How the political rhetoric reads in rural America

Now that the information fetish is all about, with every airwave trying to cram its media-mad political lies, and oh yes, promises through, perhaps we could look through one last-minute message in the bottle from this rural quarter, which is now, safely far from the current campaign.
I’m not calling it an election, yet. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Depending on what happens between now and when (and if) they actually give the votes a proper count, I’d say at this point that many people are predicting Barack Obama will win, based on the polls.
Short of Osama Bin Laden’s capture being nationally broadcast as he comes out of his hole at the 11th hour with his hands up for a Special Forces exclusive, the gig certainly appears up for the Bushites, that is, for Republican control of the White House.
The whole nation is more or less a 50-50 split between the urban coastal zones of the free-flowing, electrified, amped-up monoculture of the cities and the hunkered-down dream towns amid the moms and pops and Plumber Joes of rural and suburban America.
But it’s really not a fair game.
Under such conditions, it appears to be safe to say that he who rules the boundary-bending technology, and the grass roots networking, forces unleashed for many months in ports now both cyber and dirt-real, will manage to change society.
The Obama campaign and its mastery of technology and people moving will do, if doing nothing else, end the reign of George W. Bush by breaking through every medium and boundary possible.
This will be done by filling every port of information across the land via internet, TV and so on, creating a marvel of saturation (and fundraising) not seen before, transcending even those same 50-50 boundaries of metropolis and yes, the fabled “Green Acres” of rural America, making the mindset sufficiently the same to do at least one final desperate progressive thing: Get a change in kings.
It will happen because if Bush had only done a bad job, that would be bad enough.
No reason to pursue the evidence on this. No reason to go to world court.
It’s not that the numbers aren’t there: They are just too high to count, the assessment of eight years. The totals. The collateral damage.
That we still have shreds of the country left is, yes, I suppose, just another cause for celebration. Almost. Though nothing has been harder than try to see some pattern that might follow after the election, a drifting kind of wrecked ship is all I can conjure up to this point. A wounded cruiser with its guns still blazing into the fog of war, wastefully firing on an enemy as invisible as the word, “terrorism.”
But after eight years of Bush, while living in that same rural America of “Green Acres” fame, as far away from it all as the Shire, I can only unfortunately count the collateral damage in terms of personal calamities. In fact, I think, based on this input, it’s safe to say the extended wavelengths of pain have been getting tighter within the years, then months, then final days, now hours, of his rule.
That somebody, anybody, nobody even, is going to take that throne of this burning empire, is reason enough to celebrate.
But there’s not much caution in the winds, either way.
With the late-hour anger of teaming millions working as the main sword of the John McCain campaign, with Sarah Palin out there whipping up the primal instincts of the worst, those prone to believe in dirty, unsophisticated cheap shots, one can only shudder at the antipathies being wrought in rural America should Obama win. One shudders at what the outcome will be ... after the election.
No doubt, Palin stirred it up in Grand Junction this week. One might imagine the ugly bits, the eddies of angst, that are now set spinning from the sidelines of the fringe, from the sawed-off mountain folk types out in the crowd. From pissed off people calling for blood.
If you remember the Clinton years, there’s nothing like a Democratic presidency to stir up the home-grown reactionaries and yes, terrorists, the Timothy McVeigh types, those Monty Pylons and other sub-patriotic posses forming in the hinterlands of the West.
There’s a seething misanthropy out in the boonies, indeed, and they just may be waiting to erupt.
That Obama made some references, much ado made of it during the Democratic primaries, about rural residents, in their anger over how poorly the overgrown cities are managing things, especially from Washington D.C., only to turn to religion and guns, might make more sense than we know right now.
Is it better to have a global reformer like Obama in office? A finger-wagging war bird like McCain, though perfect for a captain’s cap if we were christening the Titanic, might be one last great warrior maverick for a dying age, he’d hardly be the “all hands on deck” tonic this nation needs. His idea of rural America only goes as far as his ranch overlooking Sedona and the red rocks of Oak Creek Canyon.
Let’s just hope the idealist, the great communicator in this scenario, points people toward liberty’s light within these shores, not just abroad, because the divisions of rural America, that xenophobic place where the wider world is ever more bizarre, and threatening, can hardly bear to withstand the disappointment.
Since that’s how these things really get started … in the provinces and outlands of the dispossessed. You know, when expectations, once raised, are dashed for one final time, where the dissenters voted for “change” but only get more “chains,” and “revolution” is the name of that thing.

FLASH BACK to '68? An anti-war protest in London, circa 2002,
asks the musical question, if someone had only listened then,
there'd be nobody listening in now ...

What's So Great About Recreating '68?
Dirty hippies for a new day? Nope, just some folks who were actually paying attention ...

“Riot, n., a popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.”
-- Ambrose Bierce, the Devil’s Dictionary

