Bob Dylan: the rise and fall

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

Here comes the blind commissioner

They’ve got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker

The other is in his pants

And the riot squad they’re restless

They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight

From Desolation Row

Cinderella, she seems so easy

“It takes one to know one,” she smiles

And puts her hands in her back pockets

Bette Davis style

And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning

“You Belong to Me I Believe”

And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place 

my friend

You better leave”

And the only sound that’s left

After the ambulances go

Is Cinderella sweeping up

On Desolation Row

Now the moon is almost hidden

The stars are beginning to hide

The fortune-telling lady

Has even taken all her things inside

All except for Cain and Abel

And the hunchback of Notre Dame

Everybody is making love

Or else expecting rain

And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing

He’s getting ready for the show

He’s going to the carnival tonight

On Desolation Row

Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession’s her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness

And though her eyes are fixed upon

Noah’s great rainbow

She spends her time peeking

Into Desolation Row

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

He looked so immaculately frightful

As he bummed a cigarette

Then he went off sniffing drainpipes

And reciting the alphabet

Now you would not think to look at him

But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin

On Desolation Row

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They’re trying to blow it up

Now his nurse, some local loser

She’s in charge of the cyanide hole

And she also keeps the cards that read

“Have Mercy on His Soul”

They all play on pennywhistles

You can hear them blow

If you lean your head out far enough

From Desolation Row

Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains

They’re getting ready for the feast

The Phantom of the Opera

A perfect image of a priest

They’re spoonfeeding Casanova

To get him to feel more assured

Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence

After poisoning him with words

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls

“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know

Casanova is just being punished for going

To Desolation Row”

Now at midnight all the agents

And the superhuman crew

Come out and round up everyone

That knows more than they do

Then they bring them to the factory

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

And then the kerosene

Is brought down from the castles

By insurance men who go

Check to see that nobody is escaping

To Desolation Row

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune

The Titanic sails at dawn

And everybody’s shouting

“Which Side Are You On?”

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Fighting in the captain’s tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much

About Desolation Row

Yes, I received your letter yesterday

(About the time the doorknob broke)

When you asked how I was doing

Was that some kind of joke?

All these people that you mention

Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame

I had to rearrange their faces

And give them all another name

Right now I can’t read too good

Don’t send me no more letters, no

Not unless you mail them

From Desolation Row

Bob Dylan

Desolation Row

with some help from

Lotte Lenya:

Alabama Song

from 

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht

Oscar Levant's Ghost: Mind Pizza

"Here, kitty, kitty": when taxidermy goes terribly wrong

I don't know how I stumble onto these things. What was I looking for? Not THIS. Not this "what-is-it", unidentifiable: maybe an otter with the mumps. 

There is a whole art form out there - in fact, you may have seen some of it in old museums (reminding me of Dylan Thomas and his "museum that should have been in a museum"). In those days, "lifelike" expressions mattered more than anatomical accuracy, often with truly hideous results.

There are sooooooooooooooooooo many of these photos out now, probably due to a Facebook page called Taxidermy Gone Wrong. Now it has mushroomed like amanita, blossomed like a patch of lethal bacteria on a petri dish. Bad taxidermy: it's everywhere!

I think Norman Bates was the gold standard of taxidermy, posing his owls and other predatory birds in such realistic ways that it made your scalp prickle. One pictures him sitting there with his little needle and thread, and that stuffing that my mother used to call "cott'n batt'n". And, of course, scissors and a knife

Killing and gutting the birds doesn't bear thinking about.

But bad taxidermy (not the meticulous kind Norman practiced in the Bates Motel) is now a kind of found art. There are lots of cutesy poses where squirrels fire six-guns and rats pose as the Pope, but I'm not too fond of them because they're obviously supposed to be kitschy and bad. Some of these examples look like earnest attempts, which only adds to their horror. Pets are the worst. Did someone actually pay for this, to have Fido or Fluffy rendered Satanic for all time?

Somebody must have had the thought, somewhere, sometime, that this was a good way to stuff a dead pet. It may have been someone's idea of human-looking eyes. Fine, if your favorite human is a raving lunatic! That second one looks like he had one too many caramel macchiattos at Starbuck's.

As with the Royal Family, some of these cats should have been strangled at birth. With their deranged expression and eyes set too close together, they're obviously as inbred as the Hapsburgs. In fact, the puma (above) looks like he's about to go marry his favorite niece.

