Monday, July 6, 2015

Bobblehead Pope Francis: I want one of these!


 


Though I have never loved anything Catholic, I love Pope Francis. I don't think I need to tell you why And though I have never owned a bobblehead, I am seriously considering buying one of these.

Catholic meant those other kids we never played with, though I don't remember being told not to. They walked in the opposite direction to school. Catholic meant kids in uniform, and those bizarrely short pleated skirts that barely covered the girls' bums.

Catholic meant Blessed Sacrament School and The Pines convent on Ursaline Avenue, where I had to go for my violin lessons. Shit-scary place, looked medieval, if I had known what that meant.

Catholic meant exorcisms and stuff like that, and Mary, a big deal over Mary who was very much a supporting player to us Protestant kids.



Being Irish, Catholics represented a deep, unspeakable schism. We just "knew". Just as my uncritical grandma from northern Ireland described people from the south of Ireland as "rather common", Catholics would have been described as Papists, if they were spoken of at all.

But I don't have to think about any of that any more, because, like a miracle, we have Pope Francis, who makes more sense than any spiritual leader since the Dalai Lama.

And I love him, too.



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Weirdball gifs






BACKSTORY. I got watching The Bandwagon again last night, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, the incomparable Oscar Levant, etc. Astaire gave one of the best graceful, effortless comic performances of his career.

These odd little gifs aren't from that show. That show has a very, very strange number in it called Triplets, in which Astaire and Nanette Fabray and that other guy (? It was supposed to be Levant, but his knees were shot) play three supposedly-identical babies. I think they did it with their shoes on their knees. Long ago, I saw a sort of surreal version of this number in Spanish and posted it somewhere on my blog. But do you think I could find it? How to search for it? Spanish version of Triplets? There went my idea for a great gif.

Somehow I ended up with this strange number, Astaire with Eleanor Powell, one of his better dance partners (though the public loved Ginger more). But my usual program, Gifsforum, is down AGAIN and I had to use MakeaGif, which doesn't make a gif very well. You can go up to 20 seconds on them, which is nice, but look at how they come out! Jerk-a-rama. I decided to go for it and use it for effect. There are much better-quality clips of this dance, but I liked the surreal phosphorescence of this one.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Not About Thomas Merton: escort cards of yesteryear



  

Now these are interesting, sort of. One of them things you see on Facebook, a link-to rather, while you're scrollin' along trying to ignore unbelievably hot-air-inflated, narcissistic swaggering and self-absorbed primping by writers who want you to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are More Successful Than You (while pretending to bewail the fact that they only sold 250 copies at their latest book-signing). Never mind. So you click on it, and sometimes it's interesting. More often than not it's a time-waster. But this is a little piece of sociological history. I didn't know about these things, presumably passed from a gentleman to a lady, and I am not at all sure what the exact meaning of it was, or the protocol. Was the gentleman in question really supposed to walk the lady home for reasons of safety? So she wouldn't have to traverse those dangerous streets alone?




"I shall be miserable if I can't love you" can be taken any number of ways, as can the description "sensible and good". He seems to be saying "your virtues are all on display, now please can I take them away"?






Hell, these are pickup things. What else COULD they be? How could you hand one of these cheesy things to someone you already know, and if you DON'T know her, doesn't the whole thing smack of "transaction"?




Think about it, though. If a lady walked alone, particularly in the evening, it sent a particular message. Kind of like all those elaborate signals you could send with a fan (like "come hither" or "up yours"). This one sounds like something out of a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical: "my style and complexion/going in your direction". Selection, affection: cute. But this innuendo-laden promise of "protection" is starting to remind me of an ad for Trojans.




Cute devil cartoons aside, the whispers between the lines are interesting. "Confidential card", "between ourselves": these don't seem to bespeak a jolly little talk between a lady and gent as he accompanies her a few blocks to her front porch. These seem to hint at Something Else.






Why am I suddenly thinking of Belle Watling's whorehouse in Gone with the Wind?




Here's a good one, with a little Cupid-esque figure on it. It talks about "appointing time and place for an interview" - and I don't think they mean for a typing job. The droll misspelled postscript "enter nous" seems to have a double meaning, somehow.




