Vote!!/Sunset's Implications/Bauman & Coletti Paintings/Bobby Byrd and Amy Trussell Poems/

(P1) Political

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(P2) Painting
2 Watercolor Paintings by Martin Bauman

("Untitled" and "Girl With Roses")

  Bizarro Comic 3-6-14

Sunset Bodega Bay
Ed Coletti (Acrylic March 2014)

 




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(P3) Poetical

Check out this wise and witty poem by El Paso poet 

Bobby Byrd in his recently released book  

Otherwise, My Life Is Ordinary

 

In Memory of the Famous Poet, 2010

“Being a famous poet

Is not like being famous.”

—John Ashbery

If I moved three miles south into Mexico

(I live in El Paso)

I could be shot for being a poet.

In fact, I could be shot for being alive.

Dead, I would be innocent.

That’s what Amado Carrillo Fuentes said.

“Only the dead are innocent.”

He died on an operating table trying to get a new face.

He no longer wanted to be himself.

But Amado was not a poet.

He was a narco-traficante and a murderer.

A vicious and evil man.

Although now he is innocent according to his own definition.

Me, I could be dead for the sin of being a poet.

For the sin of being alive.

Guilty, as charged.

Maybe I would also be famous then.

At least for a couple of days.

My wife would be weeping on CNN.

She’d sell a few of my poetry books.

--

Cinco Puntos Press is crowd-funding 

My new book of poems at Rockethub.com. 

Here's a poem celebrating a pot of good beans. 

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The Soul Is An Albino Alligator 

Full -length mirrors doubling and tripling

won’t hold back the search

into the torqued spirit,

intriguing and silent,

or burning like an overturned car.

You yearn for nothing except

for a more satisfying yearning,

high octane, that could fuel a souped-up skylark,

not a low-grade tawdry trip through the

house of mirrors, mantled and dis-

mantled by the carny types

that mother always warned about.

One sits on a chair in the dirt

with a hand-held mirror putting on her face

wearing bloomers and a bustier

while her fake city of coaster scaffolding

and hung kewpie dolls rises around her,

the carny brothers

dangling cigarettes out their mouths over

dry grass and generators.

She builds make-believe walls around her

from thin air, acting like we don’t see her

make herself up.

The air darkens and the search-

lights go up, caressing the clouds,

suggesting that this is it,

this is what you’ve been meaning to come to. 

A lit wheel suspended in air for a moment

allowing time for that kiss you’ve been dying for.

Some snacks that could kill

your appetite until the next day, at least.

Those lotus-cut onion blooms

swimming in a vat of bubbling oil.

But your yearning is loftier than all that.

Inspiration: to hear Brigitte Bardot and her sidekick

sing “Bonnie and Clyde,” making murder

and mayhem sound elegant if not sexy.

To ride down the Florida Keys in a side-

car with some hellion at the driving wheel

searching for albino alligators

along sand blown train tracks

while shooting from the hip

for a soul retrieval half real.

- Amy Trussell 

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Guns, People, and Laws/Pickles Cartoon/When People Die/Smoking

(P1) Political


Banished for questioning 2nd Amendment gospel

This headline appeared in the January 5, 2014 NY Times and contained a subhead "Fired Guns & Ammo columnist: 'Compromise is a bad word' in debate over U.S. firearms policy."


Here are some excerpts:

In late October, Metcalf wrote a column that the magazine titled "Let's Talk Limits," which debated gun laws.  "The fact is, " wrote Metcalf, who has taught history at Cornell and Yale, "all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be." 

The backlash was swift and fierce.  Readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions.  Death threats poured in by email  His television program was pulled from the air....

...I've been vanished, disappeared," Metcalf, 67 said in an interview...fears he has become a pariah in the gun industry, to which, he said, he has devoted nearly his entire adult life.

....His experience sheds light on the close-knit world of gun journalism, where editors and reporters say there is little room for nuance in the debate over gun laws.  Moderate voices that might broaden the discussion from within are silenced....

...Richard Venola, a former editor of Guns & Ammo (said) "The time for ceding some rational points is gone."...

...In 2012, Jerry Tsai, the editor of Recoil magazine wrote that the Heckler & Koch MP7A1 gun, designed for law enforcement, was "unavailable to civilians and for good reason."  He was pressured to step down, and despite apologizing, has not written since.

...Metcalf says his only regret about the column is that it was too short.  "Some topics you should never try and discuss too briefly, because they can't be dealt with like that..."

Therefore, please consider taking a look at the full NYT article now.

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 Gun Laws Actually Have Loosened Since Sandy Hook

This from The Daily Koz of December 12 2013

There were high hopes among gun-control advocates after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, last December that the United States would finally get serious about reducing firearm violence by requiring every would-be buyer of a gun to undergo a criminal and mental health background check and restricting the type of weapon individuals can own as well as the ammunition capacity of those weapons. New organizations were founded, older ones reinvigorated.
The effort failed spectacularly at the federal level. At least in part, that's because of Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein's doomed-to-failure-from-the-start effort to reinstitute a 1994-2004 ban on certain semi-automatic rifles with big ammunition magazines like the one Adam Lanza used in Newtown that are capable of firing scores of bullets in a few seconds.

