He Knew All The Words

I’ll tell you what — Thanksgiving may have come about because some pilgrims fled England, but bring some English folk over here in the 21st century and they can make you one fantastic Thanksgiving. Jim and Alex hosted our holiday this year, along with Jim’s parents, Elaine and David, who are visiting from the other side of the pond. Of course, this is no longer a purely English family anymore — as Jim and Alex have two lovely American daughters, Thea and Chloe (they’re British, too, with the passports to prove it!). Chloe, at 10 months, is just learning to walk and just developing her own sparky little personality. She’s delightful. And Thea? My goodness, she’s only 2 years old and she’s speaking in full paragraphs and with complete understanding of many topics that I thought could only be understood by 6-year-olds. She’s so loving and sweet. Toward the end of the night, she was standing in the kitchen with Alex and I was crouched behind her, with my hands on her shoulders, and she looked over her shoulder at me and said, “I love you very much.” My heart melted and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back.

Jim cooked a big ol’ turkey and carved it like an expert. And we had all kinds of harvesty veggies and cranberry sauce and special English bread sauce (which was yummy!). And then we had a nice long rest before pie and cheese and dessert wine and coffee. All told, our little gathering lasted about 10 hours! A successful holiday, I’d say.

In addition to the above eight pictures, you can see a whole bunch more right here.

After work on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I had a tough dilemma.

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Should I eat one of the tarrales Mom and Dad sent me?

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Or should I eat one of the cartadats Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jerry sent me?

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Aha! I found the answer. EAT THEM BOTH and feel the Zazaura!!

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I must be the same person though
we never are.
It can’t be, but we’ve come far

from the brown and green, from the
fluorescent light.
Now shirt and memories are black and white.

The memory is sitting, waiting quiet
and stilted,
arms on the desk, head tilted.

I was a boy in a polyester shirt
and a halo.
The corners and edges now are yellow.

I didn’t know I could be a record
in fourth grade
for the person I now have made.

I wanted to write a sentence then
go home.
The picture is a thousand times the poem.

The combination of light and chemicals
is passing time.
Look at the silent, still mime –

he doesn’t move because he is
in the past.
I was posing perfectly at last.

A simple-faced boy writing
is seated.
This history cannot be repeated.

–David Zaza [1996]

UPDATED TO ADD: And here’s another asshole — from the House, not the Senate– nominated for asshole status by my mother. Congressman McIntyre voted for the Stupid Stupak amendment which is the biggest rollback of abortion rights in a generation yet voted against the health care bill anyway. This is an example of the kind of Democrat I can live without, and another example of a Washington Asshole:

Over the years of writing this blog, I’ve called many a United States Senator an asshole. And deservedly so. Let’s add three more to the pile, uh?

Please say Hello to enemies of the people Sen. Mary Landrieu (Asshole-LA), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Asshole-AR), and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Asshole-CT):

We have enough Democrats in the Senate, now we just need to get some real ones.

UPDATED: Not only an asshole, but a lying asshole.

“She was just a normal kid. She wasn’t some fat dumb mormon fuckface who should’ve drank herself to death when she had the chance. She was so beautiful — she didn’t even have little pig eyes.” Hilarious!

You know, I happen to know a little bit about procrastination. One could say that I’m rather an expert. So file my providing this news in the it-takes-one-to-know-one column:

A planned November hearing by the US Senate Armed Services Committee to consider ending a ban on gays serving openly in the US military will be postponed, a spokeswoman indicated Friday.

“We do not have a date” for the hearing, said the aide, Tara Andringa.

Sigh. Let’s see, if it can’t be taken up by the committee now, then it’ll probably come up after the holidays. That would be 2010. Hey, isn’t 2010 the year of midterm elections? Oh great! We all know how much Congress likes to stick its neck out in election years. Not that taking up the repeal of this odious law would actually be a sticking-out of the Congressional neck — since a majority of Americans support doing so.

Anyone care to suggest that this prediction is wrong: The Senate committee will be under pressure from activists in early 2010 to take this up. The Senators will say they can’t take it up during the midterm election. The elections come and Democrats lose some seats in both the House and the Senate. Then the committee members say Well now with our smaller majority it’s clear we cannot repeal this law.

Meanwhile, careers and lives are ruined, exceptionally qualified military men and women are removed from their posts, and homophobia is permitted to fester and spread as usual.

Hey Bill Clinton! Hey Barack Obama! Hey Harry Reid! — thanks so much!! When that next email comes begging for my dollars? Guess where I’m gonna file it.

It’s Elizabeth Warren’s idea, it’s her area of expertise, and — if Congress creates a Consumer Financial Protection Agency — she should definitely be installed as its chair. This Bloomberg article describes exactly that.

This tirelessly proactive person cares more for this country than most of the bozos in Congress. Not only would I love to see her head up any new economic agency, I’d love to see her delve more broadly into politics and work her way up to cabinet-level positions. (Or become the person who actually appoints the cabinet?….)

Nicole Cadoret told me nothing about the picture she sent — except that it was taken with her iPhone. The camera on these phones is notoriously bad, which Nicole apologized for, but which makes this image, to me, absolutely beguiling.

Are we looking at an amazing natural encounter? Nicole off hiking in the woods, talking to the animals? The deer eyeing her with a mix of curiosity and skepticism, giving her the once over before trotting quickly off with her shy fawn trailing closely behind?