Just listening to a few lines of conversation from a recent meeting at Capitol Hill’s Gypsy House Café made it as clear as the view of the nearby gold dome could be easily found around the corner, if you cared to walk, that is, or of beautiful downtown Denver, all to be dressed up very soon like a $50 million red, white and especially blue bag of chips — or, if you prefer, the view of the nearby head shop: Re-Create 68 defies definition. Pin down Re-Create 68’s purpose? Try pinning down smoke.
Surely it’s not an organization. Not when its whole raison d’etre is to question authority, which pretty much precludes the act of organizing. Nor, for that matter, can it be defined as a lobbying group, considering that each member seems to have a different idea of what message it’s trying to convey. That is especially frustrating for those among us, especially in the media, who seek easy answers in order to write headlines.
Especially big headlines. Such as “Denver to Riot! See you there!”
Perhaps it could be at least loosely defined as a production company to encourage performance art. The meetings due seem to be, to the great disappointment of those headline writers, and the denizens of the outward blogosphere, more ready to cast protest in the light of a festivarian glee. To those in the middle, stuck in their easy chairs, watching all, clucking their tongues, its members seem to have some sort of common goal that involves getting people to drop out of their 21st century lives in order to come to Denver during the Democratic National Convention and replicate the turbulent druggy-leftist-protest-music-inspired lifestyle practiced 40 years ago.
But really, it’s just a bunch of people who, rather than rushing home to water their lawns or preen in their SUVS in the suburbs ... just not-so-plain folks, controvertionaries, who were actually paying attention.
“Re-create 68 is just a bunch of groups together and individuals. I didn't start it, nor am I a member,” said one of its meeting-goers, Jill Dreier, who is an organizer for the Visualized Film Festival in Denver. “I organize a film festival and used to be part of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace ... so from those groups, I know a lot of people, including the R-68 folks.”
Perhaps the Gypsy House Café itself offers some clues. Women in hints of gypsy garb, most of it slummed out to the basic tune of what you can now get pretty freely in the resale shops up and down Colfax Avenue, with perhaps a piece of two purchased at the nearby Cherry Creek Mall ... just maybe, maybe ... men in bleak-chic anarchistic looking black T-shirts, short-cropped hair, soccer moms and men in ponytails mix amiably as sitar music plays and members of the Denver Police Department stroll by, unobtrusively taking photographs.
Hey, where’s the tie-dye? What? No one calls anyone a “pig?” Where are the familiar boundaries we can trust, the old division, the division between “us” and “them.” Where are the assurances that this is just some kind of cliche. And that, at least, the re-appearance of its rough beast to serve as notice that, like it or not, ’68 is back in Denver, perhaps bigger than ever: With CSN without Y coming to town to surely sign about the paranoia in "Almost Cut My Hair."
During their orderly meetings in the café’s basement, the group’s core, er, “people,” have sought to reignite the antiwar ethos of 1968, organizing events for a “mass mobilization” during the convention. There is no rabble, maybe a ramble of two. But if you really want a rabble, go cover the San Miguel County Commissioners in the high-priced echelons of Telluride for some real gripe and grinners. They seem to be about as radical as the Town Council there.
Anyone seeking a clearer definition might consider visiting the group’s Web site, www.recreate68.org. There, one can learn that Re-Create 68 represents “the grassroots movement opposed to the two-party system,” is a “convergence center for the antiwar movement” and has an agenda that includes everything left-leaning, from fighting poverty to bringing the troops back home. Environmentalism, too, but there’s still actually some faith in politics here.
Maybe you can turn the Titanic around in four years, eight, tops?
Among many, however, Re-Create 68 has become the hobgobblin of dysturbian anxiety.
As a result, the Re-Create 68 people have spent a lot of time lately trying to deal with dissent within their own loose-knit ranks as other liberal groups and activist organizations reject whatever it is that Re-create 68 stands for. That is to say, what the media says they stand for. The scary thing they have to say. The quick thing easy to rail against before you click off Uncle Bill to catch up on some reality TV in order to get a load off and feel better.
All politics is local, ‘tis said. This is no different. Earlier last month, eight left-leaning groups — the American Friends Service Committee, Code Pink, Colorado Street Medics, the Green Party, Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Students for Peace and Justice and United for Peace and Justice — announced they were splitting with Re-create 68 and forming a new coalition, the Alliance for Real Democracy. Such is the business of politics: gyres winding in and out.
Re-create 68 co-founder Glenn Spagnuolo said it’s strange for groups to resign, considering that there’s no membership. It’s like going on Facebook.com and quitting one of many groups, such as the Rolling Stones network, to give the appearance you once played for the actual band, but, now have some new tunes to play. The participation from the other groups, he said, has been limited to dropping in on Re-create 68’s open gatherings, which usually draw about 20 or 30 people. For example, members of the Green Party came in a few times, then left, never really got involved.
But then came heap big headlines, assuring stuff to say, hell yeah, the center can hold. But, as far as it goes with the Green Party, or this other rainbow coalition of orgs, mostly driven by pushing for people to come from the outside toward Denver: “They were never part of Re-create 68,” Spagnuolo said. “Their groups reach a different audience than us. There are just multiple coalitions reaching different groups. We think that’s great.”
Green Party chair Claire Ryder, speaking for herself rather than on behalf of the Green Party, said that after attending several meetings she’d decided to stop going because she didn’t feel the group allowed everyone to be heard.
“I didn’t agree with the way they organize, and the name was chosen before anybody got a chance to participate,” she said. “It’s run by three people.”
Again, county commissioner boards come to mind: But it’s really not that simple.
Ryder also said she didn’t care for the way the group’s activities have been characterized in the media. Who would, if you were inside, looking out? Now the members of Recreate ‘68 have to put themselves through the rigors of “talking to the media” training sessions in order to keep from further fanning these so-called fire of Orc being pushed down by ol' William Blake's authoritarian foe, Urizen.
“The conflict is what the story is about now,” she said. “The big thing is the violent or nonviolent thing. It has been reported in the press that way. I don’t want to be a part of that conversation.”
It is, of course, the choice of the name “Re-Create 68” that causes people to visualize Denver’s streets filled with tear gas and billy-club-wielding police during the last week in August. The resonance to Chicago 1968’s Democratic National Convention, turns out, was a somewhat doubled-edge sword.
And there are those who seem ready to act out such a scenario. Especially the police, who are planning for the chance to arrest around 3,000 people, and who are going to look pretty damn silly, after arguing for all of that budget money, if they don’t actually fill up that hotel from hell.
If a comment posted recently on a Rocky Mountain News blog is to be believed, at least one person is “Getting ready for the anticipated and promised R-68 assault. Let’s hope the National Guard is prepared to deal with arson.” Arson, of course ... ding dang ... there has actually been no table set up plan made for how to commit arson, the Rush Limbaugh crowd might be disappointed to find.
Such saber-rattling wasn’t even actually behind April’s announcement from Tent State University that it wants no ties to Re-create 68.
The group describes itself at Tentstate.com as a “Coalition of Projects in Pursuit of Democracy.”
“We were never a part of Re-create 68,” said Adam Jung a University of Denver student who serves as the group’s Colorado spokesperson. “We severed ties because the media had married us together, and the messaging was incompatible.”
See these words?
“Media.”
“Messaging.”
“Incompatible.”
As in, watch and learn ...
Spagnuolo, however, says the groups had been linked, but there are no money trails here. No special sections to produce. And since the troubles of the world are so diverse, nothing the logic choppers can really get their minds around.
Of the Tent State thing, yeah, sure, not even the left-of-the-left of center can hold these days for very long. “That’s a group where there has been a split,” Spagnuolo said. “There was a falling out, and we admit that. For them to say, though, that they weren’t a part of our effort is ridiculous. They clearly were. They even participated in one of our early press conferences.”
Still, Spagnuolo is willing to concede that the members of Tent State “were drawn in by … issues over name, and issues about how nonviolent we (actually) were. But we support nonviolent groups and we still support them.”
Tent State, of course, could’ve have been accused of casting the some sort of resonating flames from a bad day gone by, the Kent State shootings that inspired Neil Young’s classic, “Ohio,” but who’s counting?
Not the mainstream media. They are always going to glorify the dissent within the dissent, rather than the real way business works under the Golden Dome of Rome: Just follow money, it flows toward authority, to the right. Like the Demos could even think clear enough with Hillary and Obama banging in out, to come up with any comprehensible copy, for say a special section to run in the local state political gossip sheet, the Colorado Statesman, like the Republican party was able to do for its own state delegate convention. Follow the money, indeed ...
Re-create 68 also had been disinvited from using a tent designated for demonstrators during the convention, it was announced at a R-68 meeting in May. But at at Re-create ‘68 meeting, some of that news was regarded with a happy challenge. At least there was something within target range they could actually break through.
Fellow co-founder Barbara Cohen says Re-create 68’s early “successes,” as she put it, haven’t helped its image. That includes drawing the attention of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh seized on the name, saying he “welcomed” the notion of riots during the convention and was “dreaming” that they’d happen, exclaiming, “Riots in Denver! The Democratic Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.”
When critics charged that Limbaugh was inciting listeners to riot, radio station KOA, which carries the show, issued a statement saying, “A review of the full transcript from Limbaugh’s show on Wednesday, April 23, shows that Limbaugh was not advocating violence in Denver at the Democratic National Convention, but trying to make the point that if there were riots in Denver, it would hurt the Democrats’ chances of winning the 2008 presidential election.”
The controversy thrust Re-create 68 into the spotlight as the focus of liberal anxiety and conservative glee and helped make Spagnuolo a darling of the radio talk show circuit.
It also has led the three co-founders, Spagnuolo, Barbara Cohen and her husband, Mark Cohen, to assert that the anti-war movement during the breakout year of protests against the Vietnam War is the real source of their inspiration in naming the group.
“We all agreed the name would get attention, but it’s not re-create Chicago ’68, but re-create the year 1968,” said Barbara Cohen, a longtime local peace activist who, with her husband, was a plaintiff in the famous Denver “Spy Files” lawsuit after police targeted the couple as “criminal extremists.”
“We are an umbrella group that is trying to get the other umbrella groups together ... from every political stream,” she said. “We’ve worked with progressive Democrats, anarchists, Green Party members, everybody working together to put on nonviolent events.”
Spagnuolo says he also wishes the media would characterize Re-create 68 not as a group of rabble-rousers, but rather as an alliance of leftist dissenters that’s trying to get the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee to commit to bringing the war in Iraq to a speedy halt.
The group has recently obtained hard-fought permits to demonstrate during the DNC. During those demonstrations, rather than rioting, Spagnuolo says the group plans peaceful protests of what they characterize as Barack Obama’s “toned-down” anti-war rhetoric.
Spagnuolo says the new tack indicates Obama is moving his political position “more to the center, in order to get votes.”
If Re-Create 68’s most ambitious hope is to denounce Obama’s move the center, it’s hard to believe the group will draw down the National Guard. Nevertheless, Spagnuolo believes Denver’s government is stocking up on anti-riot weaponry and is itching to use it.
Spagnuolo alleges Denver has purchased such devices as a ray gun to send microwave pulses into a crowd, creating an extremely uncomfortable heat sensation, and an acoustic device that bounces sonic waves off crowds to induce stomach distress.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the city for access to public records related to the purchase of security-related equipment, Spagnuolo said, but the city, “will neither confirm nor deny whether they have purchased these weapons” for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
In response to a request filed by the ACLU under the Colorado Open Records Act seeking disclosure of the records, the city’s Department of Safety records coordinator, Mary Dulacki, denied their release on the grounds that disclosure “was contrary to the public interest” and because “it could potentially disclose tactical security information.”
Whether or not they’ve been purchased, Spagnuolo says even the rumor of such devices has sent a chill to groups planning demonstrations.
“They are trying to build up paranoia to make people afraid to come out and execute their constitutional rights,” Spagnuolo said. “I think the city should be embarrassed with their actions to date ... It’s going to leave a lasting black eye, the way they view people who protest as a criminal element.”
City officials have attempted to quell this type of criticism by announcing parade routes for public marches and promising to process parade permits promptly.
In a written statement, Katherine Archuleta, senior policy and initiative adviser to Mayor John Hickenlooper, recently stated, “We’ve been working to enable organizations with diverse viewpoints and agendas to have access to a safe and visible parade route for the purpose of public expression.”
The notice coincides with an agreement reached with the ACLU, which on May 1 had filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on the behalf of groups seeking improved access to certain areas for public expression.
But Spagnuolo, who has been a Denver resident for seven years but cut his activism teeth on the streets of New York, isn’t convinced.
“This city doesn’t want its $50 million party interrupted,” he said. “They feel like this will tarnish the Democratic Party.”
National and local media outlets have been quick to jump on such statements.
For example, in January, 9News political analyst Floyd Ciruli said: “If they actually do turn Denver into Chicago, there’s a very good chance they will turn off the voters. It could be directly counterproductive to what they would like to do.”
Yet, back in the real space of the Gypsy House Café, the only violence under consideration was dealing with Pieface, a relic hippie activist they think might try to hit Oprah Winfrey in the face with a pie. Of course, upstairs, with the hot-blooded proprietorship there, if you don't buy anything such as a piece of pie, or, a cup of coffee, in order to use the internet link by wireless, that same internet created by the military industrial complex to begin with, well then, they'll get pretty damn violent ... you'll be pushed out in the street for your "white man's complex " ... so the human animal has all potentials under that chapel perilous, too! Indeed, the weirdness of the atmosphere around the Gypsy House Cafe these days can get so wired, so paranoid, so set on edge it's practically one of Denver's best tourism attractions, if you like that kind of thing ... you could almost convince yourself that spooks of all varieties are there, too, watching you watching them, as they take a hookah toke or two ...
But if Re-Create 68 actually is a front for subversives working under Limbaugh, things must be tougher than they seem in the right-wing military-industrial cabal. Cohen announced to the circle that the group had a mere $1,600 in its antiwar chest. An early plan to have people show their support by underwriting portable toilets for protesters just hadn’t panned out as successfully as the PBS “All Things Considered” had reported. The size ... the size of things ... they all seem to depend upon the distance they are seen from.
But for the geriatric set, the Boomers, who clearly have the practical real world in mind, they clearly have such important questions to ask regarding the survival of the human race as: Has no time been “wasted,” buzzed in some Statesman editor from her office hotbox, stressing in the addressing of the hygienic or other bodily needs of the estimated “thousand to 100,000” demonstrators who actually might hitchhike into Denver in August “wearing headbands, bell bottoms and beads, bearing flowers and protest signs, and taking an occasional mellow toke as they flash the peace sign.”
(That same editor tried to insert those same lines into this same similar report ...)
But it didn’t work, just like the economy, or, the war machine doesn’t seem to work right anymore: Instead, the group discussed presentations, film fests and which bands to book. You know, stuff to keep the people outside the castle walls entertained while the real deals are made at the DNC.
As the meeting broke up, Spagnuolo was asked if he thinks Re-create 68 will bring a repeat of the rioting and violence that gripped Chicago during the 68 convention.
“That will be up to the Denver Police Department,” he said. “Any violence would be at the hands of the Denver Police Department.
“I’m more worried about people being killed in Iraq in my name,” he said. “The local media has branded us (as violent agitators) because it’s what sells. But there’s nothing sexy to report when people’s constitutional rights are being violated.”
And if he’s a radical, he’s an equal opportunity opponent of the two-party system. When asked if he’d also be protesting at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul in September, he said, “I will be if I’m not still in jail.”


