Children Learn What They Live (1972)

Children Learn What They Live
By Dorothy Law Nolte, Ph.D.

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.
If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.
If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.
If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.

If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.
If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.
If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.
If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
If children live with fairness, they learn justice.
If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.
If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.
If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

Copyright © 1972 by Dorothy Law Nolte

$20 for this 1927 first edition!!!

Sometimes gotta love the market... when it's ignorant! :) 
Duncan is "out" right now.

"You were wild once. Don't let them tame you."

---Duncan to America, 1923 (on her last tour)

#MeAt14 (Twitter meme)

#MeAt14. A Twitter meme trying to explain to the general public that a 14-year-old girl is not interested in attention from 30/40/50-year-old men.

1979. For my 14th-birthday slumber party, me (at top) and my friends dressed up as KISS and pranced around my mother's house and goofed around afterwards. We just wanted to have fun and dress up like our favorite band. (I didn't have sex 'til I was 23; I wasn't raped 'til I was 35.)

Bobby Doyle Trio - My Mammy (1962)

With Kenny Rogers on standup bass.

I saw Bobby Doyle every few weeks in the early '90s at a tiny Austin club called Ego's. (Still around, but now a generic karaoke bar; in the day, it had a decidedly murky "Blue Velvet" out-of-time feel to it, with middle-aged bouffanted waitresses, about 10 patrons, and the ageing, blind Bobby Doyle solo on a piano strung with Christmas lights.)

Kenny Rogers: She Believes in Me (1979)

When I first heard this at age 14 in 1979, I thought it was corny.

Today, I think it's profound.

"God, her love is true."

While she lays sleeping
I stay out late at night and play my songs
And sometimes all the nights can be so long
And it's good when I finally make it home, all alone
While she lays dreaming
I try to get undressed without the light
And quietly she says how was your night
And I come to her and say
It was all right, and I hold her tight

And she believes in me
I'll never know just what she sees in me
I told her someday if she was my girl
I could change the world
With my little songs, I was wrong
But she has faith in me
And so I go on trying faithfully
And who knows maybe on some special night
If my song is right
I can find a way

While she lays waiting
I stumble to the kitchen for a bite
And I see my old guitar in the night
Just waiting for me like a secret friend
And there's no end while she lays crying
I fumble with a melody or two
And I'm torn between the things that I should do
And she says to wake her up when I am through
God her love is true

And she believes in me
I'll never know just what she sees in me
I told her someday if she was my girl
I could change the world
With my little songs, I was wrong
But she has faith in me
And so I go on trying faithfully
And who knows maybe on some special night
If my song is right
I can find a way
While she waits
While she waits
For me

Islands In The Stream Live (1983)

I've been listening to the 2-disc Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits for the past couple of days. This song was great on CD, but upon watching the below 1983 video: Dolly was annoying as hell -- completely spastic and too-revved-up and jerking back and forth and chortling. Was it her? Was it the "vitamin shots" someone had given her? (And Rogers, previously relatively mellow, also starts gesticulating wildly a la Dolly, trying to get in tune with her... The forced vivacity is kind of painful to watch.)

I haven't read any Dolly bios: Was she known to have been on drugs in the early '80s?

Rolling Stones: You can't always get what you want

Donald Trump theme song played throughout his campaign

What Happened.

RAW VIDEO: Activists disrupt rally featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders

The moment I chose between populists: The wimpy Sanders, or (see video in below entry) the fighter Trump. I will NEVER vote for anyone who backs up the way Sanders did here.

One reason why I decided to vote for Trump

The below video was one of the first moments when I decided to vote for Trump (shot at an Ohio rally in the spring of 2016).

Black Lives Matter representatives had recently physically taken the microphone away from Bernie Sanders.

I watched the Sanders humiliation. And then I watched the below physical Trump reaction to a threat. If I had been previously torn between the two populists, these moments helped decide the issue.

You might want a passive wimp in your personal life, but running the country? I want a tough guy. Just as I wanted a "tough guy" negotiating international business deals favorable to the US. (Sanders, on the other hand, had been a Senator for his whole life --- he'd never actually DONE anything in the real world.)

Donald Trump VICTORY SPEECH | Full Speech as President Elect

Opening 4 minutes by Pence are dull. I liked the speech, but even more interesting was watching the last 15 minutes as he was making his way out of the hall. I'd been following his campaign on C-SPAN for the past year, where the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" was always prominent at his appearances.

Donald Trump WINS Election 2016 Compilation

A GREAT night! And I fell asleep on the couch before it was official (!), waking up just in time for the acceptance speech...

Congrats, President Trump! One year ago tonight.