Or are we looking through glass? Are those slight scratches just below the picture’s midpoint on Nicole’s lens? Or are they scratched into plate-glass panels separating a curiously still diorama from a nature museum‘s visitors?

Either way, Nicole’s channeling Robert Frost circa 1923:

Two Look at Two

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. ‘This is all,’ they sighed,
Good-night to woods.’ But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.
Then, as if they were something that, though strange,
She could not trouble her mind with too long,
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.
‘This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?’
But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.
A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall as near the wall as they.
This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,
Not the same doe come back into her place.
He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,
As if to ask, ‘Why don’t you make some motion?
Or give some sign of life? Because you can’t.
I doubt if you’re as living as you look.”
Thus till he had them almost feeling dared
To stretch a proffering hand — and a spell-breaking.
Then he too passed unscared along the wall.
Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.
‘This must be all.’ It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour
Had made them certain earth returned their love.

–Robert Frost, New Hampshire

This is the second in the Favorite Picture Project series. The entire series can be seen here.

A few entries ago I linked to a story in The Arkansas Times about a 10-year-old boy who won’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school as a protest against the ideal of “liberty and justice for all” not being true for all Americans, particularly gays & lesbians.

This morning he was interviewed on CNN. At first I thought maybe this was one of those weird situations where a child’s parents are pushing their kid to act a certain way to get their own views out into the world. But now seeing this interview I don’t think that’s the case. The kid is incredibly well-spoken for a 10-year-old, and we learn in the interview he’s skipped directly from 3rd grade to 5th grade — so really he’s one of those crazy genius types. He wants to be a lawyer so he studies the meaning of everything, he says. He’s one of those adorably precious kids, whose father seems proud of and perplexed by him at the same time. It’s really sweet:

The Democrats are going to lose in 2010 and 2012 unless they decide they’re on the side of the people and then actually do something about it. If they don’t, then they deserve to lose.

I love the Roots. I love Christopher Cross. I love them together. (I hate that NBC forces a short commercial at the beginning of their embedded video clips, but it’s worth it):

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Christopher Santos actually sent me four pictures for this project. Three of them featured fog, the fourth a brown hat. I picked the one that he himself indicated he would have picked if forced to choose just one, in his words, “the tattered flag above the boat’s wake.”

The flag of the United States of America. Old Glory. The object of our Pledge. Or in some brave cases, the object of the pledge we will not take. The Stars and Stripes.

I love the old-fashioned feel of this picture. The perspective (or the wind) makes the triangular corner of stars that is showing look warped and out-of-proportion, as if there’s too much space between that last star and the three before it, as if the empty spaces there are waiting to be filled with the fresh stars of Hawaii and Alaska (or Puerto Rico and DC?). And the tatteredness? Oh the tatteredness.

I assume from Christopher’s home-base of San Francisco that this is that Bay, though given his ability to slip into and out of locales all over the world (London calling, Los Angeles falling, the Cape eternalling) this may have been shot somewhere else. I also love the emptiness — the wake, as he calls it — of most of the composition. A self-portrait in the voice of early Mark Strand:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

– Mark Strand, Selected Poems by Mark Strand

I see Christopher next in Brooklyn in December. While he’s here, he’ll be what’s missing.

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What is Favorite Picture Project? See here.

Well, I haven’t had much to say these last few weeks. That’s not true, actually. I’ve had plenty to say, but all of it filled with bile and venom and then shrouded in an ugly veil labeled “I don’t care.” Which itself is a lie. I do care. I care that Maine voters are 53% bigots. I care that Democrats feel it’s necessary to abandon core values in order to pass a shitty health care reform bill. I care that the economy is recovering for bankers but not for anyone else. And I care that many good things — movies, music, internet stuff, successful work and personal experiences — have come and gone without me passing any of it on to you here on these pages. But sometimes I need a break from paying attention. And I’ll tell you what — it’s felt great to not worry about this blog for a few weeks. If you missed me, sorry. If you didn’t, well, I didn’t miss you either. I honestly didn’t. (See what I mean about the bile?)

Anyway, one way to rejuvenate my interest in updating this thing would be to follow-up on a long-standing initiative that’s been languishing on the road to ruin since mid summer. With Thanksgiving coming, it seems a good time to pick it up again and make something of it. It’s called the Favorite Picture Project.

Back in early August I sent an email to family and friends that read:

Dear Friend,
If you’ve taken a picture within the last year that you love, and feel like sharing it, please email it to me. Anything at all. I want to compile such favorite pictures from a whole slew of different people and put them together in a blog post. You’ll receive credit and I’ll let you know when it goes up.
Love, David

The intention was to collect these pictures and make one massive blog entry that presented the pictures in a collage of the world as viewed through my loved-ones’ eyes. Well, they say that when God doesn’t answer your prayers he actually is answering, with a big ol’ “No.” And my friends and family responded in fewer numbers than I really needed in order to present the massive world-through-my-loved-ones’-eyes collage. I don’t blame anyone, of course — I mean, we’re all busy and frankly, most of us don’t really take any single picture that’s worthy of sending to anyone as a favorite. But let me tell you, the baker’s dozen of people who did send me pictures really came through with flying colors.

So the modified version of this project will be to present each picture individually, with a bit of writing about it or about the person; each as it’s own entry. The first edition of this project is coming up next. I hope you love these pictures as much as I do… Stay tuned….