Douglas McDaniel is the author of 15 books, including his most recent, a book of poetry for the political season, "Ginsberg Rolls Over," published by Mythville MetaMedia.

Summer Driving in the Blue Bomber
and Other Ghastly American Summer Rituals

People can go walking on the Valley Floor now, that is, that 570 acres the Town of Telluride paid for in a condemnation action against Neal Blue, head of General Atomics, which while lighting and heating and glowing up the world is also a major manufacturer of drone bombers and spy planes.

But we will avoid that for just right now. If only because, as Telluride was fighting this battle, and as I was writing about the legal beagleisms all along, the official start of where this official descent into hell, which is where all great literature, should actually begin.

But instead of writing really, really great literature (hah!), I was so busy writing up a bunch of words congratulating everyone about having saved the world in this “VF” matter – as well as the additional news that, as you read this, scientists are on a train to meet in India with the Dalai Lama in order to halt the eternal suffering of mankind – I only had time to drive by the Valley Floor instead, on the way to work at the Telluride Watch.

Yes, some people choose hiking boots. Others go to worship upon the Valley Floor on bikes. Still others fly over “the Floor” in hot air balloons. My weapon of choice was then known in my small circle as the “Blue Bomber,” a rusted, ‘80s vintage Subaru that, quite honestly, no longer really had reverse available as an option, had three out of four doors that were pretty darn hard to open, and about 400,000 million billion miles on the odometer.

I loved to drive the “Blue Bomber” because gravity was its friend. Gliding downhill saves on gas. I hated to drive the “Blue Bomber,” too, because going uphill was well, embarrassing, or would be, if driving this dream machine weren’t my solution to reduce the impossible suffering of mankind, too.

For, you see, as the “Blue Bomber” made regular non-stop flights from Telluride through the friendly skies of the San Juans to my home in San Bernardo, which was originally called Matterhorn in the mining daze of 100 years before, this miracle machine was San Miguel County’s answer to maintaining the speed limit on Highway 145 for both the driver and every high-tech, gas-guzzling, fully loaded, tailgate pressing Imperial (as in the Empire is Real)” Cruiser lucky enough to fall in behind it as we, the great quick-dried community of hurried commuters, construction workers, tourists and so on, paraded our way into town.

I had been driving these jalopies for 10 years now, in order to reduce the impossible suffering of mankind, ever since I was the editor for car coverage at the Robb Report, where one of my jobs was to test-drive high-end automobiles. Don’t own or drive one of those things just right now, though. However, since I was living and working so close to Walden Pond, which was right around the corner from that magazine’s offices at the time in Acton, Mass., a conflict began to arise in my Henry David Thoreau-poisoned skull about losing my sense of social responsibility by pimping, in print, the glories of living large, being insanely wealthy, owning expensive wheels and other kinds of pornography for the rich.

So to keep my feet planted firmly on the ground, I bought a $200 Volkswagen Rabbit and drove it, or, left it in the parking lot at the Robb, when I had to suffer through the guilt of having to drive the latest Porsche, Jaguar, Mercedes or Caddy around, pretending I was rich, too. Honestly, that task was so exhausting it was not uncommon for me to drive the Rabbit at lunch over to Walden Pond (leaving the $90,000 custom Hummer or whatnot in the Robb’s parking lot) and take a short nap.

But now it’s 10 years after and we are going to Disneyland! Usually, as I cranked up the engine beneath the haughty gaze of Sheep Mountain in San Bernardo, we lifted off with three or four people on board. So we were doing our best, as far as the carbon footprint goes, but for four adults it was a hell of a thing to work out, in terms of fares, scheduling and so on.

My great great-grandfather must have worked the caboose for the Gallaping Goose, the old mountain train line moving around ore in the mining days, I think, as the flight fell out of the clouds of the Matterhorn camping area and we descended toward the Ophir Loop, knowing full well this wild curvy ride was really what Walt Disney had in mind for his bumpy roller coaster mountain ride, heh!

Now I’m the tour guide as we spin around the daily rock avalanches of Hwy. 145, Ames far down below, Alta far above, wheeee! ... Too bad Nikola Tesla didn’t consider wind before hydro first ... wheeee! ... Better let this first badass military column of “The Empire Is Real” SUV Cruisers pass! ... wow ... Look at those maniacs go ... geez ... that’s a hell of a drop ... Oh Lord, oh lordy low! ... Most of the cars I saw the high-mountain Peruvians driving in the Wade Davis film at Mountainfilm Film Festival for that week were 20 years newer than mine ... hmmm, Third World indeed, yes, yes ... the “Blue Bomber” will offer Telluride resident, e-Bay CEO and bigtime “Valley Floor” donater of a fund amounting to $50 million to buy the Valley Floor, Meg Whitman free rides whenever she needs ... Oprah, too, another heavy investor and Telluride mainlight, but only if it fits in with our schedule ... Yeah! ... Here comes Lawson Hill, we are landing now, down on the Valley Floor, leading a parade of still more Empire is Real Cruisers as we go easy on the brakes, letting gravity do its work, wheeeeee! Wheeee! Wheeeee! Wheee!

... And then, a big sigh, that “E” ticket item itself: The Valley Floor ... let us pray ... I mean, finally, the Conoco Station! at Society Turn on the Valley Floor, planted just near the headwaters of the San Miguel River canyon’s flow ... Yee-haw!

From high up above, coming down the highway into the San Miguel River Valley, the actual gateway to the Valley Floor, the conglomeration of civilization at Society Turn, could actually be confused with a large U.S. Calvary outpost with a big red corporate logo, a real rarity in San Miguel County (almost as rare as a traffic light), instead of a flag mast where the bugler might stand.

But there were no insurgents anywhere near Fort Conoco, just us consumers, who, if not for the price of gas, all seem to be immune to war. There’s nothing to explode around here but that pressurized bag of chips gas-pushed to us at 9,000 feet from the lowlands by that big ol’ Frito Lay truck belching out its own “Blue Bomb” of electro-petrol hoopla. Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!

Then, after obtaining a small loan for gas and guzzling up on all the necessary monoculture sodium glutton-o-mate we can absorb, we, the forever “Born to Be Wild,” were ready for the Floor!