Dusty Springfield: The Windmills Of Your Mind (1969)

Dusty Springfield: Breakfast in Bed (1969)

The Springfields "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" (1962)

Silver Threads and Golden Needles (1976; Dolly Parton et al)

Nonsensical plea from Internet's Mozilla

Opening my Internet home-page today, found this missive from Mozilla Firefox:

Big corporations want to restrict entry. Fake news and filter bubbles are making it harder for us to find our way. Online bullies are silencing inspired voices. And our desire to explore is hampered by threats to our safety and privacy. It’s time to join Mozilla and do our part as digital citizens. Donate today to support programs that keep the internet healthy, free and open for us all. 

(1) It's not "big corporations" trying to restrict Internet usage. (Are you kidding? Corporations want ads, that's all.) It's the government seeking control, and sometimes rightfully so: i.e., radical Muslims and Russian operatives being allowed uncensored access to the Internet. I applaud any government that tries to limit any such radicals from posting their propaganda (via Firefox, for example).

(2) RE "Fake news and filter bubbles making it harder for us to find our way." Are you KIDDING? YOU, Firefox, are responsible for said "fake news" appearing on any platform that you control. If fake news is a problem, then DO YOUR JOB and edit out the fake news.

(3) RE "Online bullies are silencing inspired voices." Ha! I'm an Independent. And what's been happening online lately is a concerted effort to stifle any voice that doesn't correspond to current left-wing PC group-think. The leftists are the so-called "online bullies." Please maintain your independence, Mozilla, and don't align with the decidedly UNHEALTHY thought-fascists.

Not Situated

[why blue text? because this site won't let me change it; I've tried a dozen times]

On quiet nights like this (what? Halloween?), I love my apartment. It's big (1200 sq ft) and pretty (I especially like the wall of white stone with fireplace), and there are a lot of things to work with, lots of decorating plans to potentially enact.

Trouble is, the place is 50% placid, 50% ennervating. The "dudes" hanging out from last April (when I moved in) thru July have been quieted thanks to the firm actions of the apartment management. From July thru October, the only "problem" I had was with the maintenance room being located next door to my apartment. And I decided that I could handle those DUDES banging around. Especially after a new "old guy" was hired; he's over 50, and since his hiring, the room is no longer a hangout. (As it should never have been to begin with! Get out there and fix something, DUDES!)

As of early October , though, I have new neighbors on the other side of me: 20-something DUDES who have been blasting their music at various hours. There's also a new fat chick who lives behind me whose dog is a barker: for hours at a time, depending on when it gets triggered. Sometimes in the early morning, sometimes after 10pm, sometimes from 5pm on and on.

I can't relax. And, at $1300 per month, I want to finally be able to relax. One of the photos below shows the big stack of boxes left over from when I moved in last April: I don't want to discard them, because I might need them again this coming April! Another photo (by the kitchen table) shows a big box with an unpacked outdoor patio set. I initially bought this at my last apartment, thinking that my space there was relaxed enough to allow me to sit outside... it was not. Nor is my current space, even though it has a backyard area (fully in view of a whole bank of residents). In the spare-bedroom shot, you can see an unpacked carpet (new) plus framed turn-of-the-century Weehawken portraits that I have had from my last apartment and have STILL never hung anywhere.

I can't seem to get out of flux. Dang. $1300 should have bought me a bit of peace, I thought.

Isadora Duncan harangue, 1915 American tour

"Don't you know what's wrong with you? It's those hideous brick buildings across the street! They would make anyone sick! That's what's the matter with you Americans! Why do you live in such ugliness? You are all going to die of it some day. It's going to kill you all, every last one of you... Where have you been, all of you, all your lives? Haven't you ever gone anywhere? Haven't you ever seen anything? Haven't you ever loved anybody? Hasn't anybody ever been kind to you? What is it that makes you willing to live with such hideous things around you?"

This is her screaming at an audience. This has been me screaming at the only audience I have -- on social media -- for the past 7 years, out of utter desolation and loneliness. True in a warped way, yet meaningless and emotionally self-destructive.

1895-1908 Loie Fuller's Serpentine Dance

Clips from various dancers, but all imitated from Loie Fuller's original dance performed at the Folies Bergere of Paris. Imagine seeing this at the turn of the 20th century! How unique and interesting! (While the clips here are colorized, Fuller actually incorporated colored lighting into her club show.)

Isadora Duncan

I've always disliked Isadora Duncan. I didn't like her face to begin with; I didn't like the stupid Greek tunics. I thought the legend of her childrens' drowning and of her own death via scarf ("Affectations can be dangerous," said Gertrude Stein at the time) were part of her pretentiousness.

Her magnate lover, Paris Singer, helped me understand. When Duncan asked him why he stayed with her, he replied: "You have the most beautiful skin, and you never bore me." He eventually left her forever after he'd rented Madison Square Garden for her and she mocked his gesture in front of others.

