.

Is there no place left in the world for deep, abiding love and friendship between two same-sex individuals that has no sexual content whatsoever to it? And does it always have to be trivialized and sniggered at? Why? Because immature adolescents of all ages think deep feelings are funny and can only be attributed to gayness?That's a pretty pathethic place we've reached, if so.

I have a feeling it's mostly puerile individuals who are insecure with their own sexuality, be it hetero, homo or bi, who feel the need to sexualize even the most innocent of hetero friendships portrayed in movies or on TV or in books into a ho-yay context. And this really, REALLY gets up my nose.

Fandom slashfic (fanfic is an abomination in itself, which I may rant about at a future time) in, say, Harry Potter (Harry/Draco, Hermione/Ginny, etc.) or LOTR or just about anyplace else you can think of just boggles my mind. Are there REALLY that many beaten-down closet gays out there, who need this sort of thing as a way to feel good about themselves? Or is it mostly perpetrated by infantile, giggling teenagers who think gayness is a goof and that this sort of thing is fun?

It isn't, you know. It's demeaning to all concerned. And I really wish it would stop. Perhaps, as people grow up a bit, it will. Until that day, I think I'll stay away from TWoP. It's just not worth it.

That's all.

Happy Birthday, Honey!

2008-12-08T20:23:00.000-05:00

James Douglas Morrison

8 December 1943

Side warm against mine in frost-time
Chest my cheek rests upon, shield-broad, steel-ribbed
Arms around me, oak-strong, sun-warm
Flanks arrow-straight, the downward highroad
Slow honeyed flare of desire spiraling round us
Love, and peace within it:
We are gathered in like grain,
Our harvest each other.

---Athyn's bridal song to Morric, Blackmantle

Crossing the Bar

2008-11-27T01:01:00.000-05:00

Jim's father, Admiral George Stephen Morrison, died on November 17, in Coronado, California. He had fallen at home and fractured his pelvis, necessitating a 9-1-1 call, and went into hospital on the Friday. Over the weekend, he developed congestive heart failure and fluid in his lungs, and "with no hope of getting home again any time soon, by Monday he had left the planet", as a family member told me. There was a traditional Navy funeral service for this very distinguished military man, including an F14 flyover, at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, and his son Andy gave a eulogy. Admiral Morrison would have been 90 on January 7.

I've known about it all along, but didn't plan on posting---but I changed my mind...

I never met the man, but some years ago I was told he had my Kelts books on his nightstand for reading...

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

---Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A Hero in the Family

2008-11-23T23:13:00.001-05:00

Please spare a thought or a prayer for my cousin Kathleen, youngest daughter of my mom's youngest sister. Her husband, firefighter Lt. Robert Ryan, was killed today in a fire on Staten Island when the ceiling fell in on him, knocking away his helmet and oxygen mask. They had four children. As the newscaster on Channel 2 said, "He came when he was called and then he was called home."

It Was Forty-five Years Ago Today...

2008-11-22T00:02:00.003-05:00

I was 17 years old, away from home for the first time in my life, just beginning to settle in to the start of my freshman year at St. Bonaventure. It was a gorgeous, clear, chilly fall Friday afternoon, a few days before the Thanksgiving break; the leaves were mostly gone, but the sky was an astonishing deep blue and little clouds were flying by on a cold wind.

We were in Prof. Leo Keenan's English lit class in Plassmann Hall, and just getting ready to leave at the end of the hour, when Jack Garner, one of our classmates, came to the door looking ashen-faced and told us and the prof that the President had just been shot. I remember scoffing, oh no, that can't be true, and Jack just shrugged helplessly. Uncle Leo, as we called him, said no word but strode away in silence, headed for the AP ticker tape in the journalism classroom.

A bunch of my fellow coeds and I all streamed back across the road to our dorm on the hill, St. Elizabeth's Hall, desperate to see it on TV. Classes seemed somehow to be magically canceled, because I don't recall going to another that day.
Though I do have a memory of watching the campus flag being lowered to half-staff...but I can't put it in context, so maybe that came later.