First part was a bit of a disappointment, yes, with that mine-tailing remediation site and, of course, the power lines, the channelized river and troubled wetlands. Gotta do something about that, someday. Old habits die hard. Then, the glories of the great field of dandelions, an invasive species, the mountains and the glittering waters of the San Miguel, with a fly fisherman out there, as we headed eastward, invading forward.

Nice thing about this first drive on the, at the time, almost freed Valley Floor (it was finally released to Telluride in full about one year later, but not after the condemnation case was won in the Colorado State Supreme Court), maybe just one court order away then (hah!), this great victory in preservation, was the fact we had so many other people dressed in orange now, along the way, to point out the highlights and, yes, directing us to slow down, as in chill, at 35 mph: Road construction on the Spur, which is road leading to Telluride from Hwy. 145 that’s most likely still deteriorating like another antique paen to the Galloping Goose years ...

Then, at 25 miles per hour, where the first glorious grove woods and road meets, we are forced to slow down even more, due to construction, yes, but with time to appreciate the scenery explode as the whole vista opened wide again with a big fat “Welcome to Yellowstone”-style hello! And there stems the seed of an idea: Maybe it should just all be kept this slow, even after the Large Butted Caterpillar, Beeping Dumper and Asphalt Scorching Beetle-box return safely to their winter breeding grounds. Then Telluride could extend the 15-mph ethic of town further out into the world, creating the drive into as just more well-intended take-a-breath time, eco-tourism wise.

That way, by the time you pass the other slight corporate oil logo, this time Shell, as travelers enter this National Park for human behavior, Telluride, Colorado, the Gunnison Prairie Dogs can be more easily watched and watched for.

This would, of course, have forced a bit of an alteration in the Blue Bomb’s daily flight plans. But we could’ve make up for it with a less intensive tour on the way home after work, after we’d picked up a big bag of chips for the ride back up the mountain: Does anybody remember the license plate number of that smog belching Frito Lay truck? No? It should’ve been reported.

Oh well, as they always say, the good vibe of the sermon only lasts as long as the car ride home from church. But as rituals really go, the finale for that year’s Fourth of July fireworks display went awry, with all eyewitness versions of this buzz bombing of Town Park being unreliable since even those who were most responsible for the annual incendiary celebration were ducking for cover at the time.

One witness who saw it occur right after having one beer and two shots of tequila claims to have seen a white phosphorescent charge hit the Town Park playground and people running for their lives. An admittedly secondhand street report claimed a baby carriage was blown up. Another report, again carried around by secondhand street mail, featured someone racing to grab a child out of a baby carriage as they themselves ducked for cover.

The best evidence wasn’t carried by word on the street, but by photograph: A shot from down the street by former Telluride Mayor Amy Levek showed the entire park exploding from some kind of beautiful anti-personnel device sending shimmering fragments of spider-webby silver streaks across the grounds.

Like, wow! … Nobody shares a more intimate connection to both nature and explosives than those thousands who come to the base of Bear Creek Canyon in Telluride for the Fourth of July!

According to Telluride Fire District officials, the fireworks display’s very last shot, a 16-inch shell, failed to reach proper height before going off, but certainly delivered the advertised firepower. The additional good news was, of course, that nobody claimed any injuries, and the event itself was shut down without any further incident. The dust cloud of baby carriages simply left without rioting and the unnoticing throng of proud Americans was somehow sated, without demands for any more spectacular displays of controlled violence than what they’d already just experienced.

Another rumor on the street was the actual errant rocket purchased for the event was supposedly banned after 9/11, though one would have to wonder why: It seemed completely effective, in terms of sheer terror, or, sorry, sorry, Shock-and-Awe values.

A visit to Firecracker Hill a couple of days after it was lit up that July 4 evening like a smoky Fort Sumter still turned up some evidence of the rocket red glares, including a scattering of round, purplish cardboard caps and burned-out yellow, AA battery-sized cylinders, plucked right out of a young pine tree like bad fruit, around the compromised hill otherwise covered with small mounds of gravel pits built as launching points for the fireworks blasts. A close look around the trampled, fire-burnished mound revealed that over the years the treetops had all died or been diminished in some way, as if singed by frequent spaceship landings.

No other place in town was allowable for such abuse, and resulting small fires all around the base of Bear Creek were being put out well into the next day. By Thursday night it rained, washing away the any burn scars and, if it ever existed, that apocryphal burned-out baby carriage was secreted away by those in authority.

Forensics aside – sight lines on a bazooka pointed down to Town Park are clear enough to strafe the playground – the real critique here was not that it was lucky nobody got fried. Nor was it that, even in 2007, like the ancient Aztecs, we as a culture were willing to sacrifice the hilltop at the base of a national geologic and primordial treasure such as Bear Creek for our once-a-year ritual of flaming ecstasy (even when, if that canyon ever caught fire, it would be the rough equivalent to setting off a firecracker in ones’ navel).

Nor should we go into the physics of indirect or misguided flight. Nor wax on what gunpowder does, or the fact that the right to blow up such elemental stuff in metal tubes with triggers is guaranteed by nothing less than the U.S. Constitution.

No, what’s really FUBAR about this obviously faux military exercise is that occurs at, of all times, around or near anything like the annual periods of Mercury in Retrograde!

Everybody knows nothing works right during Mercury in Retrograde.

This is not rocket science. This country, born under a bad sign, now celebrates that bad timing with a series of loud, threatening and potentially fire-triggering explosions. All to great applause. No wonder we scare the bejesus out of the rest of the world.

As any decent astrologist will tell you, during such periods of Mercurial misanthropy everything goes bad, from our technological marvels to our planetwide maze of communications. One Web-based wizard put it this way: “At 23:41 UT (Universal Time), just before midnight on June 15, 2007, Mercury, the cosmic trickster, turns retrograde in Cancer, the sign of the Crab, sending communications, travel, appointments, mail and the www into a general snarl-up … This awkward period begins a few days before the actual turning point (as Mercury slows) and lasts for three weeks or so, until July 10, when the Winged Messenger reaches his direct station. At this time he halts and begins his return to direct motion through the zodiac …’’

Of course, planets are never retrograde or stationary; they just seem this way because of this “cosmic shadow-play,” as the astrologers put it. But regardless of what some might see as superstitious nonsense, the metaphor works. There’s the national symbol as mixed messages, the bad communications, the poor shooting, the messed-up rocketry – and there’s shadow-play.

Which brings us to faux generals George Bush II and Dick Cheney, two true-blue retro-graders who just that week in Telluride, were the targets of a local petition drive to have them impeached, at least locally, for launching “Shock and Awe” for all the wrong reasons, and at far too great an expense (a plea the Telluride Town Council later decided to vote to support, being the first Colorado state in town to endorse impeachment of Bush/Cheney, though it never took place).

Of course, this impeachment petition was a symbolic act, but our July 4 fireworks are symbolic as well. Since we are all particles in the same cosmic “Shock-and-Awe” footprint wrought by the White House, let us consider Telluride Fire Chief Jamey Schuler’s statement after the display: “The fireworks went off without a hitch,” he said, “except for that one shell,” which could be parsed like “democracy works in Iraq, except for that one civil war” or even “we are all born free, except for the slaves we own.”

By now you should be looking at this and going, gee, not only is Telluride always putting a firecracker in the very belly button of its tourism economy – even worse, this town is annually transmitting cosmically challenged political messages at the wrong astrological time.

My thought was: “Let’s shake the whole thing up next year and declare no more commit pyrotechnical piracy, no more fireworks in our navel, until the current war is declared over. That would be a far clearer symbol than trying to impeach the ‘Shock and Awe’ twins, who barely have a constituency in San Miguel County.

Cancel the fireworks, and therefore the crowds it brings in? Yeah, you bet, I said: “To mitigate the financial impact, we could, say, move the Yankee Doodle Doo-Dah to its proper night, and suggest bringing in, say, Country Joe and the Fish for a special concert and laser-light show in its place.”
But, sadly, those realtors and other elitists who considered tourism the engine in San Miguel County’s regional democracy received this suggestion as happily as news of a drop in Halliburton stock.

But, if such towns really only have one last, big, fat, finale rack, post-9/11, crowd-strafing 16-incher to play with each year, but had misgivings about the war, then why shoot it off at all? Make it the Shot Not Heard Around the World Festival instead, and put the faulty rocket under glass at the museum. Tell everybody each election year, “Hell No, We Won’t Blow.” Let people just stay home fry in the bake and stink and denial of the cities on the Fourth of 2008 until they learn to vote better. Now that would be a shot not heard around the world.

The sixth book of poetry by Douglas McDaniel is, after a considerable amount of trouble, considering how many places and machines most of the work had to go through, in addition to the number of addresses taken up by the poet and author of some 10 or so the drafts had to go through, just to survive ... that includes Arizona, Massachusetts, Oregon, Arizona again, Colorado again and again and again ... Yes, it's out! Some of it was written from behind the cash register one long hot summer at Borders Books & Music in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Or in the heat, smoking outside during breaks, looking out at the parking lot, thus inspiring the name of this very blog. Plus one long month at the Telluride Watch where the draft was hiding in some stored computer that had been tucked away in their vault due to some ill-advised, unannounced office move ... while most of the lyrics were being used for a post-punk cowboy blues band called The Agro Daddies ... anyhow, here is is is, whew, is ...