After reading "Isadora: A Sensational Life" by Peter Kurth for the past few days, I like her much better. She's still pretentious (and obnoxiously slutty---sleeping with over 1,000 men, according to her one and only husband, the 18-years-younger Russian poet Esenin, himself a drunken slut).

But there's also something THERE. I think she was sincere in her desire to express a universal music in dance, and to teach others to express the same. I'm not certain, but I believe she is considered the founder of modern dance; she especially hated ballet and its rigid forms. Ballet still survives, of course. But so does Duncan's then-newfangled concept of "natural" dance which, combined with Loie Fuller's elevated, enhanced "skirt dance" performed in Paris (with accompanying light show) at the turn of the last century, are together the foundation of modern dance. (Fuller the modern, technological innovator; Duncan, the "back to nature," "free-love" purist --- both a radical departure from the established mores of the time.)

George Jones & Tammy Wynette - "Golden Ring" (1976)

This video, of the couple who had just divorced the year before, is cute until the weird "spitting" episode that occurs in the last 30 seconds of the clip. Tammy recoils, wipes her face, shakes her head; George clutches her to him, mockingly wipes his own face... Very awkward to watch.

Tammy Wynette - Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad (1967)

Tammy Wynette (80s remake of 1976 hit)

Tammy Wynette - Stand By Your Man (1968)

Dolly Parton - Dumb Blonde (1967)

Dolly Parton - Jolene (1973)

Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You (1974)

"We both know I'm not what you need..."

Cher - Gypsies Tramps And Thieves (1971)

But for this, there would be no Cher. She is so great here --- enough for the next 40 years or more.

"Places In the Heart" Final Scene

I woke up at 2am yesterday with TCM on, and caught "Places in the Heart" for the first time in over 20 years. Here's the final scene (some in the pews are dead).

I could not stop crying.

Rescue Fantasy

I don't have one. Truly, I don't. I never have.

I think, while growing up, that my mother's hard-core judgmentalism always somehow outweighed my father's abusive tendencies. I was emotionally abused by both parents, and frightened by my father, but the latter was always stopped in his tracks when he tended toward sexual abuse. For instance: At age 12, I was sunbathing in the backyard. My father came outside to join me. He then suggested that I take off my bikini top. I didn't feel comfortable doing so, and refused. He then went on a tirade that involved making me take down every single Bay City Rollers poster on my bedroom wall. Emotionally traumatic, but, as I always did, I immediately told my mother when she got home. I "got to" put the posters back up a day or so later. And my father never suggested such a thing again. (They divorced later that same year, so I luckily got to avoid any further sexual suggestions on his part.)

That said... Was my "telling" a "rescue fantasy"? I guess it could have been. But I also had a firm belief in the power of telling "authorities" and thinking things would then turn out OK. I didn't have to fantasize because, while I was often under great mental stress at home, I also had a sort of outward structure: My mother was never going to let anything TOO bad happen. (At the very end of their marriage, that year, my father finally pulled a gun on my mother after she wouldn't go in the bedroom with him after he'd come from drinking. He chased her outside and shot at her a couple of times. That was the worst I'd ever seen. I was relieved to discover that THAT was, indeed, the very last straw for her --- she then filed for divorce.)

So that's me. A shitty, violent dad; a mother drawing lines only after it came down to truly horrible stuff. I survived it. And I'm glad for the line-drawing. 99% of my adult life, I've been self-sufficient.

I do have a question, though, about someone that I've known for about 9 years now. When I met her online in '08, she had just lost 18 years of child support, was then being supported by an older Sugar Daddy. When he was declared senile by his children, she lost her sponsored apartment and was forced to beg relatives/friends for support. One old family friend paid her rent for year; after that, a fellow AA member gave her a spot on his couch. Even that is now about to end.

Now, this woman was raised rich; her father died early, her mother lost his money to vultures... I think she has a perpetual Rescue Fantasy.

I've tried to help her, for years, to get a job: Working up a resume for her, sending job notices that I found online, explaining how easy it was to get a simple, cushy part-time job with the state... No desire at all for any self-help. She'd prefer to sleep on someone else's couch rather than work for even a one-room place of her own.

She's nearing 60. At what point does the "Rescue Fantasy" end? Of course, it doesn't. Even when speaking to her a couple of weeks ago, she joked about a "Russian" rescuing her from her financial plight. (That wealthy Russian oligarchs might prefer 30-ish nubile young women to a 60-year-old didn't seem to deter her.)

Me in this equation: I care about her, but my idea of "rescuing" is offering a room for a few months and helping with a job search. Not sexy. Not the stuff of fantasy. Our internal needs don't intersect at all.

Gordon Craig on Isadora Duncan

Isadora Duncan by Edward Gordon Craig.

