Friday, August 27, 2010

Hotsy Totsy

A rotund but demean figure from Long Island. Once hotsy-totsy New York artist on pilgrimage to Zen, but now a subservient figurine on the trophy mantle of time. How to salvage an aging vulgar carcass, revitalizing a zombie into a tomorrow of vital todays? 

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Sunset on a sizzling Nihon


I listen to Christopher Hitchens' "The Portable Atheist"  though I wish this recording had been read by the author. His biting wit and sarcastic Cambridge lilt compliments his enthusiastic embittered atheism. I love the depth and breath of his criticism and find him an angel of rational argumentation, an artist of divisiveness. I envy the voluminous tomes of quotable details he carries on his shoulders... And find the perfect tone of the audio artist that reads his text, Nicholas Ball, a misguided use of narrative perfection. Hitchens is best read by Hitchens.

Dame if Hitchens isn't the kind of mental athlete I wish I were. Instead I am a cerebral hooligan, a vandal spraying verbiage on dirty walls, to impress the street urchins I run with, a suburban ghetto of wannabes. A couch potato cliche of armchair quarterbacking ego-grandized causes, in a game that doesn't matter.

Nobody should care what I think, and when they do, I loath my unpracticed goal attempts at conceptual clarity. If I were captain I'd bench my mouth. Fortunately, athleticism is magically attuned to evolutionary theory. I fade now as I speak, a dinosaur of impractical ego dimensions.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Wuthering Heights



Wuthering Heights (1939) reminds of the romantic values that cast the shape of our present. I hide in the air-conditioned cocoon, of computer, oral gratitudes, and the delusional state of constant news.


In news today, via Fareed Zakaria and Riz Khan, I am presented the economic reality, seasoned with the moral tale 'to be thankful for still owning my own home, and having a job.' Our international statistical reality is the USA, despite all its present hand-ringing, is still chief dog, among the mongrel leaders of Japan, India, and China, and I, having never appropriately established myself within the American dream, live in limbo under the Sword of Damocles. 


For Cicero this legend suggested that virtue is sufficient for living a happy life. "Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person, over whom some fear always looms?" Yet in my case, fear laughs as I cower. Fear of ill-health and inevitable death, a coward left unarmed, on the gates of my own persistence. My own insistence that this is who I am.