”Ginsberg Rolls Over”

http://www.lulu.com/content/2840162

http://www.lulu.com/content/2840162

23 Roads to Mythville
An apocalyptic journey across America and meditation on the imposition of order in space, both cyber and dirt real. By experiential author Douglas McDaniel, who explores the mysteries of American networked life. Read more






One Quarter Now, One-Click Wars to Come
A collection of essays on the media arts during a time of war, the book looks at everything from cyberwar to video games, as well as technology and violence in the new century. Read more


Ipswich at War
A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, poet and essayist Douglas McDaniel moved to Ipswich, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. A collection of poems from that period of fear and anxiety, as well as the polemic essay, "Media Arts and War."
Read more







Glasnost Lost
As an act of defiance after the botched election of 2000, experiential author launched himself into a journey into the underworld of American life, or, what he calls: The Science of Descent. Read more







Godz, Cars & Cannon
Experiential author Douglas McDaniel launches drives into the networked thickets of American life, looking for signs of myth and romance in the age of automotive machines.
Read more







Many Moons the Mythville: The Collected Road Poems
Poetry written during a 10-year span of criss-crossing America in a roving-eye view of the turn-of-the-century landscape of Mythville, or, as the author puts it: "It's all a bunch of Mythville." With work from four separate books by Arizona-based author and poet Douglas McDaniel, the bard-inspired voices of Milton, Blake and Yeats, as well as the saturnine streak of early beat poesy, ring through this collection of poems and essays. From the southwestern deserts to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, "Many Moons to Mythville" is a foot-to-the-floor blast through the mythical roads of American life.
Read more







Human Search Engine

The journey continues as the quest for myth in an age of information overload leads to online life as an editor for Access Internet Magazine. A story about all human search engines as they chase the ghost in the machine.
Read more






William Blake in Cyberspace

Experiential author Douglas McDaniel takes on the visionary art and poetry of William Blake, comparing an otherworldly worldview to that revolutionary, romantic era to our own wild, wired, mythic world.
Read more








The Kachina's Son

Poems about the Four Corners area written while author Douglas McDaniel was living in Telluride, Colorado.
Read more








The Road to Mythville
A collection of poems on the new millennium in America, drawing from decade of bouncing across the country as a journalist and Kerouac-style poet, from the Southwestern deserts to the shores of New England and back again.
Read more

"Think Surface, Wallpaper"

And that's the situation with the magazine business in Phoenix, all expressed oh so confidently by Desert Living editor David Tyda, who was trying to elucidate what kind of fill goes between the ads at his publication.

Print journlalism in America is so far removed from the First Amendment it can scarcely raise a mute defense against "surface, wallpaper." The skin-deep marketplace dictates all. Economic forces shape the printed word in order to appear before the overpopulated media frenzy to promote "surface, wallpaper."

Read more:
Forty Days of Fire Forty Days of Rain

Noplacia was once my name,
That is, a place where no one goes.
Plato’s Republic now I claim
To match, or beat at its own game;
For that was just a myth in prose,
But what he wrote of, I became,
Of men, wealth, laws a solid frame,
A place where every wise man goes;
Goplacia is now my name

- Thomas More,
from Utopia

To continue reading
GREETINGS FROM MYTHVILLE
Click here:
Greetings from Mythville

A lot has been happening in Mythville for the past full year. First off, a number of Mythville contacts have been successfully self-publishing their books. See:
Mythinformation

Jack, Jill, The Hill and What Tumbles After

She opens her eyes
as the red glow
behind Chipeta Peak
shines for me

Dive into her bossom
Feel her warm breath
on top of my Hopi head
as light undresses
her mountain throne

Coffee, banana bread,
Telluride sangrael,
a musical bead in her bed

From afar, they are white-
capped pyramids of snow,
but these mountains
are not white at all --
they are not purple, either,
though majesty they define,
they are silver-shadowed
ribs and vertebrae,
blue stone mixed milky,
like a pearl that forgot
its roundness
Soft hollows next to
proud, broken peaks,
if whiteness means purity,
then where did the white go?

Look inside, my love, to your heart

Pointing proud and lusting up
at the belly of this paradise
A trickle of the senses
perhaps a frost-induced
hallucination

Is this what an echo looks like?
What happens when clouds
become solid?

Sweet purple pearls in a bed
afloat on dreams?

Dreams that take care
to trust
in the tossing seas
of love

Your embrace. Your trigger,
moist and alert.
In the moonlight, starlight,
your skin is alpinglow
as you sleep

Waiting for the last musket blast
to pour me out of the city
like a dry wine, aged, and restless
for drinking this desertscape,
unbecomes me quickly,
my vanity, the snow,
calls into blood
a fast pace, this tempo,
a slow burn, steadying the shifting
eddies of wind at my back,
by a mountain tree marked
and bonded to the land
through red drapes fillled
with hemoglobin, oxygen
and eros to a time
just around the bend

Sunset shoulders
across my back, a blow
peached rosy with violet
blue-seeded brightness
aflame with the glory
of the day as it passes
to bray at the moon
from afar

The sun sets in a skin
so vain, so knowing,
like the dark flowers
of sunset, in bloom,
closing to the tides
of right watchfulness
a gaze sets, too,
on her brow

The Sun Ra comes and goes,
the heart remains true

Song of songs,
Song of Solomon
He who by twin angel
cast the dice

The way of love
is the way of climbing
up the truer chambers
of the soul

The harvest of the spirit
looms like that moon

Mellow mountain,
music a melody
John Denver's yoddle
down the highway

Winter's western dreamtime
sings your name
Western dreamtime,
San Diego, Kansas,
Cleveland and Maine

Eastern star,
order of the Golden Dawn
These are the haunts
we're hunting down

Slow going,
by the window,
strength in tires
water over
the brotherland
Navajo beauty beings
along the golden path,
a snake in the water,
born in the earth,
a cool shuffle of cards,
a smile

Water born in the desert,
died again in a flutter
of ecstasies and denial

Come winter, snow rises
on the high country,
your country,
where your histories unfurl
like long flags
symbolic and won
through sacrifice

I am aged past knowing
upon the bride of a bold
new dawn, when my
circle of the night
wraps around our sleeping
cold lands

The perfect stasis
is the yearning of the years
In turning, the winter
comes to spring

Joy, a fountain, under ice,
waits for our warmth
to come

The sky, as interpreted
by Stevie Ray Vaughan,
says so

II

Birds, sounding their song,
in a tree by the city
center of consumer America,
where a cool breeze
winds through the corridors
sighing by shop windows
through which hundreds
and thousands of bodies pass,
eyes wide open, stoic, blank,
or perhaps they are shut blearily,
seeking a stimulant mind bath
to improve
the sense's perceptions

Density soars, like those birds,
on air

Late fall, light behind shades,
winter's unequal
is a desert season
when warmed light
fuses with the muse

Plato's power is temporary
but true

The information we seek
is within me,
within you

Baubles hanging from trees,
red, almost fluorescent dangling things
defying gravity, they wait
for a gust of wind,
to rise on a blanket of air
to vibrate with currents,
sound, undulating eddies,
defying pavement, flickering
in the twinkling ebb of the new
evening ...

The somber wail made me glad,
alive, at brightness, lingering
in the dark while the white-winged
angel hovers over the city,
the air currents
as comfortable to those
feathers as the land
we walk upon,
hot waters from beneath
the surface
to percolate
into a dream of you

The water is blue,
the sun, light red,
tinged in rosy glass,
orange blossom scents
in the open passages,
mingling with honeysuckle,
sickening sweetness,
absorbed essence into ether,
beyond time, in space, beyond
temporal, spatial coherence
to bring pollen to you, old bee,
signs of springtime,
in this winter of the desert,
which is more like fall
in Iowa, the sweet smoke
of life burning the eye

Can't keep me from feeling you

Intimacy inside this tree house
is just beginning

In justice, trust,
simple phantoms of light
cross these eyes, these nights,
when the Scorpio moon is full

She tires when the city closes in

The course womb of technological
chains sap the strength

The clock ticks off time
with Zen patience,
wild escape ...
One is for frame,
the other, wings

Doubts are just stars
passing in the sky

At these times
one must remember
to keep the eyes
focused on the ground,
the thing that doesn't move,
your own deceived dreams

The question of standing solid
is eternal
since the world is ever
in flux, and love, the binding
energy,
goes hand in hand
with being ever present:
The head resting on me,
the perfume of tender,
temporary embrace,
the lock on love
is breezy and free
to challenge the atoms

The space is sad and true,
the welling up in the poisoned eyes
is moisture misspent
in the fullest expression
of tossed trials of us

Within this scattering
of principle fact,
the flower
as the highest vibration
of perfection,
folds and dies

Then the rules
of unity are a secret,
leaving just reasons
and no role,
no well-beaten path,
no free will,
just heaviness, loneliness,
a vacant presence,
unwound by a mere moon
that's bigger than me,
bolder than you


Fatherless

How is it possible
William Blake
had no children?

