I hate clowns

 (In dishonour of my returning nightmares of Milky the Clown, and because I don't feel like writing anything, here is a pre-summer repeat of a kind-of-favorite/not-too-bad post.)

I hate clowns, I hate clowns,  I truly hate clowns,

They always depress me and drag my soul down.

When somebody puts on such strange things to wear,

The human condition is truly laid bare.

I ask, what's the point of all this tom-foolery?

It triggers in me a deep incredulity.

Now here is a clown who caused me great dread.

In childhood this creep rented space in my head.

His name was Milky, which was awfully scary,

Just clowning and whoring for Twin Pines, the dairy.

Before John Wayne Gacy came ambling along,

There was this guy here. And he was just wrong.

He wore stars and stripes for some unknown reason,

Though flag mutilation's a high form of treason.

Back when I lived near old Detroit town,

I saw a strange act performed by a clown.

When he mounted his friend, to my child's mind, 

of course he

Was riding on Bozo, just playing at horsey.

When I saw this old photo of black-and-white clowns,

I climbed on a bridge and just threw myself down.

There's Milky and Bozo, the two that were lovers,

Jingles, and Whatsis - who cares, they're all mothers.

This clown guy I mentioned, and those of his ilk

Did a lot of hard-selling by sucking down milk.

In Milky the dairy thought they would invest - right?

Then found out that he was a flaming transvestite.

Twin Pines weren't aware that they'd started a fashion.

Soon clowns 'round the world drank their milk with a passion.

And poor Pagliaccio was filled with a rage,

So he drank milk, then  killed his poor wife right on-stage.

With hijinks like this, some dark force was released.

The ringmasters shot themselves: all were deceased.

Clowns threw nasty fits, banged their heads on the wall:

These Komedy Kapers weren't funny at all.

If this gets much weirder, I'm going to be sick.

I've never laughed once when a clown did his trick.

I can't speak for you, but I think this is rude -

I never knew clowns were this nasty and lewd.

Milky is dust now, and Bozo is dead.

Their romance still haunts me and lurks in my head.

I hate clowns, I hate them, I'll never be free,

They never will get one guffaw out of me.

Bouncing tits: the wacky world of palindromes

No, no, no, I swear this gif relates! And I didn't write these, though I wish I had. I don't know how anybody could sit there and figure even one of these out. They sort of make sense, in a weird, almost surreal way. It's hard to find anything to illustrate these, so I tried to dig up a few palindromic images of my own.

Some of them are, I'm warning you, pretty weak, but the palindromes are magnificent.

A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda. 

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. 

A new order began, a more Roman age bred Rowena. 

A tin mug for a jar of gum, Nita. 

A Toyota. Race fast, safe car. A Toyota. 

Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

Animal loots foliated detail of stool lamina. 

Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna. 

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? 

Are we not pure? "No sir!" Panama's moody Noriega brags. "It is garbage!" Irony dooms a man; a prisoner up to new era. 

As I pee, sir, I see Pisa!

Barge in! Relate mere war of 1991 for a were-metal Ernie grab! 

Bombard a drab mob. 

Bush saw Sununu swash sub. 

Cain: a maniac. 

Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic. 

Daedalus: nine. Peninsula: dead. 

Dammit, I'm mad! 

Delia saw I was ailed. 

Denim axes examined. 

Dennis and Edna sinned. 

Depardieu, go razz a rogue I draped. 

Desserts, I stressed! 

Did I draw Della too tall, Edward? I did? 

Do good? I? No! Evil anon I deliver. I maim nine more hero-men in Saginaw, sanitary sword a-tuck, Carol, I -- lo! -- rack, cut a drowsy rat in Aswan. I gas nine more hero-men in Miami. Reviled, I (Nona) live on. I do, O God! 

Doc, note I dissent: a fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod. 

Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard. 

Drat Saddam, a mad dastard! 

Draw, O coward! 

Draw pupil's lip upward.

Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside. 

Eva, can I stab bats in a cave? 

Evil did I dwell; lewd I did live. 

Gateman sees name, garageman sees name tag. 

Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog. 

Goldenrod-adorned log. 

Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog. 

Harass sensuousness, Sarah. 

I roamed under it as a tired, nude Maori. 