All things have only an imaginary existence...
For the remembering of an act --- "I went with her
through those lighted streets and we
bought our supper from three or four shops" ---
is greater than the act itself....
Beyond wonder wonderful --- that seemed and seems
as I see those shops --- that street ---
the lights, it becomes again so wonderful
that I turn sick with pain of gazing --- It is gone
by --- that glimpse.

----------------------------------------------

An earlier recollection of Craig, after seeing Duncan dance for the first time in 1904:

Only this can we say --- that she was telling to the air the very things we longed to hear, and till she came we had never dreamed we should hear...

Traveling Wilburys - Handle With Care (1988)

I've been uptight and made a mess

but I'll clean it up myself, I guess

Oh, the sweet smell of success

Handle me with care

Oh, goodness

I've recently been in sporadic e-mail contact, via Facebook, with the subsequent "best friend" of the girl I loved my senior year of high school and "left" when I went off to college at UT Austin. (I put "left" in quotes because neither of us knew anything about "love." She and I were very close. Closer than I've been to anyone since. Once I went off to college, Ginny found a new "best friend"; she left me.)

A couple of weeks ago, I Facebook-messaged the friend: "Happy Birthday to Ginny!" (who had died in 1988).

She messaged me back, saying she'd called Ginny's mother on that day...

I replied back with my shallow memories: "I remember that Ginny always spoke harshly to her mother; and is her father still around? I remember that he always drank a dozen Cokes per day..."

What was I trying to prove? That I also had memories of Ginny's parents? Ginny and I used to want to explore different religions. We once tried to find a Unitarian church in Fort Worth and got lost. Her parents questioned us upon our return --- we didn't look like we'd been to church. I also traveled with the whole family to Georgia in the summer of '83 to visit Ginny's grandmother. The car trip, the hotels, the bedroom, the return...

At the time, I thought, "Oh, this is just the end of high school. I'm going off to college. I'm a hotshot. I'll experience hundreds of other intimate moments like this." In fact, I have never since experienced such intimate moments.

Traveling Wilburys: End Of The Line (1988)

Well it's all right, riding around in the breeze
Well it's all right, if you live the life you please
Well it's all right, doing the best you can
Well it's all right, as long as you lend a hand

You can sit around and wait for the phone to ring
Waiting for someone to tell you everything
Sit around and wonder what tomorrow will bring
Maybe a diamond ring

Well it's all right, even if they say you're wrong
Well it's all right, sometimes you gotta be strong
Well it's all right, as long as you got somewhere to lay
Well it's all right, everyday is Judgment Day

Maybe somewhere down the road a-ways
You'll think of me, wonder where I am these days 
Maybe somewhere down the road when somebody plays
Purple Haze

Well it's all right, even when push comes to shove
Well it's all right, if you got someone to love
Well it's all right, everything'll work out fine
Well it's all right, we're going to the end of the line

Don't have to be ashamed of the car I drive
I'm just glad to be here, happy to be alive
It don't matter if you're by my side
I'm satisfied

Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray
Well it's all right, you still got something to say
Well it's all right, remember to live and let live
Well it's all right, the best you can do is forgive

Well it's all right, riding around in the breeze
Well it's all right, if you live the life you please
Well it's all right, even if the sun don't shine
Well it's all right, we're going to the end of the line

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - Breakdown - 12/30/1978

Austria election: Sebastian Kurz set to become the world's youngest leader

The wave of the future. No more globalist, corporate control of countries.

Many artists are somewhat stupid

Love Joan Crawford as I might, when I've been in contact with local actors in local plays, and attended their shows and after-parties... They were silly and self-involved and downright stupid. Same with local artists at their shows. Local musicians? Eh... I went home with one one night and got to sit around in his living room talking to his roommate while the "musician" himself was off shooting up in a back bedroom. (Musicians, at least, don't seem to be pretentious --- they're just boring. Unless you like to sit around listening to them "noodling" for 6 or more hours an evening --- I don't. I've been able to stand it for about 45 minutes.)

I'm 52 now, and I've been around a bunch of people, in both academic and artistic environments... Scientists and business-people are actually the smartest. (In the academic environment, Liberal Arts and Communications professors are the dumbest/least original.)

I've currently spent 9 years of my life chasing after a so-called poet/artist that I knew from a poetry class back in the '80s. She was great circa '86. What she's doing now: Living with random people and off random never-quite-sufficient oil checks. And complaining because her sister gets to go on $40,000 ski trips. (Her sister married better than this so-called artist did.)

Her "dilemma" was interesting to me circa 2008. In 2017, though... I'm bored as shit with her. Nine years ago, I was a loser who couldn't find a job, and she was a loser who couldn't find a rich man to support her. Today... I'm making $16,000 more per year than I was making 9 years ago. And she: Still scruffing around and looking for a sucker to pay her bills.

