The Killing Floor

Time Capsule: An Invisible Rope

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


No saben el camino
[Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828), 1810-20
Etching, drypoint, burin and burnisher on wove paper, 19 x 15 cm;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]

An Invisible Rope

I saw daybreak. Sun limned the massive cloudbank, a nimbus one could read good tidings into for the upcoming holiday season, & true, mass media kept harping on the optimism we should all collectively feel about the rise of retail sales in-store & online. Already disassociating myself from that propaganda, continued down through the center of town, where daybreak hadn’t broken yet, & two lines lined up practically, but not quite perpendicular to one another on either side of Preble Street. As expected, those against the soup kitchen wall extended along the sidewalk past the service entrance. At least I could see their faces. But on the other side, three-times as long a line swung away from the massive building kept daybreak at bay & temperatures below freezing at 190 Lancaster. (Damn, when I swung around on Cumberland, a third line appeared on Elm in front of Labor Ready, an enterprise with a billion dollar a year in “sales” of temporary “help.”) Talk about underbelly of America. All three lines got to me. Hollowing out the holidays even more than innate skepticism about good will toward men at this Time of year. But it was the snaky line wending its way away from Refugee Services brought up the image Goya etched, No saben el camino (They don’t know the way), picturing an abject group of people all tethered with a rope around their necks, staggering together. This group didn’t move. Doors wouldn’t open for another two hours. There was an invisible rope, however, visible.

FURTHER STUDY
Labor Ready
Sudanese Refugees Find New Home in Maine

Click to play

Hometown Haterade

Dear Masachusetts townies who constantly dis my hometown,

How's that Haterade taste?

"The Level 1 rating puts the school in the same category as high schools in some of the wealthiest communities in Massachusetts, including Weston, Dover-Sherborn and Newton...

"'Where they are today is probably more than remarkable,' said Brockton Deputy Superintendent John Jerome. 'Your surrounding towns don’t have Level 1 schools at the high school level.'”

This story is particularly satisfying to me because before principal Susan Szachowicz and former Associate Principal Maria LeFort were national figures in grassroots education reform they were the two teachers who made me realize myself. When they talk about "personal[izing] the educational experience of every student" they're not just talking academic bullshit.

I was a recipient of this approach in each of their classrooms, at different times being coaxed, prodded, coddled and challenged out of my quixotic fog of adolescent apathy and arrogance. It makes perfect sense to me now that, once given the keys to the whole school, they could work that magic on a population of 4,000+ kids. It doesn't, however, take away any of my beaming pride or gratitude.

Boston Street Gang, 1916

(via Dirty Old Boston)

Was I born on the wrong end of the 20th Century or what?

How High Can It Go? Harlow Can You Go?

Alas, nobody won tonight's $325M Powerball drawing; we're all as broke as we ever were.

Whatever, man. ¡Bailamos!

 

Time Capsule: Saturday In November + So, What Lasts?

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Saturday in November

“Frost,” she said, entering the cold kitchen, while I one eye closed barefoot, set up the coffee. First things first. By the time I looked sun erased thin water crystals would have been dew months back. But because of the tone of voice saying, “Frost,” & what’s there in proximity between us, both eyes open, saw what she saw.

Mail arrives, nothing but junk. I stand there beyond the letter slot where paper fell. Stare up at the wall at a loss. But there are the red prayer peas stuck in the mud of the mask from Mali. They’re poisonous, keeping evil spirits at bay. White cowry shells, the opposite. Now the mask stands in for lack of correspondence, corresponding.

Look at the wind. That’s what I love to do on a Saturday morning in November. All leaves charged. Shadows shimmering. Even squirrel fur ruffled. Not the great Tranströmer “luster of precious furs,” but all-encompassing world-spinning eye-pleasing, nevertheless.

By afternoon she ran into the bank, while I shut the car off; drawn by the warm red light penetrating brick of the building, got out, & just leaned against it. Keeping one eye & decent distance away from the big fat fly with the same idea.

Outside the supermarket it was difficult who to toss more useless pity at, plenty of contenders as that earlier sun against brick wall of the bank began to wane & the homeless guy with knapsack constructed for a teenager buttoned up his parka with darkness just around the corner on his mind. Neck & neck with the worried old girl nearing eighty in wool skirt, long socks, & green bag of returnable plastic bottles tossed into the backseat of her compact brandishing “Just Me” vanity license plates.

Night fell down hard here well before 5:00 P.M., memorably, in November. We gave thanks for the meal: baked potatoes, red beans, & sautéed dandelion greens.

So, What Lasts?