How is it possible
I no longer miss
lost treasures?

How is it possible
I've come so far
but feel so short

How are Santa Claus
and Jesus Christ?
Only poets shape
religion now


Hiding Place

Beneath the stairs
the chair

On the steps to the stairs
cusps of dog hair,
hair of the dog

By necessity
the form follows function,
the words fill in as needed,
but why debate?

Sagittarian answers
anticipate Capricorn
doubts to follow,
and so the star chart
is sewn into the sky

She cooks a Martian meal
as acid rock rolls overhead
making a bead
toward a Spaniard sea,
rolling home, a teal green
reason to roam

The bowels, thrown out
of Promethean Safeway aisles
swim the the Hummers,
as a million bits of music
stop at the coast, suddenly


Betrayal of the Senses

Rehearsal night
wound up tight
Hiding from the light

She puts on a dreadful fight

Laughing till it's right
One moment in her light

The traffic trough
is thrown aloft
The tossing game
is in the wrist,
the choice, the gift,
the rift and lift

Sweet sensations bend
our insides, the morning
is a shadow wide
as the time creatures we are

Burned purple, burned into glories,
abounding with starlight,
dead as pearls, the shimmering
medleys of open space,
the snaky road, the river canyons,
the shifting sea

Get out of the children's way,
she cried, the hibiscus
blooming beneath the sun,
powered by the sun, seems
to be awake, but necklaced ladies
in the city street sweeper scene
roll on toes of lost dust, memories
of great barbecue bins
of baby blue ribs

We are the icy fires
of cigarette stares

Man with the Book
next to us just don't care

Come summer, maybe even before,
the creature comforts will become
barren, a lizard's breath
of contagious fumes
and furies

High heat, pressure, will rush
across this desert floor
and the ungainly winds
of the dust devil,
foul of feeling and terminal,
the terminous, the gate,
the gate through the imperfect
primrose path

Prometheus seeks the light,
then gasps for friends,
associates, who, for lack of
a better purpose,
shatter their wine glasses
and move on

To be lost in all of this glory
parts well with this story:
She's cross-legged in a chair,
in blue jeans, lost in a Valley
of pizza boxes, neon, tortolini
and light

Receive a free PDF of “Many Moons to Mythville”

Poetry written during a 10-year span of criss-crossing America in a roving-eye view of the turn-of-the-century landscape of Mythville, or, as the author puts it: "It's all a bunch of Mythville." With work from four separate books by Arizona-based author and poet Douglas McDaniel, the bard-inspired voices of Milton, Blake and Yeats, as well as the saturnine streak of early beat poesy, ring through this collection of poems and essays. From the southwestern deserts to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, "Many Moons to Mythville" is a foot-to-the-floor blast through the mythical roads of American life.

”Many Moons to Mythville: The Collected Road Poems,” by Douglas McDaniel

“Cool, modern beat poetry/prose the likes of which would make Kerouac and Burroughs proud. Douglas McDaniel's images make me want hop in my car and take a road trip to some mythical psychedelic diner in a lonely Southwestern town. "West Coast Storm Warning" and "What Would Water Do" are particularly effective poems.”

-- Philip Hardy, “Kingdom of the Hollow: The Story of the Hatfields and the McCoys”

Bards of Mythville Books

Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain

Automous Author

New Media Shredder

Radio Free Arizona

Enviro Digita

Come, See Jerusalem

The Bard of Artville

Baseball Dot Lit

Ipswich in a Time of War

Willy B in Cyber S

BlakenSpace

Telluride Sang Rael

GoldenWest

Time Enough for Smoke

Mythville Books

Mythinformation

Telluride Sang Rael

New Media Shredder

Automous Author

Radio Free Arizona

Mythinformation

Google Search: Mythville

Participating Bookstores

Borders Books and Music

William Blake in Cyberspace
Amazon.com

23 Roads to Mythville
Amazon.com

The Road to Mythville
Amazon.com

Northern Arizona Poets
Norazpoets.org
http://www.norazpoets.org

Bob's Beach Books
Lincoln City, Oregon
Bob's Beach Books

The Book End
4095 A Logan Road
Lincoln City, OR 97367
(541) 994-9393

Belsian Sands Oracle
#220 Aquarium Village
P.O. Box 404
South Beach, OR 97366
(541) 867-4777
belsiansands@yahoo.com

Bloomsbury Books
Ashland, OR
290 East Main
Ashland, OR 97520
541-488-0029

Filthy Cabbage
Lincoln City, OR
(541) 996-2390
The Filthy

The Well Read Coyote Bookstore
Sedona, Arizona
Well Read Coyote

The Book Store
Cottonwood, AZ
885 S. Main St.
(928) 634-5658

A Step In Time Books & Gifts
Main Street, Camp Verde, AZ
(928) 567-4377

Mama Java's Coffeehouse
Phoenix, Arizona
Mama Java's

Creative Authors Bookstore
CAB Online Books

New Literature Storytellers
New Lit Online

UK Authors Online Bookstore
UK Books Online

Greetings from Mythville

STORMS ACROSS AMERICA

She leans into the sea
keening a song
from the Madonna vagina
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
a crowny curtin of thorns

Unknowing from the unquiet
slumbers of lost ships
still melting in icy currents
below the surface,
the seagulls scatter
and defecate upon her:

Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan

Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view

America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth,
chased in the wind, wakes
the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
before the living dead
can get out of bed

Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits

After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
the northwesterly El Nino
sheared shanks of wind
off the Oregon coast,
then brought a low blow
to slap the soiled temples
of the City of Angels

Driftwood is piled fore desire
against sandy beach stumps
and stop gaps, infinite and wise:
Infinity stopped here for a day,
a deluge for the dead,
so I could admire
our wood chips,
our broken bones

A winter-long windshear
plucked the breath
from my pressurized lungs,
turning my fire to water.
I floated some, then burst,
mounted a floating oar
then sank into an orb
of sand

The sun, beyond the grey wail,
shaped a man inside here,
inside this calamity of clams;
one-part plastic,
one-part fishhook,
a bonney redwood mast,
a skull & crossbones flying,
walking the plank on dry land
without an anchor, who cares?

Setting of these banalities
of life aside, let me perscribble:
Glass floats on the beach,
I've found, and the ebb-tide
of the avenues are a roar
of trucks in the rain

On tuesdays, Great Food
is closed in a seaside town;
and what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran

Also this: The electric truth sheds
the oil slick skin off the CIA
and sickened seagulls
reel in the ninety mile winds
and Pennsylvania miners
with black lung bibles
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast

The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite's
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade

The camera's eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants

Glass floats on the beach,
it's endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it's coming here fast
It's time to drink
from the pirate's flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...

Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it's here, at last

OK, we get it. The big ape climbs up the Empire State Building and swats at 1920s era bi-plane aircraft. It's just like "The Titanic," with the most horrible thing imaginable happening at the end.
Why should anyone need to see a remake of "King Kong," this time directed by Peter Jackson, who won a warehouse worth of Oscars for his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy? Is the trick for success in this kind of endeavor simply doing the most horrible thing imaginable with more visceral detail than the predecessor?
Yes, the 1933 original with Faye Wray as Anne Darrow is an icon of American cinema. But the 1976 version, the Jessica Lange in the Anne Darrow-dress version, already spiffed up the possibilities, in terms of our cinematic appetite for pseudo-erotic destruction in technicolor. About six months ago, another remake, “War of the Worlds,” succeeded in rendering the most horrible thing imaginable to audiences, and considering the world-weariness of our eyes tuned to the 21st century, that’s a pretty neat trick. But “War of the Worlds” didn’t make as much of a splash last summer during a season awash in action films.
However, in this version of “Kong,” the director has managed to subdivide a lot of new territory into the story, transforming it into a world-class “Moby Dick” on American life, a tragedy for the ages, a veritable MacBeth for the McCulture.
Rather than just relying on amazing action, Jackson sets the stage with useful character development in the movie's first hour or so, building the tension. A fly-by-night director (played by Jack Black) pulls together his movie production team in the 1930s to film scenes on a mysterious, uncharted island. Returning the original story’s period and character styles to the 1930s restores that “Lost World” classicism film buffs will love.
Thus, to find an actress to fit the Ann Darrow dress, we are led to “discover” and fall in love with a new “Kong” heroine, Naomi Watts, who plays this role with tenderness and athletic panache.
Jackson hammers the viewer over the head with the idea, but it fits: “King Kong” is, if rendered with a hand sensitive enough to show the story’s tender side, worthy of Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness.”
And so man-as-movie-director is a parallel to the beast, a Kurtz-like paramount ego. In a perverse demonstration of man’s ability to Disney-fy the environment to meet his own greedy desires, a super-sized ape capable of winning a brawl against the most terrifying of all creatures, the T-Rex (take that, Steven Spielberg), is as vulnerable as anything else to the worst beast of the jungle: man as mortal creator.
Of course, this symbolic brainstorm notwithstanding, let’s just say the action is so intense, you’ll come out of the theater covered in popcorn, as if the bucket had exploded in the back-draft. Guys, if your date doesn’t weep, get a new girl.

