Elisa, singing at Martha Hubert/Thom Burnham's Spring Equinox Party:
...and singing later at Home of Truth, Alameda:
....Out of focus, other faces appear -- distortions, fictions, of course, even if the photos were not altered....
Sunday, April 01, 2007
ELISA M. WELCH, WONDERFUL SINGER
Elisa M. Welch is a wonderful singer, entertainer, songwriter. To buy her CD and learn more about her, visit www.art.net/elisa
Elisa, singing at Martha Hubert/Thom Burnham's Spring Equinox Party:
...and singing later at Home of Truth, Alameda:
....Out of focus, other faces appear -- distortions, fictions, of course, even if the photos were not altered....
Elisa, singing at Martha Hubert/Thom Burnham's Spring Equinox Party:
...and singing later at Home of Truth, Alameda:
....Out of focus, other faces appear -- distortions, fictions, of course, even if the photos were not altered....
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
My Obscene Gestures
My friend Fred Goldsmith needed a variety of faces and moods for the poster he was creating for a commendable event, bridging the HIV-Positive/HIV-Negative gulf in the Gay community, and why did he think I would be a perfect model for Mr. Hostility?
In the same issue of the Bay Times where this ad appeared, another model for his ad, Emil Friend (the left hand guy in lower right photo), wrote a wonderful article on the subject, "Divided or United: Can We Move Beyond Poz/Neg?"
In the same issue (22 March 2007), the Bay Times published my letter in reaction to General Pace's stupid comments on gays serving in the military, adding a title "Message for Peace":
Thank you, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for hating homosexuals. Please go a step further and forbid homosexuals, even those who “don’t tell,” from serving in the military. True, there are plenty of gay men in love with uniforms, plenty addicted to pain and violence, but if they are forbidden to serve they might succumb to the influence of what I hope is the nature of the greater number of gay men a dedication, stronger than any warrior’s pledge, to beauty, love, and peace. If there must be warriors, let them be heterosexuals. (Of course, I know I am talking a pipe dream, as gay and lesbian people are diverse as any other people who are grouped as a category under a label.) “Make Love, Not War” was first chanted at an early pre-Stonewall gay demonstration in San Francisco as a declaration of the attitude of gay people that, contrary to being sick or immoral, is an attitude that is the only hope for the future. (I hope Krishnamurti was gay.) I suppose it is difficult, General Pace, not to have feared homosexuality growing up with a name like Peter Pace, trying not to avoid the idea that you are in the military because you feel you must keep pace with the peters of other aggressive males. But try this, General: Give your last name the Italian pronunciation and meaning – Pace -- “Peace.” But, no, I suppose you will go on living with a stick up your ass. How perverse.
In the same issue of the Bay Times where this ad appeared, another model for his ad, Emil Friend (the left hand guy in lower right photo), wrote a wonderful article on the subject, "Divided or United: Can We Move Beyond Poz/Neg?" In the same issue (22 March 2007), the Bay Times published my letter in reaction to General Pace's stupid comments on gays serving in the military, adding a title "Message for Peace":
Thank you, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for hating homosexuals. Please go a step further and forbid homosexuals, even those who “don’t tell,” from serving in the military. True, there are plenty of gay men in love with uniforms, plenty addicted to pain and violence, but if they are forbidden to serve they might succumb to the influence of what I hope is the nature of the greater number of gay men a dedication, stronger than any warrior’s pledge, to beauty, love, and peace. If there must be warriors, let them be heterosexuals. (Of course, I know I am talking a pipe dream, as gay and lesbian people are diverse as any other people who are grouped as a category under a label.) “Make Love, Not War” was first chanted at an early pre-Stonewall gay demonstration in San Francisco as a declaration of the attitude of gay people that, contrary to being sick or immoral, is an attitude that is the only hope for the future. (I hope Krishnamurti was gay.) I suppose it is difficult, General Pace, not to have feared homosexuality growing up with a name like Peter Pace, trying not to avoid the idea that you are in the military because you feel you must keep pace with the peters of other aggressive males. But try this, General: Give your last name the Italian pronunciation and meaning – Pace -- “Peace.” But, no, I suppose you will go on living with a stick up your ass. How perverse.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
18 March 2007
San Francisco's current Poet Laureate, Jack Hirschman, selling papers at the Demonstration against American occupation of Iraq:
A wonderful impromptu band of about 12 people played "We Shall Overcome."
