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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

The Road to Mythville
A collection of poems on the new millennium in America, drawing from a 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.
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Mythinformation Radio Free Arizona O.-Links: Psychic Weather Report Avatars R Us Submit Your Poems The Bard of Mythville New Media Shredder Willy B in Cyber S Mythville on the Google Stretch Come, See Jerusalem Enviro Digita Radio Free Arizona at G21.net Automous Author Last Water






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 and purchase


Angel of the Avenues
Includes the experiential essay, "Time Enough for Smoke," and new poems written during the long hot 2004 election season in the Southwestern United States by Douglas McDaniel..Read more and purchase


23Roads to Mythville
The combined three books of "The Mythville Trilogy" in the one book, 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 in a real-life Da Vinci Code quest..Read more and purchase


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 and purchase


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 and purchase

Mythville: One

Godz, Cars & Cannon

Experiential author Douglas McDaniel launches himself into a real-life search for the so-called Da Vinci code, driving into the networked thickets of American life, looking for signs of myth and romance in the age of automotive machines.
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Mythville: Dos

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.
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Mythville: Tres

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.
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The Kachina's Son

Poems about the Four Corners area written while author Douglas McDaniel was living in Telluride, Colorado.
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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."
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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.
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When Eddie Albert died last month at the age of 99, one of the early pioneers of American culture was lost. As the star of the popular 1960s television comedy series, "Green Acres," he was Oliver Douglas, the New York lawyer who settled in a generic caricacture of farm life with his glamorous wife, played by Eva Gabor. And so, one of the enduring themes of pop culture was set: That of a city clicker perplexed by the antics of the residents of rural America.
This theme has been repeated over the decades. American film and television has continually recycled the charming schism of this fish out of water story. Eventually, after his on-the-tube career as a Chicago psychiatrist ran out of ideas about dealing with the crazies of urban America, Bob Newhart moved out to the country, too. And there again was Newhart, scratchin' his head, dead pan, about eccentric country folk.
Then, in the 1980s and early 1990s, a sea-change occurred with "Northern Exposure." Based on the life of a tiny, remote town in Alaska, and the adventures of various city slickers who had also come out to the country in search of some kind of Eden fantasy, the question was turned on its ear. That is, who was more comedic, the city slicker or the laid-back logger, the dingy waitress or matter-of-fact restaurateur.
Arguments could be made on both sides, but if urban America's interest in this theme is any indication, there exists deep in the heart of the national fabric a lingering desire to return to "Green Acres."
To extend this deep-seated need into reality then, one need only to look at changes in the local rural environs as loads of people come up from Phoenix or other cities to attempt to find the sort of nirvana implied by escape from the city. In counter to this, long-standing residents of these rural areas regard such folk with suspicion. Typically, there is a fear these people want to bring the city with them.
So there exists, in the election of Camp Verde Mayor Tony Gioia, or, a refugee from more populous places such as newly elected Councilman Ron Smith, a natural rflex action that their values run counter to what old-timers whose families grew up here believe in. That is, a rural lifestyle.
One need only to look at the voting record of Gioia, as his votes continually are a minority on the town council, that there is an Us vs. Them formula at work. However, as more and more people come to town from the cities, with ideas of controlled growth and supposedly radical notions of preservation that seem to run counter to a general community desire that more is better, always better, one might take another view of these newcomers with a fresh thought: These people are canaries who have just come from the coal mine.