So. If she won't go home with him, he wants to reserve the privilege of staring at her as she walks by. Creepy.




This one expresses more ardour, or else is more arduous than the others. Strangely, two amphibia frolic (with no clothes on!), and "blissful" pleasure is hinted at. The card-bearer and his potential inamorata are "two souls with but a single thought; two hearts that beat as one". Very, very interesting indeed.




More ogling from the fence. Miawwwwww!




Sa-a-a-a-a-ay, are these cards really what I think they are?  For if they are, all this is beginning to seem a bit pink about the edges.




And I ask you, what could be so erotically-charged as an oven mitt? Such a signal could leave no doubt as to a gentleman's intentions. God only knows what those initials stand for.



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What rhymes with penis? The worst gif in the history of mankind




I was watching one of those wretched Top Ten YouTube videos, very late at night when my brain is basically on another planet, when I discovered Top Ten Worst TV Spinoffs. The Dukes of Hazzard was bad enough, with its idiot characters and free display of the Confederate flag (not to mention that irritating car horn and all the cars flying through the air), but here is evidence of a (mercifully) short-lived spinoff called Enos. I don't want to know who Enos was, but his name rhymes with penis and his police car flies through the air. Good God, who'd make a gif out of this??


THOMAS MERTON CONFIDENTIAL, Part 2: Dead monk in the middle of the road





(These are not random reflections, but the ones I woke up with, off the top. I have never been a Merton fan ever since I took a course and noticed how many groupies he has, almost all women. They worship the guy. The book about his "affair" with Margie Smith, a nurse who washed his body and thus ignited his passion, has been denounced by Mertonologists everywhere. The worst sin it commits is to be boring. There is no sense at all of Margie's character, but that's not the point. She is a cipher in this, and only a device for TM to attain yet another facet as the Monk who turns out to be Human After All.)

I've had the night to process all this. The book (Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair That Set Him Free by Mark Shaw) is saturated with Catholic guilt. I think the feelings about sexuality are sick and polarized between “sin” /“filth” and “chastity” which isn’t really chastity at all but something protected only by several layers of clothing. He was like a teenager making out in the back seat, performing what they now call “outercourse”. I wonder if he didn’t have a masturbation habit which was then considered an unspeakable horror, almost a worse sin than killing someone. And it’s all so stupid, why not just blow it off? It makes no difference to “God” or G/d or whoever made or gave rise to all of this. 





He is so orthodox in spite of his so-called rebel status. This Margie is a good example of his attraction to women/girls of a “lower station” that he could easily dominate and manipulate with charm and status/intellectual power/fame. It started off with her bathing him in a darkened room. Sounds like Bathsheba or something. Obviously sexual, as he hadn’t been touched sexually in 20 or more years. But he has this self-whipping thing that I think is sick. It all comes across as creepy rather than romantic. Though he mentions sex over and over again, he keeps insisting he “hasn’t broken his vows”, but he had stretched them beyond recognition, which is utter hypocrisy and a sin against the body. It's throwing sex back in G/d’s face to cheat your way past “sin” and back into G/d’s good graces, not out of love for G/d but to protect your status and unimpeachable reputation as the wise, all-knowing, "celibate" monk. 





So I end up feeling even worse about him. He is an object of worship by now, and the sad non-affair is now seen as a lovely pastoral interlude, TM and his nubile nurse walking hand-in-hand through green pastures while saturated with chaste, pure feelings of Love. This makes him Human (so what was he before?) and even more admirable in their eyes, though I think he was an emotional mess who kept a mask on all his life. His body fell apart, for sure, for self-neglectful/self-destructive reasons, or perhaps from the way things were in the abbey, similar to the one I wrote about where medical conditions were ignored.





We won't get into the drinking. Nobody drinks that much if they are happy. I know about this, being an alcoholic who stopped drinking in 1990 (yes, fully 25 years ago!). People drink as heavily as he did, not to carouse and have fun, but to blot out their feelings, which are usually totally wretched and ridden with guilt.