Not only did Feinstein's proposal go down in flames, with large numbers of Democrats opposed, the assault weapon ban's introduction as the first new gun proposal after Newtown may well have hurt the chances for enacting a background check law covering private gun sales. A universal background check has overwhelming support among citizens in general, among gun owners and even among members of the National Rifle Association. But the debate over the background-check proposal was tainted with the assault weapons ban by the NRA, the more extreme Gun Owners of America and many NRA favorites in Congress. Ultimately, that proposal also went into oblivion.

There has been more success for advocates of tighter controls at the state level in the past 12 months. As The New York Times pointed out Thursday, 109 new gun laws have been enacted in the wake of Newtown. However, 70 of them have loosened restrictions.

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(P2) Poetical

My Four-Year-Old Asks What Happens 
When People Die And When I Hesitate

     She Answers Her Own Question

First they wake up on the day they're going to die

And they pack up all their clothes

And they say goodbye to their mama and goodbye

To their daddy

They go to a different state and find a nice empty

House that's quiet and a good soft bed

And they lie down. 

- Tina Parker in Rattle Winter 2013 

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(P3) Philosophical

Cigarette smoking is a fast track to an early deathAn excellent column and a very interesting read follows.  Perhaps it can save a life or two.

by Richard Cohen, Washington Post (January 20, 2014)

On Jan. 1, Colorado began permitting the legal sale of marijuana. Even before that, the nation’s news media had swung into action, arguing just about everything — marijuana is dangerous or not dangerous, a gateway drug or just a lot of smoke. Nothing I saw mentioned why I, for one, will not smoke marijuana. I’m afraid it would lead me back to cigarettes.

Once I was addicted to cigarettes. (I suppose I still am.) I tried to quit numerous times — hypnotism, acupuncture, hypnotism again, willpower and shame and mortal shame — but for the longest time, nothing worked. I felt enslaved — sucking this poison into my body, soiling my lungs — and enraged at an industry that encouraged me as a youth to smoke and, despite all the health findings, continued to give me that encouraging wink: Smoke. Go ahead. Such sweet pleasure!

Now the latest surgeon general’s report shows that cigarette smoking is even worse for us than we once thought. To all the usual diseases — lung cancer and heart disease — can be added diabetes, colorectal and liver cancers and, irony of ironies, erectile dysfunction. The Marlboro Man needs some help.
Boris D. Lushniak, the acting surgeon general, tacked on some more horrors: vision loss, tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis, impaired immune function and cleft palates in children of pregnant women who smoke. Did I mention bladder cancer? How about cervical cancer? They, too, can be caused by smoking. Can you imagine anything more economical? Almost any disease you can name is in a single package.

The managers and directors of tobacco companies must wonder at their good fortune. The nation is engaged in a great debate about marijuana — is it dangerous, addictive? — while tobacco is not only legal but widely available and not discussed. Smoking, the surgeon general says, is responsible for 480,000 premature deaths a year. That’s a bit more than the population of Kansas City, Mo. — dead, dead and very dead every single year.

About 18 percent of Americans smoke, down from 42 percent in 1965. The decline has leveled off, but with it has come an appreciation of just how unhealthy smoking is. Tobacco is about the only product you can think of that, when used as directed, can kill you.

To my knowledge, Karl Marx never considered tobacco companies in his criticism of capitalism. Yet almost 150 years after he published “Das Kapital,” these companies are selling a carcinogenic delivery system to what are, after all, nicotine junkies. How’s that for exploitation, Karl baby? What other industry can claim so many lives and so much misery? Beginning with its early efforts to suppress medical findings, what other industry has such a splendid history of lying to the public?

Yet the people who run these companies are not shunned, denied membership at the country club and appropriately reviled. Instead, they are welcomed and respected and, of course, well compensated. If you read the Web sites of the various tobacco companies, you would think that they are in the business of fighting smoking and that new smokers somehow materialize out of thin air. The word “responsibility” is a leitmotif. This is an outrageous restraint of trade; these companies leave little hypocrisy for anyone else.

I started smoking as a kid, 13 or 14 years old. After some years, I tried pipes and cigars as a cigarette substitute. No good. Pipes were impractical when I was in the Army — I couldn’t light them up or put them out fast enough to suit the average sergeant — and cigars were no improvement since I tended to inhale.
The truth is I loved to smoke. But now I can hardly bear to watch Bogie light up in some film-noir classic without seeing it as foreshadowing his death from esophageal cancer at the age of 57. And when I see kids on the street smoking, flipping off health concerns with the arrogance of youth, I want to slap them silly or, at the least, delay their walk with a lecture on what the surgeon general has found. But mostly I want them and everyone else to ask how we can have a national debate on marijuana and ignore the annual mountain of cadavers from smoking cigarettes. It, for sure, is a gateway drug — to an early grave.

