Tuesday, January 25, 2022
SHOCK WARNING: Return of the Dancing Pig!
Sunday, January 23, 2022
🚗Is THIS the most dangerous car ever made?
Saturday, January 22, 2022
The way we live, the way we die
There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.
I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.
Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.
Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.
For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.
Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?
The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.
I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.
How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.
Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.
As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.
One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”
After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.
In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.
I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”
What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”
I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.
I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.
So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention".
Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.
But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.
My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.
Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.
He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.
I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself! But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.
He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.
I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.
But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.
But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself. It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).
Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.
There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.
The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.
I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.
POST-BLOG. A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit.
Friday, January 21, 2022
"MENTAL HEALTH" is affecting my. . . mental health.
By Tom Utley for the Daily Mail
Earlier this month I invented a game to cheer myself up through these short, chilly days of January. I’m not claiming it will work for everyone, but readers may care to give it a try.
The rules are simple. All you have to do is award yourself an imaginary £10 every time you hear the words ‘mental health’ uttered on the radio or TV, or read them in the media.
I find that even on a thinnish day I can rake in a comfortable 50 or 60 fantasy quid — while if Prince Harry, a controversial statue or an internet influencer is in the news, I often notch up a sum well into three figures.
Indeed, those who follow the media may be forgiven for thinking most of the population is incapable of expressing annoyance or sadness about anything, from Covid restrictions to rising prices or even sexism in the works of Shakespeare, without complaining about the irritant’s adverse impact on his or her mental health.
Eavesdrop on almost any industrial tribunal these days and you’ll hear a sacked employee complain that the boss showed her too much affection, or too little, and that this was having a devastating effect on her mental health.
Read any report of a criminal trial, and the chances are that the defendant will say that he nicked his dad’s credit card — or drove at 120 mph up the M4, high on cocaine — because he was suffering from mental health issues.
Ask athletes or sports stars to explain a poor performance, and they’ll claim that mental health problems lay at the root of it. It’s an all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-free card. Instant victimhood for anyone looking for an excuse.
God knows, it’s no part of my intention this week to make light of genuine mental illness, because I know there is nothing more debilitating. I have a great friend who was so clinically depressed he couldn’t get out of bed for months on end, and I’ve known others whose despair was so deep that they took their own lives.
I must also declare that I’m extremely proud of the fact that one of my sons has decided to devote his life to the care of seriously disturbed adults. This seems to me to be among the noblest and most selfless careers imaginable.
No, what I object to is the modern habit of labelling every low we experience in the course of our everyday lives as a mental health issue, as if it were a clinical condition beyond our control.
The most obvious offenders are those misguided university students — often indulged or actively egged on by academics who should know better — who demand ‘safe spaces’ to protect their mental health from exposure to ideas with which they’ve been taught to disagree.
Tell them that the British empire wasn’t all bad, for example, or that unrestricted immigration isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good, and they’ll run for cover, complaining that we’re messing with their fragile minds.
Ask students of English literature to read Dickens, Trollope or Walter Scott — all of them riddled, it’s true, with the casual racism and sexism of their time — and they’ll wail that we’re putting their mental health in grave jeopardy.
On that point, it surely doesn’t help when a respected actress suggests, as Juliet Stevenson did this week, that plays such as The Taming Of The Shrew and The Merchant Of Venice should be ‘buried’, since they portray ‘unacceptable’ attitudes. Oh, how I wish actors and actresses would stick to acting, which some are quite good at, instead of spouting the half-baked political opinions apparently shared by almost everyone in their profession.
But this unhealthy obsession with mental health is by no means confined to Left-leaning students, broadcasters and Tweeters. Academics at University College London have even devised a ‘depression index’, which purports to measure the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of the nation, according to a survey of more than 30,000 respondents.
This week, if you’re interested, UCL found that between November 1 and January 3, levels of anxiety and depression in Britain rose by 24 per cent on the scale, from 5.0 to 6.2. That’s a pretty meaningless figure, if you ask me, but then misery-mongering is all the rage these days.