What astounds me though is that he had the same psychiatrist as George Gershwin! Dr. Gregory Zilboorg. This is the one who slept with Kay Swift on HER dime, during HER appointments, as part of the “treatment”, though she hated it. He swindled and exploited and sexually abused a brilliant, sophisticated woman whose accomplishments would have been much more appreciated if she hadn't been Gershwin’s “beard”. The same Zilboorg who revealed all his patients’ innermost secrets to other patients as a sort of party game. Everyone wanted to see him, he was “the one to see” who proved how complicated, tortured and brilliant you were, and all these high-flown literary/musical celebrities flocked to him. It came out much later that his medical degree was phony and he had no business treating patients at all. In spite of all that, thirty years later, he treated Merton. Beats me. He got away with it, I guess. It was all highly intellectual then anyway, and very elitist.








Anyway, he dumped her when she became a hazard to his status and was no longer convenient for him, and since she bowed down before him, loved and adored him, and anything he said was law, she obeyed. To eat the crumbs from under his table was huge, of course. The book talks about a woman who sexually attacked him and, I think, he rather enjoyed it. Women love celibates as they used to love gay men before they wised up. It’s Thorn Birds syndrome, in which this virgin priest (usually gay) turns out to be a superb lover. At least TM fucked around in his early days, which endears him to me a little, but felt a lot of Catholic guilt about it afterwards. Fathered a child, which he totally disowned: there’s a ruthlessness there, and a need to protect his reputation rather than acknowledging his child and helping to bring it up.  The more you look at this, the creepier it gets. I think he had elements of narcissism, definitely, hypocrisy, and even a bit of sociopathy, as he felt Margie was there for the taking, a sexual banquet he could ALMOST taste, then ignore and walk away from when he was “finished”.






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Saturday, July 4, 2015

Om ma ni pad me hum





  


Om
(ohm)
Ma
(mah)
Ni
(nee)
Pad
(pahd)
Me
(may)
Hum
(hum)



At the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, I turned the corner and literally gasped when I saw this incredibly beautiful statue of Lord Buddha.




This is not the usual jolly, rotund, obviously male Buddha of tradition. This one is beautifully androgynous and seems to embody both sexes. In its downcast eyes and beautiful hands, it is enigmatic in its grace.




Thus the Buddha appears as Mother and Father of us all.


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Friday, July 3, 2015

THOMAS MERTON CONFIDENTIAL (or: did they or didn't they?)




I’ve never been much of a Mertonologist, though I know there are entire societies worldwide that exist only to praise his lowly, Trappist name.

For he was a Trappist (also known as Cistercian), a bona fide hermit, bestselling author, cult figure, and many other things besides. I think he probably wrote many hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps even millions of pages and is still writing them right now, even as we speak, though he was electrocuted in Thailand back in 1968. Always known to be clumsy, he grabbed a poorly-wired electric fan to steady himself when getting out of the bathtub. Don’t touch those things while wet, Thomas.




I don’t know, nor do I particularly want to know, all the details of Thomas Merton’s life history, except that when he was young, he was Bad, and when he was older, he was Good. I am not sure if he was poisonously good or not, but good he must’ve been, living in that hut and all.

I read a hilarious account written by Joan Baez in which she and her spiritual mentor Ira Sandperl witnessed the good Brother Thomas (or Brother Louis, as he was variously known)  put away two cheeseburgers, an order of fries and more than a couple of shots of Irish whiskey (let’s hope it was Irish, for God’s sake, and not that other stuff), while telling them that he had fallen in love with a woman in Lexington and wanted to go sneaking away to see her.

No one “sees” someone they are involved with. I think it involves considerably more than seeing. Other senses are involved. It’s funny that when you look up accounts of Thomas Merton’s infamous affair, many INSIST that it “wasn’t consummated”, while others insist that it obviously was. Or perhaps should have been.





Obviously, the only thing sexier than having sex is NOT having sex. We knew this in Grade Nine, for God’s sake, while fumbling frantically around in the back seat. An elbow in the eye was a fair price to pay for a digit in the right place. Or don’t you remember?