Kellywise - SNL

Joan Crawford publicity for "Ice Follies of 1939"

Heart: Crazy On You

Happy Birthday, Ginny (October 11).
I didn't get either Heart or Rickie Lee Jones, her favorites, at the time.

WE'RE ALL WATER by Yoko Ono

Happy Birthday to Ginny Haney today, October 11. She died at 22. She would have been 52 today.

She listened to this with me in 1983 because I absolutely had to hear it. Yoko and John are ridiculous to me today, but I still remember, and am grateful for, a 17-year-old Ginny's patience. (Probably why she abandoned me a year later!) :)

Tammy Bruce

http://tammybruce.com/

 

Milquetoast Republicans Like Charles Sykes: No More

https://www.c-span.org/video/?433923-2/words-charles-sykes

Never-Trumper Republican Sykes (exactly the type of person that I hate worse than Hillary Clinton, whom I never hated until her disgustingly false behavior in 2016 and until learning the extent of the Clinton Foundation corruption; in fact, I voted for her against the nothing Obama in the Democratic primaries in 2008) and interviewer Tammy Bruce on C-SPAN while I was using C-SPAN to go to sleep Sunday night. Sykes was a complete generic Jeb Bush idiot (again --- I would vote for Hillary Clinton before I would EVER vote for someone like Jeb Bush). 

Tammy Bruce, a conservative herself, calmly discussed with Sykes the fact that Trump, while no Republican (thank god for that), was, nonetheless, an agent of change who was attempting to get rid of both Democratic and Republican orthodoxies... As I drifted off, I was thinking, "Thank you, Tammy Bruce, whoever you are. You are asking sane, rational questions of this epitome of Republicanism that I absolutely HATE." The guy, Sykes, decried Trump for "acting bizarrely," among other shallow and stupid things, like being a "fraud." (If there's one thing that Trump is not, it's emotionally fraudulent: I challenge anyone to name one thing he said on the campaign trail that he's not attempted to follow up with as President.)

I ended up staying awake to watch the whole thing. I woke up the next day wondering who Bruce was. Turns out she's similar to me: Bisexual, feminist, Democrat up until 2008 (me, until 2012) --- when she (and I) realized that something has gone horribly wrong with the Democrat social experiment that began in 1968 or so.

Words Charles Sykes, Oct 4 2017 | Video | C-SPAN.org

Former radio host and MSNBC contributor Charles Sykes looks at the conservative movement in America. He is interviewed by Tammy Bruce, Fox News contributor and host of The Tammy Bruce Show.

c-span.org

Donald Trump Campaign Trail

The man didn't win for nothing.

Trump: A Real Man

Compare how Trump reacts to an intruder to how Bernie Sanders reacted to the BLM gals. Trump is a fucking old-school Stud. I admire that sexy, macho lost breed.

RAW VIDEO: Activists disrupt rally featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders, weakling. Why I couldn't support him last year. Trump, on the other hand --- when someone charged HIS stage, he set his feet and turned directly to confront. A real man.

Trump and Sanders were the only candidates to address the outsourcing of American workers. Those were the two I was interested in. But when I saw Sanders give in to these radicals, I was completely repulsed by his weakness. Not to mention, when I thought about it, his complete ignorance of any concept of how the economy runs. Why wouldn't Trump be the best choice?

Tom Petty: I Won't Back Down (1989)

You can stand me up at the gates of Hell

but I won't back down.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Even the Losers (1979)

Well it was nearly summer, we sat on your roof
Yeah we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon
And I showed you stars you never could see
Babe, it couldn't have been that easy to forget about me...

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Refugee (1979)

The first Tom Petty song I ever heard on the radio.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Listen to Her Heart (1978)

"Buddy, you don't even know her..."

1934. Joan Crawford by Hurrell.

Tapped Out

The blessings were mixed, the whole mess licked clean
from a horsehair bowl some joker's dada had left him

Our avid lapping the envy of each starved cat
curled nearby, unpurring, eyes narrowed to watchful slits
skirting the edges, stilettoes mincing convincingly

Oh, the trouble we stirred up --- sometimes with splintery
wooden spoons pricking our outstretched tongues
Sometimes with blenders whose tops blew off, splattering walls.
We licked it like that.

------------------------------------------------

The trees of our land have scars
where pioneers nailed their barbed wire.

And when the worms have had their way
with flesh and wood alike

The rust still runs through ---
swallowed by the stubborn knots
of both fury and patience.

------------------------------------------------

The you that I miss was never there
We met in air, and dispersed with as little mass

Which came first
My wish, or the way you were

I was never sure
which way the wind blew
without clouds occasionally kind enough
to leave clues in a wide, vacant sky

--------------------------------------------------

All her incantations couldn't conjure
one last drop of even bad luck
from the dregs of Old Jude's bag of tricks.