So, what lasts? Don’t ask me exactly where that massive interrogative emerged from, whether internally, Death lurking in the low register of organs, or vast depths of the surprising calm sea on one side out there next to me, or late-afternoon sun carving unseen before shadows into ledge rock on the other side. Not necessarily an Eschatological question either. I want to say those moments lived so fully as to imagine blood expanding Time. Things that last within cell & experience, body & life lived. I’ll say it. Final, round, setting sun burning itself into rectangular windows of cottages in distant offshore islands, afire. Green sea deep green green of the hull of Atlantic Livadia stretched out docked at the tank farm, now just south of Barrington, Nova Scotia, still carrying imagination forth, part of the sea, & of me. The salt air lasts here, breathing the moment in in word. For starters.

FURTHER STUDY:

Atlantic Livadia

DJ Green Street Called Into Action

I have been given a challenge.

A few months ago my ladyfriend took a position teaching high school art in Lawrence, MA, an always rough-and-tumble, now post-industrial city that Dominicanos have taken as their own (or were they forced there? That's a conversation for another day.). This evening she told me that tomorrow was a half-day of school before Thanksgiving break, and that it will consist almost entirely of a party.

And what is a Dominican party without music?

The challenge: Make a mix of bachata, merengue, reggaeton, cumbia, hip-hop and R&B that a) is public school-appropriate, and b) the kids will like...in one night. I've never curated music for people half my age...who I've never met...who come from a completely different culture...with the restriction of being PG-rated. To win, I think I have to stop worrying about the music being racy and connect with the kids. Hope the old folks don't mind.

I've gotta come up with about three hours of music, but I know these will be among them:

 

Time Capsule: Talk Is Love

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Talk is Love

I’m a talker. There are times I get great pleasure from it. Granted I’d rather write, than talk. Might even prefer to read than talk, but I’m a talker, nonetheless. Since I live in the moment, just recalled wanting to write to the extent I almost forgot how to talk. Ask my first wife. It was rough. On both of us. That minor revelation is surely not the direction I planned to go, although I rarely plan which way to go in life, & not at all in writing. But my favorite talk, my stories, experiences, Hell, it’s certainly not discourse toward solving problems, those logical progressions. No. So, seriously, I get this urge. Urge in life sometimes simulcasts with urge to write. I get this urge to head to a pub named after the nickname of the great American director from Portland, John Ford, Bull Feeney’s. He played football. You can discount plenty of his nostalgia, but can’t for a moment diminish his shots set in Monument Valley. (Ingmar Bergman said Ford hated islands.) I’m the third man in just after 11:30 A.M. opening, order a Guinness (in Ireland I’d order one at 11:00 sharp, but this is America, after all) & ask the Maitre D’ & bartender to rustle up a couple of Irish scones in lieu of the fact that my wife can’t join me here, I’ll tote them home. New Maitre D’ & bartender, the turnover here is brutal, wondered how much to ask. I said they usually just give them to us. There is no price for scones on the menu at Bull Feeney’s. Free-scone Feeney’s. Open my book a lot faster than Guinness gets poured. Which is Good. Page 41 of Kerouac, the Word and the Way by Ben Giamo. Should I break for a paragraph here? Or just keep rolling, ‘cause the scroll version of On the Road is the sacred version of the BOOK, not Malcolm Cowley’s however-many-more-I-don’t-give-a-damn-could-have-saved-Jack’s-life-publishing-it-earlier YEARS!! Giamo refers to the fourth & last Time the prophet appears in the book, page 306, whispering Go moan for man. Makes you weep. Not into my beer, believe me. I’m here for one. Scones arrive hot just out of the oven. So what the author adds is that the prophet’s hep-cat line aligns with the old belief that man’s constant lot is suffering. In Joyce territory here I’m feeling a certain epiphanic moment, whereupon, if I want to address the act of writing as ecstatic, that great 14th century origin of the word frenzy fearful excited, or earlier Greek displacement, or from sta, to stand & leap from that position, or dance, then what is the foundation of that stance to leap from, but suffering? Oh, go write, & moan for man. Ask the bartender if she’s from Ireland, no, but her mother was a Lollar, spelled differently from their Loller relatives, who were Protestant. Tell her it must have been rough all those years, when religion held such a tight grip, & that I was there in Ireland, when the last four Blanket Men [Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, Michael Devine] died starving themselves to death in H-Block, Maze Prison. She had no idea what I was talking about. You know, Bobby Sands was their leader & first to use a hunger strike as political weapon to get the British out. News to her. Only there for three weeks in 1981, when the last four of ten martyrs died. They are the reason the British left. I went on a bit about being there after writing a play on the life & work of William Butler Yeats, but that I really wanted to write one about the Blanket Men, having met a guy our Irish friends introduced us to, then recently let out of H-Block, that first-hand handshake, talk & recognition. You still can, she said. No, too far away from it by now. Couldn’t wait to drive home with the scones, & retell Kathleen all about it.