While I could never get through a  Merton biography because I don’t think they’re honest enough, and while I could not get through The Seven Storey Mountain to save my bloody life, I might be able to get through this semi-bio by Mark Shaw. It’s got an unfortunate True Confessions title (Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free) that has serious Mertonologists hopping mad, hopping up and down in their faux habits which they wear to Mertocon conventions (in which everyone dresses up as the monk of their choice).





It’s just the good parts, folks, though of course to avoid lawsuits the author has had to put it all in context: how this great man and spiritual giant became human and proved, to himself and to the entire world, that he was Humble and Contrite and got away with bloody murder because he was so famous and the abbey needed the money.

Surely that must have been part of why this enigmatic spiritual genius got away with such murder, and why he wasn’t chucked out for frolicking in the green woods with a 25-year-old woman and lying about it (his dishonesty and deceptiveness, in the long run, being the more serious sin).

Merton got himself into this delicious mess when his back gave out and he was confined to the hospital for surgery. An attractive young student nurse gave him back rubs, sponge baths, etc., and one can understand the attraction: someone who hasn’t been touched in 20 years is suddenly getting all this professionally-sanctioned hands-on attention from a young woman.

Attraction quickly gave way to . . . attraction.





Margie Smith was completely awed by the grinning Catholic Buddha/walking contradiction that was Merton, who by this time was the most famous Trappist hermit in the history of the world. He was literally twice her age, and had a very big thing (sorry!) about his vow of chastity, so that in the next few months he pushed it as far as he could without – we think – or so we are told -  “breaking” it.

I have a little bit of problem with a grown man NOT having sex with a woman he is madly in love with. It seems somehow indecent. It reminds me of Bill Clinton and his famous statement, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” because in his humble opinion blow jobs did not qualify as “sexual relations”.  It’s a fairly common practice for men to have anal sex with a woman, particularly a virgin, then deny he “had sex” with her because he used a relatively (though not entirely) non-standard orifice. I have read more than once that this practice is particularly common in fundamentalist Christian circles, where “purity” is prized but perhaps a little ill-defined.





You can have sex with a knothole, men. ‘Fess up. Friction will do it. But there is a certain prissy sense of tiptoeing around, of walking along the line instead of stepping over it. For some obscure reason I find this infuriatingly dishonest.

We define “sex” and “consummation” in some pretty strange ways. I have no problem with the act that legally defines it, but it can and often does happen with no orgasm, at least not for the woman. That’s dreadful. A man with a talented hand can get you there without even undressing you. You see, we live in a sexually-limited society which is secretly still appalled at the whole thing, or at least doesn’t care two figs if a woman is sexually satisfied or not.

I get that feeling with Merton. He couldn’t get away from his feelings, but at the same time he skated around them. He was playing the naughty boy, the bad monk acting out, while secretly hoping his abbot would grab it and get him back to where he belonged. But he played his young would-be lover, too, perhaps even played her for a fool.





This excerpt from the Thomas Merton Confidential book kind of sums up the whole thing, with the same sentiments repeated over and over as he refuses to decide either way and deceives everyone in his monastic world.

“As May ended, Merton was frenzied as he attempted to sort out his feelings after a second secret interlude, where “we got ourselves quite aroused sexually” and he suffered “a great deal of confusions, anguish, indecision and nerves.” He decided, “I cannot let this become a sexual affair, it would be disastrous for both of us.” Placing at least part of the blame on Margie and her “being too curious . . . and too passionate for me (for her body to tell the truth was wonderful the other day, ready for the most magnificent love)”, Merton, praying he could resist her, recalled more talks about the need for the love to be chaste. He was fearful of another meeting alone on the Gethsemani grounds, and told her it was unwise.”





They keep meeting, though meeting right on the grounds seems like lunacy to me, not to mention more than a little “nyaa, nyaa, look what I’m getting away with”. They meet every place they can, which is pretty hard because he is not supposed to leave the abbey or venture very far from his hermit’s hut. His writings about his passionate, illicit interlude, which are surprisingly candid for someone who must have known it would eventually be published along with all his other writings, are full of references to eroticism, kissing, and “making love”, though stopping short of “real” sex in the form of intercourse (which is, after all, the only true sex).

