The Third Man

Last weekend I watched The Third Man – had never seen it, had always put it on when I was really too tired to watch anything. Wish that image of Orson Welles (small tower of black) walking into the bright sterility of bombed out buildings and a Ferris wheel had been in my mind much earlier. It would have explained the Millennium Wheel outside the Houses of Parliament so well.

(It’s not the wheel: it’s the 800 years of slowly successful struggle against the divine right of kleptocracy that lie in ruins behind it.)

Angel IV

islands of pain in the midst of the burning
dark as Greek seas, dark as the slaughter of daughters
pass into night
while the wings reach out, peach, apricot, nectarine
and the fire shouts gold,
glory, fear me –

dark as slaughter around us now.
we wait for we don’t know what.

Passing

Another Shrimp on the Barbie

Colonialism & neocolonialism don't have a hair's breadth between them. They institutionalize and amplify and focus to political ends both casual cruelty and the small, everyday, habitual cruelties - bullying at school, hazing in the army/at military schools/fraternities/in sports clubs, rape culture. Abu Ghraib torture was built on hazing rituals. There are also formal schools of torture such as the School of the Americas, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Central and South American governments and death-squads learnt their trades there for decades, in the dark heart of democracy. (Which has always been democracy for me and servitude for thee.)

Tools of the state reach down and allow private psychosis to become policy, to give us law and order which is at heart torture, to give us foreign policy which is at heart torture.

Overt and implicit war liberate psychosis. Psychosis makes war granular.

A Royal Commission is a particular kind of stacked committee…

Who’s left, beyond the Finns* & New Zealanders, to liberate the camps?

To take Australia to trial for this history of imprisoning refugees? (Which has been going on for close to 20 years.)

For Aboriginal deaths in custody? (Murder/suicides which publicly protested as long ago as 1987,  committed much longer than that; which had increased to the point of public protest.)

Photograph of poster on display in the South Australian Museum, July, 1988. The artist has dated it '87.

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*In Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next the segment on Finland shows an education system which isn't aimed at producing low-wage labour on the one hand, and corporate apparatchiks on the other. It is aimed at producing adults with autonomy, skilled and self-directed, who expect and are expected to find work that is meaningful to them.

Douglas Spangle - 2016 winner, the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award

There is a footnote in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which cites an unconsciously gender-based and class-based argument by Aldous Huxley to the effect that, because of more generally-available education and technological advance, there may be 4 men of literary talent now to every 1 of earlier times. Huxley’s corollary is that the demands of our vastly-expanded market must result in the production and consumption of a great deal of trash.

If we look at rock’n’roll we see that musical talent is widespread. Of course it is and always had been – where does the music in ethno-musicology come from if not from the ethnos? Where did folk music come from if not from the folk?

Folk tales. Border ballads. The blues.

Literary talent is similarly widespread, and that’s one of the things verbal art is now demonstrating and discovering to itself and the wider community. Speech and narrative clearly confer an evolutionary advantage. Narrative is central to humanity, and so is sputtering with rage, and so is singing.

Open mic is a forum / venue / performance / form which has proceeded quietly, and often just out of the range of vision of more formal and established literary forms and institutions.

That is its virtue, in many ways.

Being out of official sight means that literally anyone can apply, anyone can have their say and be heard. Because it is free and accessible, the concerns tend to be common human concerns – love, death, taxes… Like SF fandom it can be limited in scope by being invitational in nature – you can get fragmented groups and communities. But once the event or series is known the invitation is established, and the invitation remains open as long as the series lasts.

The Slam Poetry end of the spectrum can be quite formally innovative. The grass-roots, my first time in public end of the spectrum can often be perceptually innovative and emotionally subtle. Occasionally there is an astounding feat –

One night in late 2006, at the Broken Word open mic at the Alberta Street Pub, founded by Arlo Voorhees, a young woman read a long set of linked sestinas. They built and built and built, a Jacob’s ladder of exploration and explication from the nerve-ends of a relationship. It was the only piece I ever saw receive a standing ovation. It was a tour de force and a force of nature and ferocity.

Michael Shay organized a group of six active attendees – Douglas Spangle was one of the six – to edit the second published volume from those Broken Word readings. We all asked who that young woman was. None of the regulars knew her; none of their friends knew her; no one who listened to Talking Earth, on KBOO, knew her. We never found her. The poem's not in the book.

But we had heard it. We remember our mounting amazement as it built and crescendo’d – And then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared, this amazing piece of art from, in, and of the community. Where it has always come from, where it has always been.

For those of us caught between I can’t go on and I must go on, open mic gives us the chance to draw from each other the spirit to go on.

And so we come to Oregon, Portland, and Douglas Spangle. Who has nurtured this form and forum of weekly readings for more than 30 years.

The Broken Word reading at the Alberta Street Pub (founded and emceed by Arlo Voorhees, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring readers such as Judith Fay Pullman and Jaqueline Freeman) followed the Meander reading (founded by Elizabeth Domike and Elizabeth Archers, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring the intricately-talented Andrew Macarthur, sadly no longer with us); and Meander followed the reading at Murray’s Pizza (emceed by Douglas Spangle), which followed the reading at A Shot in the Dark (sometimes emceed by Douglas Spangle), which in turn followed the long-running reading at Café Lena (emceed by Doulgas Spangle with Brian Christopher Hamilton), which succeeded the long-running reading at the Satyricon (emceed by Doulgas Spangle, and featuring such writers as Walt Curtis and Katherine Dunn).

That takes us back to 1983. 2007-1983.