We got there in time to see Walter Cronkite announce the stunning news, and we all started crying. I remember, later that afternoon, a single beam of sunlight coming out from behind a gold-rimmed cloud just above the mountains and striking into the rec room like an arrow, falling on our faces like a touch from the beyond.

We didn't stop crying or watching TV for the next four days, except to attend the solemn requiem High Mass, held in Butler Gym, timed so as not to conflict with the funeral Mass being held in Washington DC.

Girls weren't allowed on the main floor, so we watched from the balcony of the indoor running track; I remember how hard it was to stand on the slanted track floor even in the low French heels I had on, but I had a perfect view of the ceremony below. Every coed who could was wearing black; I was in a nice black boucle' wool A-line coat, and a black lace mantilla which I was later to put to similar use in Paris, July 1971...

It was like something out of the Middle Ages: robed friars, priests in black vestments processing to a central altar, the tall tapers, the male seminary choir chanting "Dies Irae", magnificent and chilling. And oddly comforting. One of the supreme spiritual moments of my life, no question. I knew I would remember it forever.

There was nothing but assassination coverage on TV: no programs, no commercials. It was all black and white: not that it mattered, but I was startled when I saw the first color pictures from Dallas---how pink Mrs. Kennedy's suit was, how brown-red her hair.

Every coed in the dorm gathered in the third-floor rec room---glued to the only TV set we had---and I can still hear the indrawn half moan, half hiss of breath, as if we'd all been struck in the face, that ran around the room at the first sight of Jackie in the doorway of the plane, hand in hand with Bobby, blood all over her skirt. Everybody almost collapsed in grief and sympathy; we held each other up as best we could.

But a lot of people with cars had jumped into them as soon as they could, cramming the cars with anyone who wanted to go along, and headed south to DC, to stand in line outside the Capitol to pay respects and to watch the cortege head to Arlington on Monday.

The rest of us who stayed were in total shock: I remember watching TV numbly on I guess it was Sunday night (having earlier seen the assassin shot point-blank live). Some symphony was playing the "Eroica" funeral movement, and the announcer was commenting in a hushed voice that on his Berlin trip, the Germans had called JFK a young Siegfried; tears were silently streaming down everybody's faces. We just stayed as close as we could to comfort ourselves; the more religious among us spent hours in the dorm chapel.

I even wandered up the hill behind the dorm to a little grotto in a grove of trees, a shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes (which is still there, although the dorm is gone, and I visited it when I was back on campus 2 years ago), just sitting there, not praying, not even thinking; a nun came walking by, on the same errand, trying to find some peace or calm, but we didn't say anything to each other.

By Monday---the Mass and interment and the eternal flame and the whole thing---we were exhausted.

But we still couldn't stop watching. Sometimes it feels as if we never did.

Mrs Mojo Rises

2008-11-15T22:23:00.000-05:00

Gray drizzly VERY bad-hair day. I spent the afternoon in midtown, taping my contribution to a Doors (NOT Jim!) documentary being assembled by Prism Films, a British outfit with some very good past docs to their credit (Captain Beefheart, featuring my old friend Gary Lucas; Dylan; few more).

The interviewer/producer, Tom O'Dell, was hands down the best interviewer I've ever encountered. Fantastically intelligent questions from a very well-informed and honorable individual. I'll only be a tiny part of it---he's talked to literally dozens of people, from fellow critics Robert Christgau and Richard Goldstein to biographer James Riordan to producer Billy James and other figures from the dawn times, so my screen time will be minimal.

And I hope I did the questions credit: I got to talk about a lot of stuff I never ever get to talk about, such as how the Doors were perceived by audiences in NY as opposed to those in LA and the UK; how the songwriting chores were divvied up; how Jim perceived his role in the band and as a person, what he told me, what we discussed privately as opposed to what we discussed in interview settings; the music and how it changed as the band got more widely known; how they saw themselves; the trial and how it affected our lives; all kinds of really interesting slants on what he and the band did.