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Germs, Viruses, and Catechisms (historicowarpoligious poems) by Ed Coletti

Ed Coletti's Germs, Viruses, and Catechisms Published December 2013 by Civil Defense Publications (San Francisco)

As you well can imagine, it was difficult finding a press interested in publishing a political ( in this case "historicowarpoligious") poetry book.  I'm very pleased and humbled by CDP's acceptance and all that publisher James Tracy has done!

http://www.amazon.com/Germs-Viruses-Catechisms-historicalwarpoligious-Pocketbooks/dp/0978691393/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387481432&sr=8-1&keywords=ed+coletti

Here's what Jonah Raskin wrote,

“Ed Coletti is at the top of his form in Germs, Viruses, and Catechisms, a collection of irreverent, sacrilegious verse that might become infectious, and that could become a kind of contemporary catechism. Playful and punning, satirical and lyrical, political and whimsical, Coletti’s brave new book brings together Crazy Horse and Joe Gallo, Columbus and George Bush. The lists are funny; the imagery of war and torture is absolutely wild. There are surprises here, too, as in “Hypatia of Alexandria,” a wild and wonderful poem that offers a heretical heroine for our own crazy, brave times.” 

                       

- Jonah Raskin, author of The Radical Jack London and Rock ‘n’ Roll Women, Portraits of a Generation.

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What's Obama Done For Us?/Bizaaro/Louis C.K./Anselm Hollo/

(P1) Political  Amol Rajan: What has the President ever done for us? Plenty

Apart from healthcare, Wall Street and social reforms, getting Bin Laden, green investment and smart stewardship of the world’s biggest economy, what the hell has Obama done for the US?

Sept. 23, 2013. In recent weeks it has become a prevailing orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic to call Barack Obama a spent force. The argument goes like this: in screwing up over Syria, a President who was always weak and ineffective and who foolishly inflated expectations ahead of his first term has accelerated America’s decline and exhausted his own authority. History will thereby judge him a failure. It’s White House Down.

Like most prevailing orthodoxy, this is bunkum. We’ll come on to the Syrian mess in a moment. First, a brief review of the wider critique.
I guess it’s true that Obama has done nothing very useful; except achieving, in public healthcare, something that presidents going back a century or more have wanted but failed to get. Then there are the small matters of substantial Wall Street reform, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — which did so much to reduce the pay gap between men and women — repeal of the vile “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule for gays in the military and the exceptionally competent response to Hurricane Sandy. Then there are his radical moves towards energy independence through investment in shale, and his personal supervision of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and the scheduled withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Finally, when he took over as President, the world was on the brink of depression and America was losing 700,000 jobs per month — but since 2010 it has grown an average of 2.3 per cent per quarter.
So apart from healthcare, Wall Street and social reforms, getting Bin Laden, green investment and smart stewardship of the world’s biggest economy, what the hell has Obama done for the US?
Not much, I guess; though note that his detractors think his predecessor is sorely missed and often champion Britain’s economic recovery, where quarterly growth since 2010 has averaged 0.28 per cent and is fuelled by a disgraceful housing bubble.
It’s true that Obama screwed up over Syria. His error wasn’t breaking the pledge about crossing a red line but making it in the first place — something he did on his diplomats’ advice. The hesitancy he and Secretary of State John Kerry showed has energised his critics, who see international affairs as a contest over who can put the biggest willy onto the negotiating table.
That’s not how it works. Diplomacy is a combination of patience, strategy and luck. Obama has all three. On Syria, he has been given an exit strategy, by the Russians of all people. And tomorrow, at the UN in New York, almost unthinkably, Iran’s new leader will shake Obama’s hand.
Though the Israelis are — justifiably — sceptical, there has been an astonishing thawing of relations between Iran and America of late. Iran’s leaders released political prisoners, sent Rosh Hashana greetings to Jews via Twitter, and exchanged letters with the White House via the Swiss. The Americans reciprocated.
If Obama is chastised over his handling of Syria, so he should be applauded over his handling of Iran. It is far too early to tell, of course; but he could yet convert the latter from pariah to partner. That won’t convince his silly critics, but it might shut them up for a bit.
Amol Rajan is editor of The Independent (England) Twitter @amolrajan

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(P2) Philosophical  

 Press the name

"Louis C. K." - Check Out His Measured Reason Why His Kids Will Not Have Cell Phones

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(P3) PoeticalFrom
Guests of Space

For Janey, with French idioms

by Anselm Hollo  (April 12, 1934-January 29, 2013)

wind gusts changes sky from blue to white
above carpet of crabapples under the tree
flickers flicker through air

tremendous lightning strike two nights ago
gave me the flesh of the hen for half a second
then water poured from the sky

      — no I'm not turning into a "nature poet"
but the little green house you built for me
does make me notice a few more things in the universe
to add to my "Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence"
      and I never imagined I could be so unjealous
of my loved one's art
      even when it takes her away from me
for many evenings and mornings and nights inbetween
but o I make myself a joy of it
            to see her again



"the flesh of the hen" — "la chair de poule" — goose pimples
"make myself a joy of it" — "se faire une joie de" — to look forward with pleasure 

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