Human Search Engine

Go ahead, give it a try: At Google.com, if you ask the question right, you can find and download the entire script to the oddball British comedy classic, “Monty Python & the Holy Grail” in just a few clicks on your mouse pad.
But remember this, fair knights and damsels of the information age, as they have always said about computers, if you put garbage in, you will get garbage out. When using an Internet search engines, you have to know something first. Because with these magical machines called meta-search engines, if the question is too broad or any part of the information is misspelled, there is a very good chance you will end up in the information abyss, swimming in a sea of sales pitches, pop-up boxes and who knows what else.
So do a “Boolean” search on “Monty Python & the Holy Grail” and “What is your favorite color?” which is just the name of the film and a line from one of its best scenes. Forget about who or what Boolean is (or was). He was some kind of 19th-century mathematician and why they call this kind of search that is “much too silly” to think about right now (to borrow another line from the movie). Just remember to put the question in quotes (or forget about it because you might find a better result without them).
Now click. A series of links will appear. And so will the “Holy Grail.” The entire script of the film, in fact, uploaded to the Web at some point, no doubt, by some film devotee with way too much time on their hands. The 2,000-year trail of one of the bloodiest, most legendary, most mythic quests in human history is reduced to two clicks on your computer’s mouse.
For the moment, let’s set aside the arguable fact this is not the actual “Holy Grail.” But, keep in mind, it is most likely the wrong one (or just a series a clues to the fabled relic), for later.
Now, during the film, “Monty Python & the Holy Grail,” the misfit knights and Arthur, King of the Britons, come to a crossroads when they meet an odd, grimace-faced old man who guards a bridge that crosses a gorge. This is the “Bridge of Death.” It is also, for the purposes of our story here, the passage across the information abyss. Standing in our way is the “Old Man from Scene 24!” He is the keeper of the Bridge of Death. If you are a researcher of any kind, you must face this curmudgeonly troll. He may appear as a schoolteacher. Or, as a woman at the window at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Or, what stands between you and that delicious recipe to Raspberry Torte. But surely, at some time in your life, you must face him, her or it many times.
He will ask you three questions, perhaps, the film debates, five. If you get the three questions right, you may pass safely. If you get any wrong, you are cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.
Let the quest begin!

*****
Alice Duncan is neither a king or a troll or a knight, but she is a traffic cop for a lot of questions asked at the crossroads to the information abyss. She is a reader’s advisory specialist. What is that? Well, somewhere between the burning down of the great library of fabled in days of yore B.C. Alexandria and the birthday the very first Dewey decimal, but well after Dewey had formulated a system for library categorization, Duncan became what they used to call a reference desk librarian.
“A lot of libraries have changed from calling it a reference desk librarian,” said the reader’s advisory specialist at the Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City.
The Internet, for example. That faceless digital troll at the edge of the Gorge of Eternal Peril, in the fabled age of Google.com, has a counterpart with a human face at the library.
A face that’s happy, eager even, to help you.
“People have interesting questions,” Duncan said. “One local writer might be looking for the origins of an Indian word, or want to double-check on some information.”
Indeed, on the Internet, a great deal of information is splooged together into an amorphous mess. A universe, if you will, of unconscious data. You might be able to find a fact, but it will be in the form of numerous secondary sources. The real McCoy is often going to be buried in there, if it’s available at all, at a specific single location.
It takes a human mind to navigate and decide which bit of info is authentic, and which is from the source.
The trick is knowing what to ask. That’s the role of the human search engine.
“Sometimes people don’t know how to phrase the question,” Duncan said.

*****

The “Holy Grail” film opens with the king traveling with a man clicking together two coconuts behind him in order to simulate the sound of horse hooves. He comes to the gate of a castle and already, in Scene 1, he is frustrated by two guards asking impertinent questions by two sentries to the gate of the castle about his so-called horse, and where he got the coconuts.
Now, a king has gone to school and knows knowledge is power. If he went to proper king school, he’s learned in the classics of Greek literature, and knows of Plato’s allegory of the cave, and its metaphor that he who rules sees the flame of the fire in the cave, while his subjects only see the flickering of the firelight from the shadows on the wall.
One of the guards suggests to the annoyed king that the coconuts could have been carried from Africa by a swallow. The king, irritated by the debate, is warded away, but a key to information needed in the movie is given away. First, there are two kinds of swallows that are relevant: African and European. Second: Only one migrates. And three: Lectures the guard: “Listen, in order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings 43 times every second.”

*****

A reader’s advisor, like a king of the information age, needs to know things. Indeed, Duncan is a master researcher.
“I’ve had lots of interesting new questions. Here's one of them: ‘What is ambergris, and can we find a picture of it?” ” she said. “I've had a vague idea of what it is, ever since I was a kid ... Weird chunks of a waxy substance chundered up by whales, bobbing around in the ocean and washing up on beaches, and had heard that people once collected it for concocting exotic perfume. ...”
When the library visitors asked about it, she looked it up in several whale books and encyclopedias and articles, and learned that it's a “biliary concretion” formed in sperm-whales' intestines, thus helping protect their digestive tracts from sharp objects – such as indigestible squid beaks (... This may sound funny, but it isn't to the whales.)
“Ambergris has been used for ages as a stabilizer in perfume-making, to slow down evaporation, although many modern makers of perfumes use synthetic substances instead,” she said.
“Apparently freshly-ejected ambra-grisea smells whalishly fecal – but sun-exposure and sloshing about in the salty sea makes it oxidize, and the scent mellows out to a sort of mix of musk and rubbing-alcohol.”
They even found a picture. It looked like “a cross between oil-blobs and horse-poop clumps, although it also can look like slabs of beat-up wax or chunks of concrete; sometimes pieces are found that weigh 100 pounds.
“One source estimated the current price at $20 a gram. So dogged beach combers may want to keep an eye out for it ... though it's said to be more common in the Atlantic ocean, and the shores of Asia and Africa and New Zealand and the Bahamas and South Seas ... (almost everywhere but here!)”
With such good service, the library visitor is satisfied, getting more than a chunk of both experience and information by asking to the right question from the right person.
Now, that’s service.

*****
At the Bridge of Death, each knight is asked a series of questions. The results vary. Sir Launcelot of Camelot is only asked “What is your favorite color?” He answers it and is allowed to pass. Sir Robin is next, and gets a tough question and, failing to respond correctly, is thrown into the abyss. Sir Galahad is asked about his favorite color, waffles on his answer, and is thrown into the pit, too.
Indeed, it’s a lot like Google.com. And you can wind up wasting a lot of time, and energy, in the process.

*****
At the library, Duncan is a multi-tasking reader’s advisor.
Students ask a lot about the Periodic table. Kids want to find books proving or disproving whether “dragons are real,” she said, since for whatever reasons the legends of yore are still very much on their minds. People who rent their homes often ask about locating information about landlord / tennant laws. Builders are often pointed to the “Construction Estimator,” a popular set of books and CDs for building projects. A lot of the information and assistance she gives out has as much to do with how to use the computer as where to locate information.
“The Internet is great, but my job is leading people to the books,” she said. “There’s a feeling you get in the brain ... there’s just something that happens with a book. At a computer, it’s just hard for many people to read for too long online.
“People are overwhelmed by the amount of information that’s on the Internet, and they prefer to speak to a real person.
“Sometimes you need to ask me a question before you need to know what to look for online.
“You need an answer back before you can ask the real question.
“If you help people find a piece of information, they will thank you for helping them find it. It feels good to help them to find it faster.”
Indeed, a reader’s advisor is a way to put a human face on the information age.


*****
Completely annoyed, King Arthur faces the old man at the Bridge of Death.
He is asked, “What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
“What do you mean?” he responds. “An African or European swallow.”
The keeper, not knowing, is thrown into the information abyss himself.
He’s asked, “How do you know so much about swallows?”
“Well,” Arthur answers, “you have to know these things when you are a king, you know.”