No less gloomy was this week’s announcement by the Oxford University Press that the word chosen by children as their word of the year for 2021 was ‘anxiety’.
This was the finding of a survey of 8,000 pupils, aged between seven and 14, who were asked to select from a shortlist of ten words the one they would use when talking about well-being and health last year (the other contenders were: ‘challenging’, ‘isolate’, ‘well-being’, ‘resilience’, ‘bubble’, ‘kindness’, ‘remote’, ‘cancelled’ and ‘empathy’).
I note, by the way, that the children picked anxiety ‘after discussing the words with their teachers’. Call me an old cynic, but this suggests that in some cases, the teachers may have prompted them to opt for it as their word of the year.
Certainly, I suspect if they had been left to their own devices, they would have chosen a very different shortlist of words to encapsulate their year of disrupted schooling. It would possibly have included ‘smartphone’, ‘Xbox’ and ‘pizza’.
But whatever the truth, I meant it quite literally when I described the modern obsession with mental health as unhealthy. Let’s face it, we all have our ups and downs as we go through life — and I know that many of us have truly dreadful lows from time to time. But I cannot believe it’s good for our well-being to label all such lows as symptoms of mental trouble.
I know it’s a terribly old-fashioned thing to say, but I can’t recall anyone of my parents’ generation complaining about the effects on their mental health of being rained on by Hitler’s bombs, night after night in the Blitz. But ask many of today’s young how they’ve been affected by gentle teasing or other ‘micro-aggressions’, and you’ll never hear the end of their suffering.
Nor do I remember anyone from my own childhood taking time off school because of feelings of stress, depression or anxiety. Measles, mumps or glandular fever, yes. ‘Mental health issues’, no.
Children given to moping or self-pity were told to cheer up, count their blessings, look on the bright side and generally buck up their ideas. I can’t help feeling that even in 2022, there’s something to be said for this approach.
These days, by contrast, I’m told it’s far from unusual for children to cite mental health reasons for taking time off sick.
Yes, I know that in many ways it’s harder for them than it was for us, given the cruelties of social media and other pressures of modern life.
But how can it improve their well-being to bombard them daily with trigger-warnings, helplines to contact if they’ve been ‘affected by any of the issues raised in this programme’ and endless items in the media about the effects of this or that on the nation’s mental health?
It’s almost as if they’re being invited to cast themselves as victims of a mental health pandemic as widespread as Covid.
I haven’t room here to rehearse the many proven ways of banishing minor woes, such as meeting friends, taking up a hobby or just staring out to sea. I will only say that if all else fails, you might try the little game I mentioned above.
The joy of it is that instead of being plunged into gloom every time another story comes up about mental health, you will think: ‘Kerching! That’s another imaginary tenner for me!’
If you’ve got to the end of this article, you may notice that I’ve mentioned the words mental health no fewer than 18 times. That’s £180 already in your fantasy bank. Look on it as a bonus to get you started.
Thursday, January 20, 2022
💗HAROLD LLOYD Mends a Broken Heart in Dr. Jack (1922)
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
💔The Tragic Death of George Gershwin
Monday, January 17, 2022
🙀CAT GETS MAIL!😸
Saturday, January 15, 2022
🤍The Troll Doll Channel: MAGICAL! Spinning in Silver🤍
Thursday, January 13, 2022
It was ten years ago. . .
(NOTE: the whole family is in this shot! My son Jeff (Erica and Lauren's Daddy) can be seen on the far left, and Crystal, their Mom, is pulling the wagon. Bill and I are in there somewhere - see the lady with the short hair and the green-striped shirt? And Bill is the guy to the right of her in the grey Tilley hat. Hard to believe it was that long ago!)
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
😵HAUNTING VOICES FROM THE PAST: Historic Re-enactment of the EDISON TALK...