Oh Lor', oh Lor'. . . a polar bear with a hangover, a prehistoric Muppet, a tubular moose. . . Did this taxidermist ever SEE a moose, did he have any idea what one looked like?

.  The shrivelled, sunken, dessicated, dusty, shabby, moth-eaten, mummified look of

 bad taxidermy is awful enough without these demonic leers.

Taxidermy slippers! These were either made from the world's biggest moles, 

or meant to fit a Chinese woman in the 17th century.

Another "what-is-it?". Don't know what happened to its nose.

My personal favorite. It's easy to see how it died, but. . . 

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Thistledown Press

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Chapters/Indigo
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The murdering Mom: welcome to 2013

Apparent murder-suicide leaves 3 dead in Ottawa community

Bodies of mother and 2 children found in basement of Stittsville home

CBC News

Posted: Jan 14, 2013 6:30 PM ET

Ottawa police are investigating what appears to be a double murder and suicide after the bodies of a woman and her two children were found in the basement of their west Ottawa home.

Police were called to the home at 25 Granite Ridge Dr. in the community of Stittsville at about 5:30 p.m. ET, according to a media release.

The father of the children found the bodies, police sources told CBC News, and was later questioned by police.

Investigators suspect the mother — identified by acquaintances as Alison Easton, though police sources say she also sometimes went by the name Alison Corchis — was responsible for the deaths of the couple's son Alex, 10, and daughter Katie, 6.

A sharp weapon was used, but police sources would not say what type. It was a "disturbing scene," they added.

A neighbour, Jeff Wilk, said the woman living at 25 Granite Ridge was a Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinator. She introduced herself to Wilk's family when they moved into the neighbourhood more than a year ago, and gave them a welcome package.

Daughter's 6th birthday last weekend

She was often seen walking her children to and from nearby Stittsville Public School on Granite Ridge Drive, Wilk said by phone.

Another neighbour, Tonya Marczak, said her daughter was Katie's best friend. They celebrated Katie's sixth birthday together last weekend.

Neighbour Tonya Marczak says her daughter was best friends with one of the victims. (CBC)

"They seemed like such nice people. To hear that there's three dead, it's just devastating," Marczak said. "I don't understand how this happens, I don't, especially when I've got little kids of my own."

Marczak said she told her children there was a fire at the home, and nothing else. She said her daughter was best friends with Katy, who had just celebrated her birthday with a fancy dress-up tea party last weekend.

"I honestly don't know what to tell them at this point," she said. "Do I send them to school tomorrow, do I not? I have no idea."

The two children went to school across the street. Katie was in kindergarten; Alex was in Grade 5. Neighbours said their mother stayed at home.

The major crimes unit is handling the investigation.

No further details were released.

The more I contemplate this hideous story - and believe me, I'm trying NOT to contemplate it too deeply - the more overwhelming the sick, twisting feeling in my gut becomes.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? I know this is not what you're supposed to ask. And I won't list all the school shootings and movie theatre shootings and political rally shootings and unbalanced kids all over the place opening fire because they're - what? "Disaffected"?

I won't list them because you already know. But why would a mother, a "nice" person, a block parent, do this to her children, hack them apart with a knife? People are exceedingly hard to kill, that is, if you have no firearms, and in good old non-violent, pacifistic Canada, we don't have any of those awful things around.

There has to be a reason. There has to be a reason why I NEVER read stories like this when I was a kid. My mother didn't have to tell me, "Your best friend, ummm, went away, and I'm afraid you'll never see her again."

The same best friend who had that nice birthday party just the week before. Then was hacked to pieces with a knife - by her mother.

Folks, are you listening? Stop texting for a second (because you're really not saying anything anyway). There is something wrong here, something terribly, disastrously wrong with people on a very significant and ever-escalating scale. Fifty years ago I remember there were vehement complaints that we had become a depersonalized, technology-driven society, that our every move was being scrutinized by a sinister Big Brother, and that there was "too much violence on television". Now violence is standard, along with rigorous denials that it does any harm. And no one seems to care any more that their every waking moment is studied and recorded.

So what the hell is going on?

Do all these horrific events somehow make such inexplicable acts "thinkable"? Do people just flip out, lose it, and why? Do people have no self-control any more? Is rage simmering beneath the surface in even the most unlikely individuals?

I push it away, as most people push it away, because we have to go on living, don't we? But I never had to explain this horror to my own children, who grew up in the '80s, not centuries ago. 