The interview was about the Doors as I perceived them, first as a fan, then as a rock critic, and only last and distantly as Mrs. Morrison. Which is as it should be. And hardly a mention of You-Know-Who, and I don't mean Voldemort, the whole time. Bit after, off-camera, to clear up a few misconceptions, but that was it.

I've always maintained that the synergy of the Doors was lightning in a bottle, and history bears it out. The three never did anything after Jim's death even remotely comparable; we'll never know what Jim himself would or could have done, but he was instructing me to look for not only a loft for us to live in but a studio and likely engineer for himself, once he extricated himself from Paris and came back to me in NYC, so he obviously had creative purposes in mind that didn't involve the other guys.

Anyway, since I NEVER get asked stuff like this, it was really, really satisfying to be treated as a Founding Mother of Rock Criticism and one who was present at the creation, not as the Yoko Ono of the Doors. So deepest thanks to Tom and Alec, and this may actually be one doc I'll watch without cringing. Well, too much, anyway.

(Oh, for the jewel porn fans: our claddaghs, my Keltic tourmaline and six diamond bracelets on my left hand; my emerald engagement ring and the white sapphire 25-year memorial ring on my right hand; pearl studs; and the huge ruby-and-diamond-framed opal heart with Jim's inscription in his own handwriting on the back: "To my wife/my Patricia/I love you/Jim". Fun stuff.)

Pulling Up the Ladder

2008-11-09T13:26:00.001-05:00

I see where something like 70% of black voters in California voted Yes on Proposition 8, the one to (apparently) enshrine in the California state constitution the ban on gay marriage.

I have to say I am damn disappointed, for my gay CA friends and in these voters. The voters don't seem to consider that this is a huge and legitimate civil rights issue every bit as much as anything they have encountered as black people in the past or present. They seem to be regarding it as a matter of choice that gay people are gay, and that such a "repellent" "lifestyle" should not be encouraged by permitting the "aberration" they consider gay marriage.

Well, though it may sound racist to say so, consider the source. Uneducated, or poorly educated; fearful of social change that seems to exclude them; above all deeply in thrall to simplistic religions and religious organizations that preach bigotry and fear of the unknown...you'd think--or I'd think, anyway--that this particular voting bloc would be tending the other way, out of fellow feeling for an oppressed minority.

But it didn't play out like that. And I wonder what can be done to ensure a better outcome from these voters the next time the matter comes up, and it will. Challenges are already being mounted to the "amendment" or "alteration", and quite rightly. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds in the courts; we already see it in the streets.

And I do SO wish New York State would get on the stick and do something; we're supposed to be fearless groundbreakers in such matters, not followers of Connecticut and Massachusetts, at best, and at worst total ignorers of this great issue where we have a chance to take the lead now that California has temporarily stalled out.

Maybe it needs to be pitched as civil rights from the start: a whole segment of the American populace being denied a basic human right by a bigoted majority. Sound familiar, black Californians? It damn well ought to.

Gray Day

2008-11-08T15:28:00.001-05:00

It's raining here, all gray and chilly and windy, though not as chilly and windy as I would like.

Still, a fine day to stay indoors, which is also good. It wasn't going to be a big exciting adventure or anything: just a trip to the Union Square greenmarket to buy pear cider and clam fritters and maybe some lovely glowing autumn flowers, and Trader Joe's on the way home for a few more blocks of frozen French onion soup, which I'm very fond of and nukes beautifully, and if I felt really ambitious I was going to get some chicken at the butcher for homemade chicken rice soup with scallions and romaine and carrots, or if not feeling so ambitious I planned to stop at the Philly cheesesteak place on 3rd Avenue and get a nice hot cheesy steaky oniony sandwich.