The Gang -- Remember to click on the photo if you want to enlarge and look at these folks individually:
A wonderful impromptu band of about 12 people played "We Shall Overcome."
The Gang -- Remember to click on the photo if you want to enlarge and look at these folks individually:
Friday, March 16, 2007
Bye Bye Betty Hutton
There are some few who will note the passing of Betty Hutton. During World War II, for the zany energy-driven child who loved to stage wild singing and dancing Broadway shows with his friends in a living room, Betty Hutton (“The Day His Rocking Horse Ran Away”) was the perfect model.** She had jitterbug in her veins as she danced and sang her frenetic novelty songs. [From my period (the poor man's Andy Warhol) of primitive color xerox collages, with further changes in Photoshop:]
Everyone was singing sad songs of loss, about separation from their doughboys, or they were hooked into the kind of speed that Betty Hutton personified, an energy that hoped to leap away from the terrible, drudging reality of World War II.
Those of us who remember this musical star fondly share that vice with the philosopher Wittgenstein, although Clive James insults us all: “In English, Wittgenstein devoured pulp fiction and worshipped Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton, two of the most off-putting stars ever to burden Hollywood. This kind of slumming – which is anyway quite common among people who do intellectual work at high intensity – tends to obscure the profundity of his culture.” Although Mr. James' pretensions are silly, it is certainly true that nonsense, especially when sung at tongue-twisting speed, is, paradoxically, the best vacation for someone who is normally dissecting and analyzing language down to the letter.
The obituaries say that Betty Hutton “brought a brassy vitality to Hollywood musicals” (with absurd plots, often set unrealistically against World War II – I suppose only those with a childhood connection will feel any nostalgia about Betty Hutton, although on the few occasions when she sang softly, she sang ballads affectingly.) Ms. Hutton is also in a “classic,” the 1944 Preston Sturges satire, “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” that “rattled the censors with the story of a young woman who gets pregnant and can’t quite remember who the father is.”
Like many other “stars” of the era, Ms. Hutton fell from the heights to the depths, discovered later as the cook in the church where she had converted to Roman Catholicsm – where she also taught acting – after a dark period of bankruptcy, alcohol and substance abuse, attempted suicide, and a nervous breakdown.
**I doubt if anyone who read this Betty Hutton piece on my blog will want to see filmstrips of her singing, but my friend Willie, has kindly put two on his blog http://sfwillie.blogspot.com -- something I ought to know how to do myself. If nothing else, you can sample Willie's blog. You might also see why those of us who were children before THE ELECTRIC COMPANY might have liked her zany energy.
For that few who rememember this woman (a person who MUST have suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder and whose act would have never happened if she had been given Ritalin!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Hutton
Everyone was singing sad songs of loss, about separation from their doughboys, or they were hooked into the kind of speed that Betty Hutton personified, an energy that hoped to leap away from the terrible, drudging reality of World War II. Those of us who remember this musical star fondly share that vice with the philosopher Wittgenstein, although Clive James insults us all: “In English, Wittgenstein devoured pulp fiction and worshipped Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton, two of the most off-putting stars ever to burden Hollywood. This kind of slumming – which is anyway quite common among people who do intellectual work at high intensity – tends to obscure the profundity of his culture.” Although Mr. James' pretensions are silly, it is certainly true that nonsense, especially when sung at tongue-twisting speed, is, paradoxically, the best vacation for someone who is normally dissecting and analyzing language down to the letter.