Laminated E.T. animal. 

Lay a wallaby baby ball away, Al. 

Lepers repel. 

Let O'Hara gain an inn in a Niagara hotel. 

Live not on evil. 

Lived on Decaf; faced no Devil. 

Lonely Tylenol. 

Ma is a nun, as I am. 

Ma is as selfless as I am. 

Madam, I'm Adam. 

Madam in Eden, I'm Adam. 

Marge lets Norah see Sharon's telegram. 

May a moody baby doom a yam. 

Meet animals; laminate 'em. 

Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.

Murder for a jar of red rum. 

Never odd or even. 

No, Mel Gibson is a casino's big lemon. 

No cab, no tuna nut on bacon. 

No lemon, no melon. 

No sir -- away! A papaya war is on. 

On a clover, if alive, erupts a vast, pure evil; a fire volcano. 

Party boobytrap. 

Poor Dan is in a droop. 

Reviled did I live, said I, as evil I did deliver. 

Rise to vote, sir. 

Saw tide rose? So red it was. 

Senile felines. 

So many dynamos! 

Some men interpret nine memos. 

Stab nail at ill Italian bats.

Stack cats.

Stella won no wallets.

Step on no pets.

Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!

Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts.

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot-toilet.

Tarzan raised Desi Arnaz' rat.

Ten animals I slam in a net.

Too bad I hid a boot.

Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Wonder if Sununu's fired now.

Won't I panic in a pit now?

Won't lovers revolt now?

Yo, banana boy!

Yo, Bob! Mug o' gumbo, boy!

Yo, bottoms up! (U.S. motto, boy.)

POST-SCRIPT. Like the success of my book, this doesn't want to happen, so head-bashing is useless indeed, unless I wish to become a rampant alcoholic who lives for the advent of Happy Hour. And I've had enough of that. But I have tried to piece it back together after a large chunk of it just disappeared, along with the last gif which I retrieved from the garbage, i. e. the recycle bin.

Wondering about the last gif, the palindrome? Oh OK, this is OTTO Klemperer. Father of Werner Klemperer, who played Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes. We were sitting in a symphony concert back in the '60s, and my Dad said, "Look, there he is."  "Who?" "There's Klink." He was right, but we didn't speak with him, too cowed by his greatness.

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Milk-a-bilia

By all the saints in freakin' Beulah Land, guess who's got his own Pinterest page! Yes, that's right: His Satanic Majesty, Milky the Clown.

Milky keeps coming around in my life like a chronic disease, with horrible outbreaks followed by deceptive remissions. Here he is again, looking none too well himself - in fact I'm not even sure that's really Milky, he looks so sallow. Hung over, perhaps. The pictures on Pinterest were about an inch square, and the only larger ones on Google were from my own blog. Harrumph.

Yes, I know I've run this one before! The Milky the Clown Ash Tray. Don't you want to see it again? You wanna make something out of it?

Milky says: WHAT? "Is we not zee Super Race?" It could be anything.

One o' dem games where you put the little balls in the little holes, though it looks vaguely like a sack of flour to me. Or some weird sort of pencil sharpener.

Now, I know this is original. It's a tennis ball with a clock built in. It lasts for one serve. Either that or it's a stopwatch of some kind, set to stop when the world ends.

Pretty slimy stuff. 

Milky with a boy scout. I apologize for the poor quality of these. They were made with a camera obscura in the 17th century.

When I first saw this, I swear I thought the Milkster was doing lines of cocaine, but it appears, on closer inspection, that he's blowing up a balloon.

Somebody's idea of fan art.

"What did you do to his eyes?"

This is not the best gif technically, but it will do: it captures the "reveal", the most sublime moment in Rosemary's Baby, which I watched for the third time last night on DVD. 

Though this hardly seems possible, I saw it on TV in about 1969 - I know it's true because I watched it in the den when I was sleeping in the pull-out bed, and we  moved away later that year, so there were no more late-night fright nights. Back then, it usually took quite a few years for a movie to go from theatrical release to television, and then only in adulterated form. How could it have shown up on TV, pretty much intact, in only a year?

Then the movie completely disappeared. It never came on television, not even on Turner Classics. It was never re-released. I could not find a trace of it anywhere, so was finally forced to buy a rather shitty DVD with grainy quality, perhaps a knockoff.