But even though I like going out in this kind of weather, as I say it's not cold enough to make it worth my while (plus the cheesesteak place delivers...). And I have plenty of food and water and milk, so even though I'd really like that cider I won't starve or get thirsty.

Not yet in the mood to work on Rennie, maybe later tonight, so I'm spending the afternoon rereading Harry Potter in sequence, first book to last. The first book is my favorite for atmosphere, the third for overall balance. As they get darker and grimmer (or Grim-mer), I find I don't reread them as much. I really do not love "Half-Blood Prince", though it has its fine moments, to be sure, and I can't stand reading about Dolores Umbridge much either.

But I do reread "Deathly Hallows" a lot, in my usual just-open-it-and-dip-in rereading style. And I think it's because JKR, in this one, gets back to writing about weather and food and daily stuff in a way she kind of left off in the preceding two books. And I LOVE that stuff.

So even though DH is quite horrific on so many levels, and transcendently glorious on so many more, I do enjoy it. For all the books, I like to fantasize about being a Hogwarts student myself (Gryffindor, of course, though sometimes I think I might prefer Ravenclaw: could I be a Gryffinclaw? I can just picture myself in that Gryffindor girls' tower dorm, though, with a lovely four-poster bed hung with red velvet curtains), the way readers tell me they fantasize about being in my own novelistic world of Keltia. Which I also fantasize about.

Otherwise, I'm not any kind of fan of contemporary "lit'rachoor", as I find it gloomy and just plain boringly pretentious. I draw the fiction line in the sand after Thomas Hardy, with very few exceptions, and those are usually fantasies or historicals of some sort.

The only modern fiction I read is mysteries (faves are Marcia Muller and Margaret Maron, actively writing; Susannah Stacey and Dorothy Simpson and Ngaio Marsh, out of the game for various reasons).

They're intelligent modern cozies, very scant on procedural crap, totally character-driven. I read fiction to be made happy and interested and entertained and taken out of myself, not brought down and bummed out big-time by some dystopian sad-sack of a "gritty", "real-life" writer, and these do it for me.

So I think I'll go nuke myself some French onion soup, and that leftover cornbread from the BBQ place the other night needs eating up, and go hang with Harry and Hermione for a while. A good afternoon!

Batting Clean-up

2008-11-05T19:47:00.000-05:00

Just a few things that occur to me now that the election hopes have become fact:

The Supremes' Greatest Hits: Three big, BIG reasons to rejoice even further? John Paul Stevens, 88; Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 75; David Souter, 68. And all three of them are almost certain to vacate their seats on the Supreme Court in the next four years.

Wow. Can we say...well, I don't even KNOW what we can say except Yippeeeee!!! This means that President Obama will be appointing three new justices at the very least, and perhaps more...

Dr. Who?: Oh, and Caribou Barbie/Mooselina/Bible Spice never DID release her medical records, did she, even though she promised and promised. What's she afraid of? That we'll find out Trig isn't really her personal spawn after all? Hmm. Well, we can count to nine months for Bristol just fine...so let's just see how long this miracle pregnancy takes.
And no bets on whether the pregnant teen and the redneck boyfriend will tie the knot after all, since it's no longer a groovy photo op for the Repugs.

The Lyin', the Bitch and the Wardrobe: The campaign is also claiming that a third of the much-talked-of fashion heist ("Wasilla Hillbillies Pillage Neiman-Marcus and Saks! Film at 11!") has already been returned to the stores, while some has been "lost." Uh-HUH.

Thanks to MDF Lisa for this info: Palin was only supposed to buy 3 suits and hire a stylist. Instead...well, you know how it is when someone is admitted to the shoe-wearing classes; they tend to get a little overexcited.
She actually bought many tens of thousands of dollars OVER the $150,000 claimed; the trusting donor was appalled when he got the bill; up to $40,000 went to outfit the First Dude; and I'd like to know how they plan on donating used baby clothes all sticky with poo and spit-up.

What, just because she's an ex-candidate doesn't mean I can't still have some fun taking shots, right? Right!