The obituaries say that Betty Hutton “brought a brassy vitality to Hollywood musicals” (with absurd plots, often set unrealistically against World War II – I suppose only those with a childhood connection will feel any nostalgia about Betty Hutton, although on the few occasions when she sang softly, she sang ballads affectingly.) Ms. Hutton is also in a “classic,” the 1944 Preston Sturges satire, “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” that “rattled the censors with the story of a young woman who gets pregnant and can’t quite remember who the father is.”
Like many other “stars” of the era, Ms. Hutton fell from the heights to the depths, discovered later as the cook in the church where she had converted to Roman Catholicsm – where she also taught acting – after a dark period of bankruptcy, alcohol and substance abuse, attempted suicide, and a nervous breakdown.
**I doubt if anyone who read this Betty Hutton piece on my blog will want to see filmstrips of her singing, but my friend Willie, has kindly put two on his blog http://sfwillie.blogspot.com -- something I ought to know how to do myself. If nothing else, you can sample Willie's blog. You might also see why those of us who were children before THE ELECTRIC COMPANY might have liked her zany energy.
For that few who rememember this woman (a person who MUST have suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder and whose act would have never happened if she had been given Ritalin!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Hutton
Quetzalcoatl on 24th Street
The gates to the renovated playground on 24th Street, near York, are often closed, and I wish I had taken better advantage of an open gate this last week to take more photographs. The old murals have been brightened. Here is the wonderful new Quetzalcoatl (plumed bird-serpent) moving in an out of the earth there. 
I do not know the names yet of those who recreated the old playground, but they certainly portray the preoccupied writer well! I will let the builders and architects judge this portrayal of them:
And the tail end...
Sunday, March 11, 2007
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Confront Evangelicals' "Battle Cry"
The real point is that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were NOT confrontational at the demonstration addressing this year's gathering of Battle Cry where Christian youth gather in the ball park -- one stop in Battle Cry's never-ending circuit through the nation.
I think we are all coming to realize that with this organization the real confrontation needs to be with the children's manipulators who are undoubtedly making an immense profit.
I described to some people last year's mind-blowing and bizarre confrontation with the young people, some of them really children, whom their manipulators had convinced that they would be facing the demons of hell -- that is, us folks.
The children facing us from the steps of City Hall cowered together,
clutched each other, and wept in terror! (There was only curiosity, not fear, I hope, in the local children pictured here.) True, we San Franciscans are a motley crew, and there were the usual variety of bizarre costumes and behavior,
and a good dose of cold political jades, but it was no fun frightening children.
Some of the Sisters were there last year, but, faced with these bullied children whose vision had been so distorted, they could not play their satirical roles. Battle Cry seems next stage in that brainwashing revealed in the recent documentary JESUS CAMP. On the one hand, bound to tolerance ourselves, or indifference, let Christians are free to do their own thing. On the other hand, we cannot ignore that the children are being taught hatred and intolerance of others, and I am glad that the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, while diplomatic, let them know they are tolerated but not endorsed.
LEFT: Singer, Finian Makepeace. RIGHT: Free Thinker.
Some of the speakers presented good analyses of the poison Battle Cry spreads, and the psychic damage they cause, leading some to suicide.
SPEAKER: HOWARD WALLACE, WHOSE WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN DEVOTED TO PROGRESSIVE WORK:
But the Sisters were most eloquent, saying: Last year you got us to play your game of fear and threats. But while you teach intolerance, San Franciso represents tolerance and love. Go out and experience the love in the City of San Francisco.
I hope everyone knows how much money the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence raise for charity, bringing a light-hearted touch and merciful attitude to events and organizations involved with sobering challenges.
I think we are all coming to realize that with this organization the real confrontation needs to be with the children's manipulators who are undoubtedly making an immense profit.
I described to some people last year's mind-blowing and bizarre confrontation with the young people, some of them really children, whom their manipulators had convinced that they would be facing the demons of hell -- that is, us folks. 