43 years had gone by, but what I retained from that night in the pullout bed was amazing.

I remembered so much of it, in fact, it became apparent on second viewing that it had burned itself into my brain. Some movies barely register, but this one became part of my neural network.

Why? IT'S BLOODY GOOD. Everything about it is enthralling and strange, especially the dream sequences. Mia Farrow is excellent in it, creating sympathy while at the same time setting up doubt that any of this is real, that it isn't just a product of her fevered "pre-partum" brain.

And John Cassavetes - HE is the devil, as far as I am concerned. He is evil incarnate, far worse than the dotty old people chanting about Lord Satan. One of the creepiest scenes is when he tries to justify to Rosemary the sacrifice of their child to Satanic forces:

"Think of all we're getting in return."

Roman Polansky's reputation was forever besmirched by a statutory rape case, though the victim came out a few years ago and (bizarrely) came to his defense. That aside, there is no doubt that this is an inspired work. The sense of weirdness, of the world slipping sideways, the eerie tension juxtaposed with normalcy, does not let up for a second. It pulls tight and lets go, taking us with it.  That horrible sense of "they're all in it together", a prime feature of paranoia, plays on our fears of surrendering control. And having one special, beloved ally, one person who "gets it", then losing him to those dark forces,  is heartbreaking. 

OK, so then, why did I watch this masterpiece again? Because one of the networks decided to do a remake, which was so atrocious I only watched it to see how truly bad a remake could be.

In stark contrast with the original, nobody was good in this, and they changed all the best parts, including that astonishing "reveal" (one of the great moments in the horror genre). 

Leave it alone, I tell you! But nobody does. Did they think they could make this any better? They even wrecked the quirky charm of the short-skirt, go-go '60s by trying to "bring it up to date". 

But we've lost the ability  to make movies like this, that ruthlessly pull and claw at the emotions.  All is slash-and-splatter now, and somehow or other it does not have anywhere near the impact of a 98-pound waif  wielding a butcher knife. Married to Sinatra, in the bargain.

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Goosey Goosey Goslings!

No matter how hopeless

"This is the greatest mystery of the human mind - the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain."


I didn't write that, troops. It was that Steinbeck feller, you know, the clever one. And I don't know for sure why it leapt into my mind at this late hour, or how dissonances are going to relate in this-hyarr particular post.

It all goes round and round. You put a book out, it has taken you years and years to get to this point, it's suddenly "out", and you're sitting there waiting for something to happen. It doesn't transport your life or change the fact you need to lose weight or even lift your intermittent depression interspersed by Walmartian visitations of euphoria.


No kidding. Right in the middle of Walmart, the retiree's home away from home, looking for an economy-size sack of birdseed for my bird, I am hit with blinding euphoria: MY BOOK IS OUT. Harold, we made it! After six years of wandering around the desert, of having him roaming around in my head, he is "out", he is the word made flesh. And for that sublime, dazzling moment, I crest the top of the rollercoaster.


By the time I get home my pants are too tight and it's starting all over again. The divine/obscene comedy.

I've been obsessed with Don Quixote. Everybody is obsessed with Don Quixote because he makes them feel better about their own lives. At least we aren't some nut case crashing around with a lance. But we love him at the same time, for he takes the fall. He dies for our sins. There is something Christly about him, and Cervantes knew it. The holy fool. A sort of gaunt, underfed anti-clown. I started listening to the mind-lurching, emotionally-intoxicating Richard Strauss tone poem recently, with Yo Yo Ma on cello as the voice of Quixote. Oh God oh God oh.


And yes, you don't even need words to see and hear him. Then of course I had to go on YouTube to look up that documentary, that Terry Gilliam thing I watched when it first came out. Years ago. How he tried to make a film, an update of Quixote, and everything fell into the shit to a monumental, even Biblical degree. Everything was literally swept away until there was nothing left but rubble. This film made EVERYONE feel better, but everyone, even heroin addicts on death's door! But seriously, schadenfreude aside, what people were really reacting to and feeling deeply was the courage it takes to let your dream fall apart in full view, though thank God WE don't possess that kind of courage and never will.