From 2008-2013 Douglas curated Verse in Person at the northwest branch of Multnomah County Library. The Stone Soup reading at Marino’s, was founded by Curtis Whitecarroll, an alumnus of Broken Word, who Douglas had mentored. Stone Soup and its successors, Ink Noise, Word Warrior and Poets' Challenge have featured writers such as Dan Encarnacion, Coleman Stevenson, Brita Emeel, Brenda Taulbee, and JM Reed. The young & formidable poets are often transplants to the city from elsewhere, though not always, but because of Douglas Spangle’s work, they have a committed emcee, a gathering place, a continuing reading series, and an audience.

Nurturing open mic that is not all that Douglas has done – in addition to producing fine poetry of his own he was active in Portland Artquake / Write Out Loud, co-edited Rain City Review (which debuted many Pacific Northwest writers, from Sherman Alexie to Lidia Yuknavitch), has written for Anodyne and The Asian Reporter, produced the last Portland Poetry Fest (dedicated to Mary Barnard) and been a Visiting Poet at Benson High School. His activities in and on behalf of poetry in the Pacific Northwest are really too numerous to mention here.

With the 2016 Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, the Oregon literary community recognizes the devoted nurturing of the weekly readings that has been the hallmark of Douglas Spangle's life: the constant, selfless, week-after-week-after week welcoming, nurturing presence, giving a venue and a voice to those who may go on to be well- and widely-known, to those who come and go in a single night, to any who write a name on a sign-in sheet.

And we at GobQ/Reprobate Books books add our heartfelt congratulations!

Your Smart ForTwo

In the mail the other night, from Mercedes Benz of Portland:

"...According to our records you own a 2014 Smart Fortwo. Based on this information and the value of your vehicle, we would like to exchange your 2014 for a brand new Mercedes Benz with a monthly payment near or below you current payment!.... We absolutely need to reach our goal to purchase approximately 2 millions dollars in pre-owned inventory prior to March 31, 2016. Instead of going only to the auto auction, we would like the opportunity to purchase your Smart Fortwo..."

Well, firstly, we hope your records don't show that we own it. We're leasing it.

Secondly, How can you possibly let us have a full-sized Mercedes for the same price? (Not to mention the cost of insurance, which would go through the roof, and the cost of maintenance, likewise, and the cost of gasoline, whatever that does or will do. Which means the price will actually be nothing like comparable to what the faithful dinner companion & I are paying now.)

Thirdly, we don't like big cars. The Smart Fortwo is particularly nimble and responsive. Had a C-class as a loaner for a couple of days last year - couldn't see past the hood, it wasn't as responsive, was much harder to park, the GPS was massively distracting, it was hard to figure out how to adjust the side-mirrors (2 drivers, 1 car), and the Sirius music system didn't have anything worth listening to. With the electric car we are done with gasoline, with going into debt for maintenance, going into debt to get old cars to pass DEQ...

Fourthly: We absolutely need to reach our goal to purchase approximately 2 millions dollars in pre-owned inventory prior to March 31, 2016...

!!

Another exhausting, arbitrary, mandatory goal.

i) Why $2m?
ii) Why does Mercedes Benz need to push new cars at people who are driving cars only 18 months old?
iii) Are they making too many?
iv) Dear God, the culture of the exhausting, arbitrary, mandatory goal.
(Sometimes it can be reassuring to know that other people's managers are as insane as your own. Sometimes you do begin to wonder if it's just you.)
(But the Koch Brothers are getting ready to kill the electric car. Again.)

So what does this mean? Why does Mercedes Benz suddenly want the 2014 Smart Fortwo back? Won't there be any more nice, nimble, responsive, quiet, easy to drive, easy to park, amiable, non-gasoline, planet-saving electric cars?

There's no end to the exhaustion of the planet or ourselves.

Afterthoughts:
If $2m, quickly, is your goal, then it does make sense to search for currently-owned stock as well as stock from the auction-block. The pool of available vehicles will increase, & these vehicles will generally be in better condition than poor things from the knacker's yard.

So, yes, in that sense, contacting present owners is a logical thing to do.

But the overproduction this hints at is one blind disaster, and taking electric cars off the road to replace them, if that's the plan, with gasoline-powered cars, is another. The ice-sheets are melting. The polar bears are drowning. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching.

Flint's Water

As Michael Moore says: it's worse than you think.

Of course this is what the rich do, if they're allowed.
Of course it's an outrage.
Of course it's criminal negligence.
Of course it's 9 counts of manslaughter.
Of course it's mass assault with chemical weapons.
Of course it's grievous bodily harm inflicted on every Flint resident.
Of course it's mass theft of every Flint homeowner's home's market value.
Of course this is a (class-) war crime.
Of course Snyder and every one of his apparatchiks should be indicted.
Of course Snyder and every one of his apparatchiks should go to prison forever.

And as long as Flint's water is like this, Snyder and every one of his apparatchiks should have to drink it.

Malheur - Another White Riot

As they re-characterize every function and agency of society, land, and government, it becomes clearer and clearer that the Bundy-led group occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge want to recognize nothing larger than themselves.

Their armed lunacy is that old bumper sticker writ large: "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" - and amounts to what that sticker always did amount to: Bible-bashing, gun-toting bluster and threat.

In the meantime the Federal Government continues to co-operate in its own re-characterization as cowed, paralyzed and ... illegitimate, completely sacrificing public rights and responsible land management to the kind of armed greed & invasion that western flicks romanticized for 80 years.*

(This is the way the world ends - stumbling around in a fog of phantoms and symbols.)

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*Reductio'd ad absurdum in the belt-buckle emblem "God, guns and guts made this country great." (Pay no attention to the threat in the gun, little darlin' - the alliteration makes it true.)