“He admitted later that night that any step toward a ‘fully involved erotic and sexual love for (Margie) – completely fulfilled and frequently so’ would affect his life and vocation as never before. This was because he knew the loving affection he had for her – ‘with the explicit sacrifice of sex and of erotic satisfaction’ – was more in harmony with God’s love than against it. Did Merton’s words mean no consummation of the relationship had occurred?”





Perhaps the question is academic. But isn’t it true that he shouldn’t have been doing anything that wasn’t acceptable for his abbot to see? What about the most powerful monastic vow of all: obedience? This stuff wasn’t acceptable by anyone’s reckoning. If they weren’t having sex, some serious friction must have been going on. It bothers me just to read about it, even creeps me out. The most alarming passage recounts their wangling office space from a psychologist, drinking champagne, and (at least Margie) getting naked. You almost HOPE he jumps over the wall at this point, because the whole thing is beginning to seem downright agonizing and masochistic. Not to mention hypocritical and dishonest.

One fact which often isn’t mentioned in recounting this strange interlude is the power imbalance between a student nurse in her 20s and one of the most famous and revered spiritual leaders of the 20th century. Even more shocking is the fact that Margie Smith was engaged to be married at the time, her fiancée having just been shipped over to Vietnam. It gets harder and harder to see this as the wonderful (and, of course, unconsummated) romantic interlude that humanized the great guru and made him Even More Wonderfully Spiritual (because now wonderfully human) than ever.





What seems to have happened is that he gradually lost interest in Margie, after having broken it off a number of times (citing his precious vow of chastity. This begins to remind me of one of those wretched Southern debutantes attending a “purity ball”). He renewed his vows and pledged himself once again to being the most famous and gregarious hermit in the world.

One wonders about Margie. By all accounts, she pulled herself together and married (though not to the same guy she was engaged to: did stories of Thomas somehow cause a rift, I wonder?). I have yet to encounter anything written about this strange interlude that is at all critical of Merton, though it is obvious to me that a 51-year-old spiritual giant is no match for a confused, already-romantically-committed student nurse. And what about all the sexual dangling and lack of fulfillment, which may have carried on right to the end? Was that fair to her? Was it all just a titillating game? Was he dangling HIMSELF as the ultimate, unattainable prize?

We’ll never know, because the guy grabbed an electric fan while soaking wet, and thus was instantly delivered by the powerful slingshot of a few thousand volts to that great and unfathomable mystery on the Other Side.





Post-blog thoughts. I found out, to my great consternation, that there is only one YouTube video I can find featuring the real Thomas Merton giving a real talk. It takes place in Thailand in 1968. Shortly after this talk, feeling a little limp in the heat, he decided to take a shower (or bath depending on which Merton legend you buy into). Then came the encounter with the electric fan that ended his life. So Merton's last spoken words, in public anyway, were "let's go grab a Coke or something." Kind of makes me love him a whole lot more.




ADDENDUM. The death of Thomas Merton

Twenty seven years later, on the same day that he had arrived at the monastery - December 10th, 1968 - Merton died in Asia.

On December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Merton made his last journal entry, and said Mass at St. Louis Church in Bangkok. Merton had been invited to the 
Bangkok conference of Benedictine and Trappist Abbots. He left for Samutprakarn, 29 miles south of Bangkok, for the Sawant Kaniwat (Red Cross) Conference Center, arrived in the afternoon and was housed on the ground floor of Cottage Two.

On the 2nd day of the conference (December 10th), Merton presented his paper, “Marxism and Monastic Perspective”. The paper had been on his mind for many weeks, and he was somewhat nervous by a Dutch television crew that had turned up to film his lecture. (His abbot had ordered him to avoid the press.)

Merton’s paper dealt with the role of the monk in a world of revolution …

“to experience the ground of his own being in such a way that he knows the secret of liberation and can somehow or other communicate it to others.”

Finishing the talk, Merton suggested putting off questions until evening, and concluded with the words:

“So I will disappear.”

He suggested everyone have a coke.

