Both Sides Now

The Judy Collins cover is touching, but shrinks in comparison to Joni
Mitchell's own version. It's a useful comparison for revealing
something commercial and calculated for mass appeal (and now dated and
tacky sounding) in the former, and the totally original and
spellbinding utterance of the latter (by the composer herself), which
really is timeless. The Collins version does move you, but in a
sapping surrendering kind of way, unlike the charge you get from the
original.

the physics of wealth

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paranoia x 2

A couple whose spasms of paranoia were cyclical, and woe betides he who
crosses their path when both husband and wife's cycles coincided in a
wall of paranoia and vituperation unbreachable by mere mortals.

mediocrity

active contempt for it is to enter its vortex. mediocrity is the dark
flipside of self-love, parasitic on it. it's a craving, this contempt
and it makes you into somewhat less of an original human being. It's
subtle, and you may never realize that your predominant activity is to
scrape the sides of the well with your claws as you fall.

turning off the radio

the voice grows urgent and fast every time your hand comes near to the
knob.

the father

frustrated by time running out and knowing his son won't know til after
he's gone how irreplaceable that time was...
such an immensity of time.
we here for so little of it.

Lottery/Fortune Cooke

<fontfamily><param>Times New Roman</param><bigger><bigger>FROM
NYTIMES:Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud: how could 110
players in the March 30 drawing get five of the six numbers right?
That made them all second-prize winners, and considering the number of
tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should
have been only four or five.

But from state after state they kept coming in, the
one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, 39.

It took some time before they had their answer: the players got their
numbers inside fortune cookies, and all the cookies came from the same
factory in Long Island City, Queens.

Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery
Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began
at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.

The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each,
depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19
million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a
$25 million reserve for odd situations.)

Of course, it could have been worse. The 110 had picked the wrong
sixth number - 40, not 42 - and would have been first-place winners if
they did.

"We didn't sleep a lot that night," Mr. Strutt said. "Is there someone
trying to cheat the system?"

He added: "We had to look at everything to do with humans: television
shows, pattern plays, lottery columns."

Earlier that month, an ABC television show, "Lost," included a
sequence of winning lottery numbers. The combination didn't match the
Powerball numbers, though hundreds of people had played it: 4, 8, 15,
16, 23 and 42. Numbers on a Powerball ticket in a recent episode of a
soap opera, "The Young and the Restless," didn't match, either. Nor
did the winning numbers form a pattern on the lottery grid, like a
cross or a diagonal. Then the winners started arriving at lottery
offices.

"Our first winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie," said
Rebecca Paul, chief executive of the Tennessee Lottery. "The second
winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie. The third winner came
in and said it was a fortune cookie."

Investigators visited dozens of Chinese restaurants, takeouts and
buffets. Then they called fortune cookie distributors and learned that
many different brands of fortune cookies come from the same Long
Island City factory, which is owned by Wonton Food and churns out four
million a day.

"That's ours," said Derrick Wong, of Wonton Food, when shown a
picture of a winner's cookie slip. "That's very nice, 110 people won
the lottery from the numbers."

The same number combinations go out in thousands of cookies a day. The
workers put numbers in a bowl and pick them. "We are not going to do
the bowl anymore; we are going to have a computer," Mr. Wong said.
"It's more efficient."</bigger></bigger></fontfamily>

if you're burning to teach someone something

consider indirection. Finding a book at a used bookstore, your own
rare find, is a species of this. The dislocation of time and oblivion
enabling your discovery is a kind of indirection. The writer wrote it
in hot haste, but you were more receptive once that haste had cooled.

This has something to do too with poetry, and my agreement with Stevens' formulation that it must "resist the intelligence, almost successfully."

Product Placement

As works of art become product placements, the effect of diminishing
resources and corporate dominance which emphasizes its own survival,
therefore prodding the survival instinct in people, stifles even the
ambition to look beyond onesself, to place onesself in the universe,
to wonder. A corporation never inspired a person to do anything.
Except in the sense of negative inspiration, as a lightning rod for
protest. But since the 60s corporations have long recognized this,
and coopted the protest by borrowing its trappings, aestheticizing it,
mainstreaming it and therefore marginalizing it. They have quite successfully folded protest, environmentalism etc into realm of consumerism and the consummate infantilization the individual human being.

It must be recognized that corporations are here to stay as our civilization now
cannot work without them. It is a question of changing the cultural,
perhaps with the model of a corporation that survives by appealing to
an awareness of the need for coexistence, and that this race to the
bottom will only in end in our destruction. It's a matter of creating
an emblem in a corporation that makes the typical corporation of today
look bad. And moreover, one that thrives economically. Is this
possible...

Covers

On the one hand thinking that musicians who play covers of say, Bob
Dylan, in the subway are pathetic. On the other, perceiving that it's
pathetic to not recognize something of value, which they are doing.
It's a kind of piety. And then thinking, a priest or minister is in a
sense doing the same thing: a cover.

an artist should never complain

ever. & above all not about the state of the world. that's a given,
and the task at hand. to disclose that is a capitulation.

He thought I quit

I didn't resign. I re-signed!!!

what did I do?

I stopped a seal hunt.

They had another.

I fought for clean air.

The government lawed that away.

Resentment choked me to death.Skia

death, the last novelty

bedroom talk

"I can see your mushroom cap"

"I guess I'm wearing briefs..."

Skia

eager to communicate

"I leap to the general. I want to include, include, include!
I hardly know you and I'm talking about the cosmos. I know
I'm a fool, I should show restraint. But there's so little time."

He was endearing.

Mothers write their signatures on their daughters' heads

Scenes of Annoyance Part I - The Pizza Ghoul

Man munching pizza at Smiling about 1am. Stood there, jaws working in rhythm, getting through it.
Pocked marked folds and waxy features. No sooner finished and licked fingers than superciliously pointed and nodded at the pepperoni slices. Guy behind the counter picked went for one. "No, the other one, yes, yes THAT one" Smile of smugness, satisfaction. A vision of ugliness such as I have never seen. It was as if he would go on putting away slices like that forever--the eternity of self-serving, murderous, craving.