FURTHER STUDY
John Ford's Monument

Pretending to Be a Princess is Fun...

...but it is definitely not a career.

It's great to see Sesame Street getting back to its roots. Listen for the brief moments when Sotomayor's Nuyorican accent slips out.

 

Let the Mystery Be

Spent the night in the grips of the magician Iris DeMent. What would we do without art? Let the mystery be.

When "We Don't Like Your Kind" Becomes a Problem

Paul Waldman sure got to his point in yesterday's article, When "We Don't Like Your Kind" Becomes a Problem:

"...[T]he truth is that Republicans have been experts at division for a long time. Much of their appeal, at one level or another, has been 'We don't like those kind of people.' Sometimes it's welfare recipients, sometimes it's undocumented immigrants, sometimes it's people who come from big cities or have too much education or enjoy a coffee drink made with espresso and steamed milk. They've been very good for a very long time at telling voters, 'We're just like you, because we both hate those people over there.'"

Of course, this is the topical territory where the false equivalence rears its ignorant ass, when people like me who spit venom back at these hateful pricks get accused of being just as bad. As if it's just as bad to defend yourself against the bully as it is for him to beat you up. Doesn't anyone in Washington remember the rules of the schoolyard?

Time Capsule: Plot Marks A Geographical Point + Mercy On

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Plot Marks a Geographical Point

It seemed late in the year, & cold, for the small white moth fluttering around stalks & skeletal remains of Queen Anne’s Lace, but then the milkweed spore trailed it trying to imitate it? Suddenly made sense. Day of the Dead, after all. Souls up from underground manifesting themselves corporeally in any way they could.

That’s where Time was when the clocks got turned back an hour: housed inside the body making every second count, not counting every second, no, not that. But at prolonged ease.

Three-hundred-million leaves from massive oaks on all three backyard sides, plus three maples out front can’t defeat us. She raked swept shoveled all of them up as if cleaning lint off the living room floor. We should really let it all go to peat like the brick of it my grandfather’s last sister made sure I added (a ritual) to the kitchen stove back there in Redford, Ballyhaunis, Mayo, Ireland. They also gave me those iron fireplace tongs I dug up from the foundation of grandfather’s birthplace in ruins.

So that plot in writing marks a geographical point where character stays, or turns away from stasis, or stance, in ecstasy, say, or dance.

Starriest of starry nights since the southern tip of Ireland itself, when I got up in the middle of it to check my email. Distance didn’t end there with them either. Soon dream after dream took me to other & otherworldly worlds. A fish appeared with feathers. Sex in a corner room, violence on the water. A newborn suckled by a surrogate mother named Deodora. Present within a gathering of musicians, (both jazz & marching bands), I tried to look up the word “frostbite,” but the only two dictionaries in the library setting I could locate: Dictionary of Christianity & the Real Estate Dictionary. Today, I pinpoint the Soul, internally, at the same 43-degree latitude Florence & Portland share.

Out there on my own today, it seemed I went too far, when temps neared freezing at the edge of Casco Bay. Thought of Belgrade in terms of once having gone too far, literally left out in the cold, wondering how to get home, or at least over the Adriatic to Venice. Then two years ago, crawling on the roof clearing gutters for the winter, ice burning knees to blister pitch. Death must measure distance as much as mercury the cold.

I sidle up now to Venice Radio, vivid memories traveling back to dark alleys, glistening canals, as if it were, then at twenty, initial redemption from both death & cold.

Mercy On

In one sense I just want to jot this down (it is pleasurable to begin to write most anything at this stage in life: postcard, email, journal entry, marginal note) along with others taken in preparation for the talk in Denmark, Kerouac & the Ecstatic Act of Writing. (I mean one such bit of research late last night before hitting the sack brought in D. H. Lawrence saying the Soul needs stand on the ground “among the potsherds.”) So these two dreams, one after another seem relevant. Away from home in a strange bed, maybe the sense of travel partly instigated the appearance of a book with Kerouac’s profile on the cover. You know how a dream needn’t be explicit in imagery, voice, or lettering to intuitively take in all at once the rush of interpretive meaning, for although what showed up there in the dream: book, profile photograph of the author, & title, what I assumed, there & then, was a book from a lost manuscript recently rediscovered in some archive, & that the title printed on the deep maroon cover, Mercy On, was a collection of sea tales Kerouac kept during his merchant marine days, & crazily I suppose, there was a ship named Mercy. But, of course, upon waking one begins to wonder who had, or what Fate rendered such Mercy, & on whom? In the next dream two fantastic butterflies appeared in rapid succession: the first in the shape of the Tiger Swallowtail I saw most recently, a month ago, fly out of a bride’s shoulder while speaking during an outdoor wedding ceremony, translucent with purple tinge; the second, huge, otherworldly, blue, orange, & black with added three-dimensional circular filaments continuously rising above the wings flew behind me, then felt it cling to my head, whereupon I asked Kathleen to take a picture with her cell phone, even though already picturing it there from a third-person perspective.