At around 3 PM Father Francois de Grunne, who had a room near Merton’s, heard a cry and what sounded like someone falling. He knocked on Merton’s door, but there was no response. At 4PM, Father de Grunne, worried that something was wrong, looked through the louvers in the upper part of the door and saw Merton lying on the terrazzo floor. A standing fan had fallen on top of him. The door was forced open.


There was the smell of burned flesh. Merton, clearly dead, was lying on his back with the five-foot fan diagonally across his body. The fan was still electrically volatile.

A long, raw third-degree burn about a hand’s width ran along the right side of Merton’s body almost to the groin. There were no marks on his hands. His face was bluish-red, eyes and mouth half open. There had been bleeding from the back of his head. [see footnote]

The priests gave Merton absolution and extreme unction.

Merton’s body was dressed and laid out, and the abbots attending the conference maintained a constant vigil for him.

“In death Father Louis’ face was set in a great and deep peace, and it was obvious that he had found Him Whom he had searched for so diligently.” (Letter from the abbots attending the Bangkok to the Abbot of Gethsemani)

The next day Merton’s body was taken to the United States Air Force Base in
Bangkok and from there flown back to the United States in company with dead bodies of Americans killed in Vietnam.

An official declaration of Merton’s belongings came with his body and read:

1 Timex watch, $10.
1 Pair Dark Glasses in Tortoise frames, nil
1 Cistercian Leather Bound Breviary, nil
1 Rosary (broken), nil
1 Small Icon on Wood of Virgin and Child, nil

At the end of the funeral Mass at Gethsemani, there was a reading from The Seven Story Mountain, concluding with the book’s prophetic final sentence,
“That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.”

His brother monks buried Merton in their small cemetery next to the abbey church.


- Beth Cioffoletti, louie louie blog




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Sunday, June 28, 2015

Those dancing feet: Caitlin aces it!




Flowers in her arms, stars in her eyes! Caitlin triumphs once again at her year-end dance recital, but with a difference. She really worked hard this year and had some private coaching from the owner of the dance company, an eccentric English lady in her 60s who still dances up a storm. Caitlin displayed a dramatic leap in skills and focus. It all came together for her. Tap is especially difficult to master, but she blew us away this time with her precision and exuberance. This was a good old-fashioned 1930s-style number a la Busby Berkeley, my favorite kind of tap.




Her other number was a hilarious thing from Legally Blonde called Omigod You Guys!. The thing is, you guys, my kids were (and are) incredible athletes, smart, funny, caring people, everything you could ever ask for. But they weren't into the arts. At all. This next generation overflows with creativity in dance and music, and Caitlin has her own YouTube craft/cooking show. Caitlin also aced her clarinet solo, Over the Rainbow, at her band recital, and Erica's choir has been invited to sing at various cultural events. What can I say? Sometimes you just have to wait it out.


Saturday, June 27, 2015

Marcie in a coat of flowers: the brilliance of Joni Mitchell




Joni Mitchell – Marcie

Marcie in a coat of flowers
Steps inside a candy store
Reds are sweet and greens are sour
Still no letter at her door
So she'll wash her flower curtains
Hang them in the wind to dry
Dust her tables with his shirt and
Wave another day goodbye




Marcie's faucet needs a plumber
Marcie's sorrow needs a man
Red is autumn green is summer
Greens are turning and the sand
All along the ocean beaches
Stares up empty at the sky
Marcie buys a bag of peaches
Stops a postman passing by
And summer goes
Falls to the sidewalk like string and brown paper
Winter blows
Up from the river there's no one to take her
To the sea




Marcie dresses warm its snowing
Takes a yellow cab uptown
Red is stop and green's for going
Sees a show and rides back down
Down along the Hudson River
Past the shipyards in the cold
Still no letter's been delivered
Still the winter days unfold
Like magazines
Fading in dusty grey attics and cellars
Make a dream
Dream back to summer and hear how
He tells her
Wait for me




Marcie leaves and doesn't tell us
Where or why she moved away
Red is angry green is jealous
That was all she had to say
Someone thought they saw her Sunday
Window shopping in the rain
Someone heard she bought a one-way ticket
And went west again



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