Monday, January 10, 2022
🙏MORAL TEACHINGS THROUGH PUPPETRY😃
Sunday, January 2, 2022
True things: a comment, maybe to myself
ferociousgumby
5 minutes ago (edited)
@D Onion Just to throw in my two cents: I kept getting told by therapists, ministers, etc. to "forgive myself". But then in the next breath they or someone would say, "There's nothing to forgive." So I would get stuck: OK, nothing to forgive, so I CAN'T forgive? So what do I do? BUT, I know I did a lot of damage to myself and the family when I was deep in my alcoholism and undiagnosed bipolar. Yes, I DID hurt them and confuse them, and I failed to explain it because I was too deep in the chaos. So now I have this "voice" - I'm not psychotic, it's just a helpful voice I hear in myself - saying, "OK then, you did nothing wrong, but often you BELIEVE you did. You still carry it. Can you feel compassion for that hurt, confused, lonely, screwed-up, struggling person you were?" The answer is yes, I can. Compassion IS part of my deeper nature because I am empathetic. I also feel some compassion (pity is more like it) for the people who hurt me. They are kind of pathetic, after all, and I can't think of anything worse than to BE that way. But when people say things like, "Oh, you MUST forgive them (your Dad, sister, bad therapists, etc.) or you will be in a state of rage for the rest of your life", I believe this is a very sneaky form of the Christian agenda. No, I not only don't have to "forgive", I do not have to do ANYTHING AT ALL. That is up to me. Compassion has crept in like a tide, gradually and gently, and it amazes me, BUT I had five years of therapy that was sometimes overwhelming and often didn't feel like it was helping me. But it is now over 20 years later, and "something" happened deep inside that is really only making itself known to me now. "Forgiveness" gets my back up because it implies "it's OK what you did". It is NOT OK what my Dad, sister, bad therapists, etc. etc. did to me. And I don't feel OK about hurting myself. But I DO feel deeply for that hurt and confused person, and if I could only talk to that hurt younger self now (which in way, I am) I would say, "You're in terrible pain and feel alone, but you're getting through it, and that is incredibly brave." Is that "forgiveness"? I think it's more complex and goes far deeper. I don't like the "f-word" because of the toxic way it was pushed on me by the church and others who "only wanted to help me". Is there any other way? Are they right that I "MUST" forgive myself or be in a state of rage, etc. etc.? That's a bunch of hooey and only represents a way to get me to shut up. Think of it this way: if you think, "OK I'll forgive my Dad", it means you can't really talk about it any more or people will realize you have NOT forgiven your Dad. It is a way to get you to shut up about it because it makes THEM uncomfortable to witness those emotions. They are threatened by it, so they will find a way to silence you. Like the Bible, forgiveness can be used as a weapon and is actually very selfish of THEM to push it on you or anyone else. It is some sort of awful test of whether you're a good Christian or good person or - whatever. But the compassion came from somewhere so deep it feels like a kind of miracle. It's not up to me, I can't "summon" it, but when I feel it and want to just push it away or tell it to get lost, I do have a choice to let it be (let it be, like the song says!), and let myself feel the untying of knots inside myself. Really, if you believe in Jesus at all, compassion was "his way". It was being in a state of grace. All the emphasis on "forgiveness" may even be a mistranslation of the Biblical text. I have read that the root for "forgiveness" means "to untie". Sorry for the length of this! Once I got going, it was hard to stop. If "the f-word" doesn't work for you, there are MANY other ways, and there is YOUR way, which will eventually make itself clear.
Saturday, January 1, 2022
🌹🤍BETTY WHITE: We're going to miss you so!🤍🌹
Monday, December 27, 2021
Friday, December 24, 2021
MERRY CHRISTMAS from the DOMINO CATS!
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
💗MY VERY LAST pandemic hair update: blessings in adversity💗
😾CHRISTMAS AMBUSH! 😲 Kitty LUNGES at me from under the tree!😾
Friday, December 17, 2021
🎅SANTA CAT?!😳 BIZARRE '50s Christmas Puppet Show😽
🎅STRANGE AND SURREAL SANTAS🎅
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
🎅😽CAT goes COMPLETELY NUTS UNDER CHRISTMAS TREE!😽🎅
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Capybara enters its spa bucket
Monday, December 13, 2021
Invisible, like the wind: the divine feminine in Bob Dylan's Mother of Muses
Mother of Muses
Mother of Muses, sing for me
Sing of the
mountains and the deep dark sea
Sing of the
lakes and the nymphs of the forest
Sing your
hearts out, all you women of the chorus
Sing of honor
and faith and glory be
Mother of
Muses, sing for me.