FURTHER STUDY:

Milkweed spores

"Pool Table Ladies Invited"

(via Dirty Old Boston)

Boy do I miss this place.

It truly lived up to the hype of its exterior (pool table ladies invited). It was so small that I couldn't stand upright and they used sawed-off pool cues. There was no shot at getting a decent beer or liquor, but you could have had all the heroin you wanted.

Yet another victim of Boston gentrification.

To Tell the Truth, but Not the Whole Truth

Conor Friedersdorf, as usual, was spot on when he wrote:

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

But guess what?

You haven't just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

I just wish he took it that one truth-telling step further. Yes, Conservative Media is living in a batshit bubble and yes, the Main Stream Media had a number of reality-based data driven analysts. But what you saw, heard and read in a lot of MSM coverage was taking these two sides and presenting them as having equivalent worth, when one is clearly divorced from reality while the other is just partisan.

Since we can't change the conspiracy theorists and propagandists, we should at least be holding the allegedly legitimate media responsible for calling the crazies on their bullshit.

The Drum Major Instinct

A little context for today:

 

Real America

Go vote.

"Republicans are for Black Americans"

BWWAAAAAAHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

The "Empowered Citizens Network" even used stock footage of black folk. They couldn't find any in real life?

Newt Gingrich knows where to find them, and what to tell them.

 

Time Capsule: Mapping The Labyrinth + Ending The Conversation

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

Girl with a Red Hat
[Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675), 1665-66
oil on panel, 23.2 × 18.1 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC]

Mapping the Labyrinth

In a park with groups of people in front of me lounging in the sun. Behind me, a long, steep, stone staircase at first empty, but then a woman appears, descending. She bypasses me heading toward another man, who’d been playing soccer in the field. I walk left, where a path outside turns into a long underground corridor with candles on the walls lighting the way. At one point the candles remain unlit. I light one after another with matches from a matchbook. My last match fails to light the last candle. A young boy enters through an adjacent door, reaches up to light the candle. I wake up. In the next dream state a woman similar to the one previously descending, but not the same, walks by twice in opposite directions making me wonder? Why? Suddenly, she appears with others assembled on the street in what appears a march, or parade, or protest, & there at the other end of the front line is her twin: solving the riddle. I get the feeling they’ll head toward a nearby building, where if I can hold the door open I’ll get a better look at the strawberry blonde twins. Already a doorman there, I enter the building, past a number of rooms, workers, hoping they won’t confront me before I can find a way out. I reach an exit only to find the path that initially led to the underground corridor.

Ending the Conversation

She phoned from Florida, ending the conversation with, “Sweet Dreams.” Snow covered the balustrade.

Sun cut through fog, barely. I saw it for a minute. More important: infant mullein stalk & tiny yellow flower looking up, claiming sun’s paternity.

Tried balancing her on one shoulder & an arm in the dream, but she toppled off the bed. When I woke, she didn’t have those long white pants on I got close to with my eyes & nose in the dream, but less.

So much activity after the hurricane blew past: three five seven chickadees happily zig-zagging in the maple.

On my walk on All Hallow’s Eve, thought I saw seven crows flying East, the ancient Orient believed a Good Sign. No dismay in my gaze, however, when the lead bird turned out a hawk hassled relentlessly, all suddenly going North.

It’s not like I prayed for rain to keep the kids away from our door on Halloween, but it did early on. Then sun shone through the backroom windows. Little devils.

One such hallowed night at my cousin’s cabin, after dropping hallucinogens into bottles of wine, Rick tossed an “All-Nighter” log of cherry into the fireplace. Colors began to transcend even Vermeer’s palette that day in 1974, when we first saw Girl with a Red Hat, East Wing at that Time still just a hole in the ground. Or the Hellish conflagration in the background of Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, which the museum borrowed from Lisbon for the exhibit Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration in 1992, when I worked there.

After coffee in the morning on the Day of the Innocents, she got up to do her practice in the attic. Just before her return downstairs, I watched credits & title for a dream film called simply, Desire.

FURTHER STUDY:

All Saints' Day
Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration
Temptation of Saint Anthony in visual arts