(I am not ashamed
to say the heart stopped long ago)

Revival by needle, by glass, by knife
Every gash and prick alike
And this patron, once saintly, now too
all tapped out.

The Unwanted (Leaving Las Vegas)

I woke up to a massacre
I closed my eyes and waited for
Another fate than what awaited me

I could not guess what I had done
To dream the wrong end of a gun
(The living lure much more than I can flee.)

I'm sure it all began more civilly
With a note, perhaps: "Will you marry me?"
From an Elvis song, or from your first dead baby

I want to live, but I can't sing.
Just leave me at that. Leave me everything.

I hate Austin. I hate it with all my heart.

You're not supposed to say that about the town you live in, especially if you've lived in it, give or take, for most of your adult life.

Or if you've bought thousands of dollars of furniture upon your return to the town once you got a job and could afford it, thinking this was where you were going to end up as an old person.

I DON'T WANT TO END UP HERE.

With all of my heart, I don't.

SELF, GET ME OUT OF HERE. GET ME OUT.

GET ME OUT.

GET ME OUT.

GET ME OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A 10/2/17 post-script to the above: Jesus! I had no idea I felt that strongly about it while in my cups! Sober, I don't feel quite that strongly. Dilemma: Listen to sober or drunk self about true feelings?? :) Honestly, I don't remember writing the above. There are minor day-to-day irritations, and I certainly don't have any connection to Austin today, as I once did in the '80s --- the town has changed drastically and become drastically generic at its core, with only the veneer of its once-funky self... I guess I do hate it now. Used to be cheap and funky. Today, it's super-expensive (thanks to influx of tech people) and pretending to be funky. Do I hate it because it's truly lost its charm or because I'm too old to compete for anything in its future? I am truly upset that at 50K per year, I cannot live in a decent place.

David Bowie- Space Oddity Original Video (1969)

Shut the Fuck Up, Popovich. Seriously.

Dear Pop: Please shut up. Your views about "the LGBT movement" and "women's suffrage" (! What, is this 1920?) are ignorant and ridiculous. As is your awkward use of the term "organic." As are your apologies for those of us who are "born white" and thus, according to you, have "systemic advantages." Myself? Poor white background. Not a single "advantage." I got to attend college via student loans only. (Thanks to the government. Government student loans are also available to smart poor black people.)

On the streets, as a bus-rider, I've been physically attacked by black guys and black women. In the business world, I've had one job taken away from me because I wasn't Hispanic (the boss was Hispanic, and had a history of only hiring other Hispanics --- when I was a temp for her, she held the job open so another Hispanic woman could apply.) When I lived in New York City and worked the midnight shift as a proofreader, half of the supervisors were black, and half of the workers were black. How did that happen? Black people make up 13% of the population, not 50%.

I came from a poor white rural background, and I was given no advantages at all. Who the fuck are you, Popovich, to claim any sort of knowledge about poor white people or gay people (which I am) or of "women's suffrage" (a particularly stupid claim). Or of black people. You know nothing of anything. Please shut up.

Kanye West: School Spirit (2004)

If I could go through all that and still be breathing
Bitch bend over, I'm here for a reason
 ......

 Back to school and I hate it there, I hate it there...


 

[Intro]
School spirit motherfuckers

[Chorus]
Alpha, step. Omega, step
Kappa, step. Sigma, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw
AKA, step. Delta, step
S G Rho, step. Zeta, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw

[Verse 1]
I'ma get on this TV, momma
I'ma, I'ma break shit down
I'ma make sure these light skinned niggaz
Never ever never come back in style
Told 'em I finished school, and I started my own business
They say, 'Oh you graduated?'
No, I decided I was finished
Chasin' y'all dreams and what you've got planned
Now I spit it so hot you got tanned
Back to school and I hate it there, I hate it there
Everything I want I gotta wait a year, I wait a year
This nigga graduated at the top of my class..
I went to Cheesecake, he was a motherfucking waiter there

[Chorus]

[Verse 2]
I got a Jones like Norah for your sorror'
Bring more of them girls I've seen in the Aurora
Tammy, Becky, and Laura, or'a Shirley
I'm tryin' to hit it early, like I'm in a hurry
See, that's how dude became the young pootie tang tippy tow
Rocafella chain, yeah that's my rapper style
Rosary piece, yeah that's my Catholic style
Red and white One's, yeah that's my Kappa style
And I ain't even pledge
Crack my head on the steering wheel and I ain't even dead
If I could go through all that and still be breathing
Bitch bend over, I'm here for a reason

[Outro]
I feel a woo coming on, cuz. I feel a woo coming on, cuz
WOO
There it was
I feel some woos coming on, cuz. A couple woos coming on, cuz
WOO, WOO

1932. Joan Crawford w' writer Vina Delmar ("Grand Hotel" set)

Jimi Hendrix - The Star-Spangled Banner ('69, Woodstock)

Reclaiming the song for our country's freaks (myself included). So interesting and intelligent, the inclusion of Taps and dive-bombers.