Sing of a love
too soon to depart
Sing of the
heroes who stood alone
Whose names
are engraved on tablets of stone
Who struggled
with pain so the world could go free
Mother of
Muses, sing for me.
Sing of
Sherman, Montgomery and Scott
And of Zhukov, and
Patton, and the battles they fought
Who cleared
the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the
path for Martin Luther King
Who did what
they did and they went on their way
Man I could
tell their stories all day
I’m falling in
love with Calliope
She don’t
belong to anyone, why not give her to me
She’s speakin’
to me, speakin’ with her eyes
I’ve grown so
tired of chasing lies
Mother of
Muses, wherever you are
I’ve already
outlived my life by far.
Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath
Things I can’t
see, they’re blocking my path
Show my your
wisdom, tell me my fate
Put me
upright, make me walk straight
Forge my
identity from the inside out
You know what
I’m talking’ about.
Take me to the
river, release your charms
Let me lay
down a while in your sweet lovin’ arms
Wake me shake
me, free me from sin
Make me
invisible, like the wind
Got a mind to
ramble, got a mind to roam
I’m travellin’
light, and I’m slow comin’ home
A titaness, Mnemosyne was the daughter of Uranus and Gaia. Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine Muses, fathered by her nephew, Zeus:
Calliope (epic poetry)
Clio (history)
Euterpe (music and lyric poetry)
Erato (love poetry)
Melpomene (tragedy)
Polyhymnia (hymns)
Terpsichore (dance)
Thalia (comedy)
Urania (astronomy)
Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath
Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path
Show my your wisdom, tell me my fate
Put me upright, make me walk straight
Forge my identity from the inside out
You know what I’m talking’ about.
The line "put me upright, make me walk straight" has made me weep more than once. Dylan is 80 years old, looks as old as time, and seems small, slight and frail. I know very well from my own deteriorating body about the ravages of age and the slipping away of mobility. This line describes a power which can literally lift him up bodily and set him down on a purposeful path, guiding each step along the way.But the spookiest line of all in this richly-laden poem is, "Forge my identity from the inside out/You know what I'm talkin' about." No, we don't, Bob - we are gasping in awe at the way in which an ancient Greek goddess can become your own mother, with the relationship close enough that she seems to have literally given birth to you. I've worked my way through many a Dylan biography, and the one I am reading now (a 1,000-page tome by a Scottish writer named Ian Bell) focuses mainly on the fact that Dylan's identity as an artist is in a constant state of flux, as if he doesn't really have one. I hope he is listening to this song right now.
Just think of it: those "women of the chorus", the nine Muses who call Mnemosyne their mother, are almost literally Dylan's backup singers. But this primal mother-figure also has a son, and as we trudge through the travesty of a season originally meant to honor the Son of Man, I am immensely grateful that our greatest living poet has found yet another way to be born again.
So if we got the whole clan together for Christmas, we'd need more than one turkey.
Saturday, December 11, 2021
Friday, December 10, 2021
WHY is there a SQUIRREL in It's a Wonderful Life?
This is an annual mystery which I have never solved. WHY is there a squirrel in the middle of It's a Wonderful Life? Uncle Billy has a pet crow which appears from time to time, but this squirrel seems to have come out of nowhere. It's a well-trained squirrel, if not a compassionate one, as it clings to Uncle BIlly's arm while he sobs his heart out. The story all ends well, of course - but nobody talks about what happened to the squirrel.
🎅BADLY-ANIMATED (but pretty!) CHRISTMAS CARD🎄
This started out life as a gif, got filed away, and has been resurrected on YouTube. It's incredibly cheesy, but that's part of its charm. The horses appearing and disappearing is both lame and magical.