During the 1960s, the world was asked to take a “sad song, and make it better” by the Beatles. And by another high-water mark from the era, “The Graduate” we learned from the iconoclastic film that if you were a young man looking for a career, there was one thing, and one thing only, to look into: “Plastics.”
The director of “Rumor Has It ...,” Rob Reiner was a member of that generation, and the first place we saw him was as the hippie dippy “Meathead” in the show, “Archie Bunker.” In this film, the creature of an age of questioning values and of outright revolution asks us the question, can a good film be made about an even better film?
Well, it certainly plays homage to “The Graduate,” which starred Dustin Hoffman as the post-college graduate trying to come to terms with the new plastic world, and Anne Bancroft as a seductress twice his age. The real-life legend of the Pasadena, Calif., pair that inspired a novel by Charles Webb, is “the rumor” addressed in “Rumor Has It ...”
And the screenplay by Ted Griffin is pretty darn good. It’s a good story with a number of witty lines and surprising turns. Even better, Shirley MacLaine makes the most of the part, overcoming the fact Bancroft is no longer with us to reprise the role, by delivering one of the supporting actress perfomances of the year. Her portrayal of the real “Mrs. Robinson,” made famous by the Simon and Garfunkel song usually associated with “The Graduate,” is completely believable. And Kevin Costner is a warm friend to have around in the film, too.
One critic for the Boston Globe slammed the film because Reiner has political inclinations in the Democratic Party. The reviewer, Wesley Morris, wrote Reiner chose a pre-millenial, “Internet Gold Rush” era setting only because he “couldn’t stand to set the picture during the Bush administration.” Maybe. Maybe not. You could make points either way, since the Bush era is about crushing a revolt, and both the “Graduate” and the Internet are about revolution. But this film doesn’t work for one reason, and one reason only: “Plastics.”
Such as the performance by Jennifer Aniston, everybody’s sweetheart, yes, but with no more range than the pre-packaged nervous nelly we all know and love (or is that loathe?).
Which is why this film may inspire a new motto for these troubled times. And that motto should be: “Brad, we forgive you!”

Promotional Rescue

Want to talk about an apparent act of genius in marketing, a total reinvention of the pop process? Think “American Idol” had taken the idea as far as it could go, to excess, even. Think again.
Yes, “American Idol” improved upon the way a star can be invented in the post-MTV world with grinding, repetitive shows that hatched new stars with the up--and-coming buzz by marketing them in a “Survivor”-like series of elimination rounds.
In the end, after a televised season that was more like a truncated baseball campaign with a glitzy, overexposed finale, you came up with a “star” who had yet to even record a single note of music, other than a promotional jingle or two. Once the show was complete, the winner of the “Idol” title was handed over to the big wig music producers, who are now, even as we speak, marketing a new generation of performers who mostly sing other people’s songs, thus making the idea of a “cover” song hip again.
Almost.
Maybe it was somewhere during the rising appeal of long-haired and barefooted southern rock “rebel” Bo Bice, who placed second in the most recent “American Idol” pageant but changed the game all the same, that the genesis of the “Rock Star: INXS” show was born. Though it had less appeal and appeared to be an obvious copy cat, the show had one thing working for it “Idol” may never achieve: INXS was already a name-brand act. With a serious, proven backlog of material to perform. A huge, dedicated fan base that, even after the death of lead singer Michael Hutchence due toan apparent suicide on Nov. 22 1997, continued to live on in the form of an extensive and sophisted Webring of fan sites.
Yes, the band had lost a lot of momentum. The Australian acts best days appeared to be locked in the 1980s, despite recruiting ex-Noiseworks lead singer Jon Stevens in 2000 to attempt to replace Hutchence, who, at his best, was a phenomental frontman during the band’s heyday.
He was a hard act to follow. Even though the core of the rest of the band remained remarkably intact with the Farriss Brothers still at the helm in after 23 years of playing music together as INXS, something was missing.
Seven years after Hutchence’s death, the lead singer job for INXS was available again, like a for sale sign in front of the fabled mansions of post-New Wave, pre-alternative pop-rock. Enter the show, “Rock Star: INXS,” which included 15 contestants vying for the job last summer in an extended televised audition.
Fortune, a Canadian, was actually chosen in a controversial move for the band. To replace Hutchence at all and keep the band alive was rather like trying to replace a Mick Jagger or Bono. It tested the credibility. In fact, to seek a replacement under such tragic circumstances may remain anathema to many hardline fans of INXS’s legacy in Aussie-bred rock.
But bassist Garry Gary Beers believed all the signs were right to bring the mouthy, charismatic Fortune to the mic for another round on the road. As he recently told E-Online:
“At Michael’s funeral, it was a clear day. As we were putting the coffin into the hearse, there was a lightning strike ad defeaning thunder clap out of nowhere, and it poured rain as we drove.” Then, two years later, a sudden thunderclap struck again as they were scattering Hutchence’s ashes in the Himalayas. “Let’s put it this way,” E-Online reported last week, “if Michael’s spirit was against us, he would’ve made his voice clear during the auditions.”
If there has been any echoes of thunderclaps at all, it has been in the resurgent popularity of the band, which comes to Lincoln City’s 1,300-seat Chinook Winds Casino venue for two sold-out shows Jan. 20 - 21. According to Matthew Mingrone, marketing director for the casino, the booking staff took a shot at bringing the band to town for the second stop of its tour, just as the “reality show was in its final week.”
“We’ve always looked at different acts for the younger customers that haven’t been here in the past,” he said. But this was too good to pass up, a band with a popularity base going back to the 1980s, thus, appealing to the perfect demographic, adults in their 30s and 40s. “That’s a good core group for our casino,” he said. In a way usually reserved for the likes of Wayne Newton, announcement on Oct. 15 of the INXS shows here melted down the lines for reservation ticket sales in three days.
Thus proving INXS, too borrow a line from one of its songs, “New Sensation,” is now a view sensation.

Pedestrian Blues

Three miles from Costdale
Half a mile from home
Got everything but the girl
I guess, and, of course,
that’s not enough

I’m three miles from Costdale,
half a mile from home
Got a coat, a hat & vest,
Gonna test the West,
a road that’s rough, I guess

Forty four on Indian School,
Forty six on Highway 101
All the while time’s clicking
on my heels wondering:
What would running water do?

I’m fifteen-hundred miles
from Costdale, Arizona,
but a hundred miles of gas
will do. Gonna do what lasts,
the past is past: Ninety more
miles will do

Clipper Ship

Overlooking a seawall
cracked silly open by
a storm with ninety
mile per hour winds,
the fourth one in forty days,
eighty nights

I crawled on the floor
covered with newspaper
sports, scores and more,
scrambled for my glasses,
when the pressure dropped

I gasped for air, a coal mine
canary who could breathe
the bubbles of God’s
invisible clipper ship,
colliding

Dreadlines

And when your hear
the sucking sounds
And fear the rain
between your coats
Go on out, row your boats

The pirate of porn walks
the land, regretting, since
he can’t see his spyglass
he’s peering through,
can’t see you, combing
your hair, back there

Don’t worry:
You looked fine


Mormon Book of the Dead

People in hell
want ice water

People in heaven
want a cup of Joe



Thoughts Written on a Canyon Map
During a Coffee, Bidi and Piece
of Some Kind of Prettily Made Bread
While Gazing at a Hummer-Covered Parking Lot
at a Gentrified Surbuban Republican Bistro

I charted this course
with a red string
on a map of black chalk

The roads are many,
the final choice, new
I climb up the cafe canyon
walls to get a better view,
to see over the trees
and see my way to you

Having returned like Prometheus
to my city in pretty chains of light,
the rains have stopped like Porches
braking in the sun, which burns,
big and bright, drying this coffee stop
tabletop with its eviscerating truth

Gathering force, moving toward
the majestic and mysterious,
the merely merrily whimsical
snowcapped peaks of Ouray,
just a day away, as Latin horns
are piped through soccer moms
in sweatpants and motors purr

Is this city immune to war?

This cream of violence
rises to the top
For what they eat and taste
and buy and like,
they will not stop

Mechanized sweet, sweet soap,
the umbilical sword of the clean,
is the last potable hope
of water for the healing
and giving peace a hearing

And while the danceworld cult is searing,
I advance across an asphalt clearing:
In my heart, the key is just the start,
this language of escape
is now my art


West Coast Storm Warning

The world’s end wind
is just a frantic curtain call
of polarizing sun, oceans
rising before the fall

The world’s end wind
is you, watching TV,
swearing me away
as if tea and Tiffany
were a mortal plug

I know I’m going mad
The world’s end wind
is shaking sense into the house

The world’s end wind
has blown me off the tracks
The world’s end wind
puts the cat in heat asleep

The world’s end wind
is you on a bucking final horse
breathing sweet acetyline


What Would Water Do?

The water would run to work,
but turn, gone amok at the work corner,
toward the One-O-One
to drink a red eye and puff a smoke
in the early morning Ra

The water would pick up
trash along the way
but wait for more force
to finish the job

The water would arrive
on time and unplanned,
feeling out each empty
bottomland space
since every handmade
space is disorganized
differently

The water would percolate
in the apocalyptic heat,
catch the wind
and go fly a kite

The water would commit
murderous rage and recede,
unpleased, unsatisfied,
moving on the moon