1932. Joan Crawford in "Grand Hotel" (and 1954 in "Johnny G")

Sia: I'm gonna swing from the chandelier

I've not given up yet.

Colin Kaepernick's Pussy-Whipped Bullshit

Why Colin Kaepernick's taking a knee during the National Anthem is bullshit:

(1) From Wikipedia: "Kaepernick was born in 1987 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Heidi Russo, a 19-year-old white woman of Irish and Bohemian [dubious – discuss] descent who was single at the time.[4] His birth father, an African American man, left Russo before Colin was born.[5][6] Russo placed Colin for adoption with Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, a white couple..."

If your poor-white mother gives you up for adoption and your black father has left you, then you're adopted by a nice white middle-class couple who offers you a nice life -- far nicer than your deadbeat dad wanted to provide for you... Then be fucking grateful for your opportunities.

(2) If America is so terribly evil and racist... then how was someone like you able to make it to the top of his profession and given an NFL contract worth millions of dollars?
Same goes for all of the other NFL sheep kneeling for our country's National Anthem just because Kaepernick or LeBron James (via Twitter) suggested that you do so. And you sheep even have 8-year-olds kneeling before their Pee-Wee football league games, without understanding what they're kneeling for.

(3) Got a political beef? Go march on your own free time. Donate money to your favorite causes. Just don't subject the rest of us to your bullshit during NFL games. (And don't cry wolf. The biggest murderers of black men? Other black men. See Chicago crime stats, for instance. I'm not going to pay any attention to your "cry racist" bullshit until you first look in the mirror.)

(4) Perhaps most importantly: Don't let your new Muslim girlfriend sway your views. Kaepernick started dating Nessa Diab, a Muslim activist raised in Saudi Arabia and educated at Berkeley, in 2016. Which is right when the kneeling started. Coincidence? The guy is obviously a confused pussy. Confused about his race, confused about his origins, confused about what/who to be loyal to. Given his neuroses, why is anyone following his lead?

My Bad-Ass President (Alabama 9/22/17)

"Rocket Man should have been handled a long time ago...I'm gonna handle it because we have to handle it."

Give 'em hell, Trump.

Poor Alan Dugan on Anne Sexton

I was randomly browsing some poetry sites today and came across this, "Drunken Memories of Anne Sexton," by Alan Dugan. (I remembered his name and, vaguely, some of his plainspoken work from my classroom poetry anthology in the 1980s.)

The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
"I don't care what you think,
you know," as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover,
what? And just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her
"Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue, one green"
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others' beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine.

At first, I was annoyed by the poem's style -- I usually hate a prose paragraph broken into lines, attempting to be "poetry," not to mention the gratuitous anti-war rhetoric so common at the time. Next, I was fascinatedly grasping at any bit of personal info about Sexton (what a dick that professor was, and what a defiant thing for her to say to the innocent Dugan). And, finally, I found myself identifying completely with Dugan, the awkward, odd man out as the two "beauties" gazed at each other after Kinnell had said exactly the right thing. I actually felt pangs for Dugan's loss! And, get this... I think the below might be the exact meeting Dugan was writing about!:

NYC, 92nd Street Poetry Center. Galway Kinnell and Anne Sexton.

Poor Alan Dugan looked like the below around the same time. Heart full of love but, alas, looking like a judgmental church deacon!

And here's a color photo of Sexton, for eye-gazing, from the UT HRC website:

Phew!

Just got out of an afternoon showing of Darren Aronofsky's "Mother!" Only about 10 people in the entire audience (but then it's rather overbooked in Austin, showing at at least a dozen theaters).

Aronofsky has said the film is about the environmental rape of Mother Earth. All the critics are also saying it's a Rorschach test of the viewer. OK, so here's what I saw in it: (1) Jesus dying for the sins of humanity, and (2) the inside of Sylvia Plath's head (I kept thinking of the story of her getting overly upset when Ted Hughes asked their Ouija board whether or not he'd be famous---she saw it as an extremely bad omen that the world would take him away from her...as it did).

Yes, I feel like I've been through the wringer after watching (as with "Pi," "Requiem for a Dream," "The Wrestler," and "Black Swan"), mainly emotionally but also intellectually. You certainly know what you're getting with him.

Maud Allan

Maud Allan passport photo.

As a teen, I used to amuse myself while trying to get to sleep by trying to track the source of the latest thought that had popped into my head. I dunno, I could go 12 or so steps back. It was interesting.