We say failure is good, but it isn't. Failure is just failure. I guess it's inevitable, but who likes it, who really embraces it? Those motivational speakers are so full of shit their eyes are brown. In spite of Walmart birdseed raptures, my book likely won't go very far. It won't do a Quixote swandive either, but them's the breaks. I don't think Terry Gilliam lost out in the end, for somebody made soup out of the whole thing, and it was fascinating soup.


Most of us have had times when things have seriously fallen apart, when there's nothing we can do to hold it together. Might be serious illness, or a whole lot of people suddenly die in a row, like fucking dominoes. Or a job just falls out from under and there's nothing to dive into, no safety net at all. Or the safety net throws you up in the air so violently you wish you'd landed on cement.

So I hear this burningly idealistic, almost indecently gorgeous Quixote music by Richard Strauss,and then of course I must look up that song, you know, the one that was so popular in the '60s that everybody recorded it, even Liberace. Or Liberace's horse, I forget which. But I found, on an old kinescope of The Ed Sullivan Show, an 11-minute segment, a live, un-lip-synched slice of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, when it was brand new and still wet. And I found Richard Kiley singing it with heartbreaking devotion, just beautifully. I found a studio recording of him singing it with much more polish, but I never want to hear that one again. In this one he's standing in front of an audience, garish stage makeup all over his face, and every phrase is shaped as if with his own hands and ends with a little sigh. There's a catch in his voice here and there, as if it's almost too much for him, and the timbre of his voice is like a trumpet or trombone, the burnish and generosity and flash of the vibrato, the chest tones. This is coming from a human being. And I'm thinking.

The song is very short and compact, two minutes, and the lyric simple. The tune is something that sounds like it has always been there.


Dissonances relate. This is all about impossible quests, longing and questing, and holy idiots falling down into the mud. I feel like a goddamn fool sometimes, as if I'm on my fourth marriage and it's coming apart, as if I fell for it again. Haven't learned a thing. I remember when the idea for The Glass Character first leapt into my head. Now he is a book, he's outside myself. He lives, and he's in other people's hands, even if they aren't reading it! He's probably in Rich Correll's hands and Kevin Brownlow's hands, even if THEY aren't reading it. Today in Walmart, with the bag of birdseed in my hand, that was a glorious thing. Though at this moment, sitting here, I am not sure why.

A lot of people identify with Quixote because he is seemingly crazy, but everybody loves him anyway and he never has to go for shock treatments or be in the hospital. It's a freedom not granted to many. A lot of people like Quixote because humanity is very dark indeed, and we all want someone to take the fall for us. That's what drama is all about. Fiction is about trouble, poorly resolved or not resolved at all, and no matter how shitty our lives may be, they're a damn sight less shitty than Ahab's over there, he can be counted on to act it all out for us, to bear the brunt, to be humiliated or even killed in our place.

Sort of Christly, wouldn't you think?

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TAXI DRIVER: all you need to know

You talkin' to me?

New giffinator?

Happy Mother's Day

It was a long, long time ago, I was an overwhelmed young Mom (just a baby myself), and I'd just had my second child. We lived 900 miles away from all our relatives. Though Bill did everything he could, he worked long hours and just couldn't... be there when I needed him. And the new baby screamed and screamed, and I didn't sleep. . .

And then my mother-in-law called and said she was coming out to help. I was too dizzy with fatigue to say yes or no. When she arrived, she said, "you look after the baby, and I'll do everything else." And she did, from spending time with dazed little Jeffy (only18 months old and a little traumatized at having a new sibling) to making meals to keeping the place clean to baking a cake. This was intensive homemaking and grandmothering, and though I am sure I did not fully appreciate what she was doing, it was lifesaving.

But it was the way she did it - with such joy - bouncing Shannon around to relieve her colic, sitting on the floor playing with Jeffy, taking him outside to play in the snow - that I marvel at now. And it hit me with an absolute shock today that she was probably younger than I am now. She became my Mum over the years, filling an awful gap left by an indifferent mother (my name did not appear in her obituary), and what I marvel at most is her sense of gratitude for everything she had. This was rarely spelled out, because it didn't have to be. Her passing was as graceful and as gracious as she was. I will remember her every day of my life. 

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