In order to stay OK,to avoid an abyss of depression and horror, we all have to dance along the edge and pretend everything's fine, that it's just a few nut cases that we don't need to be bothered with.

But this wasn't some socially-isolated kid who lived in the basement of his parents' home and played video games all day. This wasn't some gun-obsessed sociopath who had been bullied for so long that one day he just snapped. 

This was a MOTHER killing her KIDS. There is no reason, none whatsoever, that justifies her killing even one of them, let alone a sweet little girl fresh from her sixth birthday party. In a final act of ruthless nihilism, the mother then killed herself (the story doesn't say how).

It's nonsensical, aberrant, crazy. Craziness existed before now, of course, but not in this blatant, malignant, macabre way, and not to this extent, where stories like this are now coming out, not every month, not every week, but every day.

Do you want to know how I found this story? It was a slow day. I needed something to write about. I decided to peruse the daily news. Opened the page,and bam. There it was, the top story!

Senseless killing.

Again. And this time, the worst it could possibly be.

There has to be a "why", in spite of the fact that there is now a curious void around this subject. Social commentators aren't saying anything, aren't coming out with the often-tiresome theories they used to rant about 20 years ago.

They have been shocked into silence. Nobody knows what to say.

I have a few ideas, but I am always laughed out of the park when I propose them. We DO live in a void where gadgets are taking the place of human contact. We DO live in a culture where violence is such a commonplace, such a way of life that it has become virtually invisible. Like so many things, it passes without comment. We just don't notice any more.

It seems there is a new taboo: the taboo of "WHY". Don't go there, or we won't be able to cope with it at all.

We teeter on the edge. If we project fifty years into the future, will Earth even be recognizable? Global warming is just tickling our noses now. We have fucked the Earth, fucked it royal, and in spite of some late-blooming and valorous efforts to repent, I fear it's too late.

My grandchildren won't live to be grandparents because the earth will melt down and fall apart. Why do we see all these climactic disasters now, these floods, droughts, storms, these freakish tsunami-like conditions in places formerly given over to tourism and high-end shopping?

Oh, uh, ah. . . 

Because the climate goes in cycles! It has always been this way -which means, of course, that everything will soon return to "normal". It'll all go back to four neatly-delineated seasons, green pastures and still waters, and a safe and predictable life on Sunnybrook Farm. 

Don't think about the seven billion people disastrously overstraining the resources of the earth - the unbreathable toxic air in China just a bellwether for what's in store for us all in twenty years (or maybe less).

Soon tiny gas masks will replace those vibrating chairs as favorite gifts at baby showers. First it will be a joke by the late-night comedians. Then it will actually happen.

So how do you connect the entire world caving in on itself to people flipping out and hacking their six-year-old daughters to death with a knife? Underneath all the denial lives terror, and underneath that, a sense that it's all meaningless, even hopeless. If somebody gets in your way, just erase them.

It is a dehumanized world, a world where, deep down where they don't dare to go, people are terrified that there is no future.

There is more going on than mass environmental meltdown, of course. Terrorists still have the wherewithal to blow the whole thing up at the touch of a button (though "nuclear awareness" ceased to be a hot topic some time in the late '80s). Relationships are becoming frayed at the seams. Families are rocking on their bases, if in fact they have bases at all. 

I would not go back to the days of Betty Crocker, and in spite of the fact that it's popular to blame women for every social disaster we've ever experienced, I don't think mothers are responsible for fucking up the family system forever.

It's the darkest impulses in the human heart, which have now been let out of the cage and even glorified. A bad guy with a gun, a good guy with a gun: how do you tell the difference?

Even the Nazis didn't do this to their children. They knew who the enemy was, and kept a bead on them. Unthinkable as their crimes were, they weren't anything like this. 

There has never been anything like this.

THE SECOND COMING


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

William Butler Yeats

(CODA. I wanted to check my facts in the murder-suicide story, so opened the news page again. No story. Did some clicking around.  No story. It had fallen right off the page. 

But there were some "top stories" listed:

HMV
BBB
iPhone5
Detroit Auto Show
Golden Globes 2012 Red Carpet
Supreme Court
Hollande
Laurence Anyways
Lady Gaga
Lindsay Lohan

NOTE: these are NOT listed under Entertainment, but general news stories, things of interest, things of importance. Dead children just don't rate.)