I mention this because right now I can't remember why in the world "Maud Allan" ever came into my consciousness today. I suppose I was searching for "Joan Crawford" on eBay, and a "Maud Allan" photo turned up in a sidebar... I dunno.

At any rate, from eBay, I clicked upon "Maud Allan" on Wikipedia, and then to her brother Theodore Durrant, who sexually murdered two women in San Francisco in 1895 and was hanged in 1898: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Durrant

Post-murder, his sister changed her name and moved to Europe.

Maud Allan was initially best known for her 1906 "Vision of Salome" erotic dance that she performed to great scandal and acclaim, appearing in 1908 in London for over 250 performances. Then in 1918, she was involved in yet another Oscar Wilde morality trial:

In 1918 the British MP Noel Pemberton Billing, in his own journal, Vigilante, published an article, "The Cult of the Clitoris" which implied that Allan, then appearing in her Vision of Salome, was a lesbian associate of German wartime conspirators.

Allan sued Billing for libel, based on the following counts:

• The act of publishing a defamatory article about Maud Allan and J. T. Grein, her impresario.
• The act, a separate offence, of including obscenities within the article.

This led to a sensational court case, at which Billing represented himself. Lord Alfred Douglas also testified in Billing's favour. Allan lost the case. The trial became entangled in obscenity charges brought forth by the state against the performance given by Allan in her dance. She was accused of practising many of the sexually charged acts depicted (or implied) in Wilde's writings herself, including necrophilia.

At this time, the Lord Chamberlain's ban on public performances of Wilde's play was still in place in England, and thus the Salomé dance was at risk. Her brother's crimes were also dredged up to suggest there was a background of sexual insanity in her family.

 

 

 

 

1916 by Edward Weston.

And about the brother, Theodore, who inspired a female following during his lurid, nationally publicized murder trial:

http://www.historicalcrimedetective.com/killer-theodore-durrant/
http://www.murderbygaslight.com/2009/11/theodore-durrant-demon-of-belfry.html
http://www.annalsofcrime.com/04-05.htm

Oh, shit...

What do you do when you find out that the person you thought was the love of your life also happens to be the love of someone else's life?

And the other person has the better claim (Ginny dumped me for her, and she was with Ginny when she died---- and I just contacted her on Facebook, and, though she's in another relationship now, she said that Ginny was also the love of her life... I think she gets first dibs.)

Shit. I'm alone now, but I had somehow fantasized that I'd have a mate in the Afterlife.... Damn. I'm really on my own, for now and evermore.

Post-script 9/15/17: Ginny's "other" just gave me her phone number via Facebook.. What can I say to her? I saw Ginny's diary with its "I write/you act" that had nothing to do with me? How desolate I felt? She's expressed to me that she was very jealous of me at the time; I expressed the same to her. What have we to say to each other now, 34 years later? (Interestingly, I told her that Ginny and I had never been lovers, never even kissed... she said that she assumed that we had been lovers, but that Ginny just hadn't admitted it to her... We were all just around 18 years old.)

Target makes you a Star

Sometimes when you're just shopping at Target for a birthday card or a new microwave or something... They suddenly offer a star-studded version of your initial for only $14.99. I completely bought into it (and bought it).

I feel sorry, though, for those whose initials aren't "S," "J," "K," or "M," the only letters offered. Oh yeah, and an ampersand. The display offered "S & M."

Joan Crawford, 1926

Why write or draw or paint or try to represent anything else? This is what I, at least, was always envisioning.

Bay City Rollers - Give a Little Love (1975)

Great Britain Bucket List

(1) England (history)

(2) Liverpool and Beatles

(3) Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (London and Devon)

(4) Scotland and the Bay City Rollers: Les McKeown is still playing gigs around Scotland to this day --- I would love to see any original member of the Bay City Rollers. (I did see short-term member Ian Mitchell play at a small club in New Jersey in 2007, right after I'd moved to NYC. With my junior-high friend Debbie, who then lived in Brooklyn and drove us out there.)

Bay City Rollers Renaissance

My first favorite band. The first 2 albums that I ever owned ("Dedication" and then "Bay City Rollers," in 1976). The first concert I almost went to (at the Tarrant County Convention Center in Fort Worth, Texas --- cancelled for lack of ticket sales).

The 1st picture below is what I've been reading over the past 2 weeks.

The 2nd picture below is me in summer 1977 (age 12) in Germany (in my German cousin Susie's bedroom), right after their "It's a Game" album was released. (My mom pasted the photo into the front of the book at the upper right, 2016, that I asked for for my birthday a month ago.)

Bay City Rollers -- It's A Game (1977)

Bay City Rollers - Midnight Special 1976

When I was 12. I stayed up all night to watch this.
After the Beatles, the Bay City Rollers are STILL my favorite band.