The children facing us from the steps of City Hall cowered together,clutched each other, and wept in terror! (There was only curiosity, not fear, I hope, in the local children pictured here.) True, we San Franciscans are a motley crew, and there were the usual variety of bizarre costumes and behavior,
and a good dose of cold political jades, but it was no fun frightening children.
Some of the Sisters were there last year, but, faced with these bullied children whose vision had been so distorted, they could not play their satirical roles. Battle Cry seems next stage in that brainwashing revealed in the recent documentary JESUS CAMP. On the one hand, bound to tolerance ourselves, or indifference, let Christians are free to do their own thing. On the other hand, we cannot ignore that the children are being taught hatred and intolerance of others, and I am glad that the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, while diplomatic, let them know they are tolerated but not endorsed.
LEFT: Singer, Finian Makepeace. RIGHT: Free Thinker.
Some of the speakers presented good analyses of the poison Battle Cry spreads, and the psychic damage they cause, leading some to suicide.
SPEAKER: HOWARD WALLACE, WHOSE WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN DEVOTED TO PROGRESSIVE WORK:
But the Sisters were most eloquent, saying: Last year you got us to play your game of fear and threats. But while you teach intolerance, San Franciso represents tolerance and love. Go out and experience the love in the City of San Francisco.
I hope everyone knows how much money the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence raise for charity, bringing a light-hearted touch and merciful attitude to events and organizations involved with sobering challenges.
A PRAYER
Like a firefly cupped in my hand,
I hold my own little sun.
Perturbations roll away from the moon
Revolving through my mind.
- James McColley Eilers, 2007
At the two-room school house in Roselawn, Indiana, Jimmy Eilers pretended to be one of the tough ones. His girlfriend, Judy Massey, standing in front of him, was much more tough. Must have been her sadistic mother who insisted the tomboy put a ribbon in her hair for the school picture.
That town, mostly of poor people and dysfunctional people, pulled Judy down. As he escaped, Jimmy watched her drown. She is one of those who will always live in one of the rooms, covered in wallpaper roses, in the blue hotel where all his remembered loved ones live. Jimmy, now known as James or Jim, escaped the poor village, ironically called Roselawn (dirt roads, no roses), and he is still keeping his head above water. He is about to turn 70. "I may have to say hello to 70," he says, "but I never intend to say good-bye to '69'."
Why was he always wearing that silly little smirk? Infected with irony at an early age.
I hold my own little sun.
Perturbations roll away from the moon
Revolving through my mind.
- James McColley Eilers, 2007
At the two-room school house in Roselawn, Indiana, Jimmy Eilers pretended to be one of the tough ones. His girlfriend, Judy Massey, standing in front of him, was much more tough. Must have been her sadistic mother who insisted the tomboy put a ribbon in her hair for the school picture.
That town, mostly of poor people and dysfunctional people, pulled Judy down. As he escaped, Jimmy watched her drown. She is one of those who will always live in one of the rooms, covered in wallpaper roses, in the blue hotel where all his remembered loved ones live. Jimmy, now known as James or Jim, escaped the poor village, ironically called Roselawn (dirt roads, no roses), and he is still keeping his head above water. He is about to turn 70. "I may have to say hello to 70," he says, "but I never intend to say good-bye to '69'." Why was he always wearing that silly little smirk? Infected with irony at an early age.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
The Muck Before Spring
I.
Today I feel the Autumn in March.
Why do I write? To furnish the emptiness.
Sometimes it feels like home.
My hands are cold.
No warm back will feel them today.
You can hang curtains in the emptiness,
fill it with many distractions,
but one good wind and your house collapses,
and you're out on the streets
or walking a desert,
another tumbleweed.
No Mecca ahead.
Or they drag you from some river,
a worm pudding.
II.
"The silence crunches me until I fit inside my skin.
It planes me, and skin appears.
What is that form within my chaos?
It breathes. It's alive.
It is too wooden for terror:
One thing crunches another in its teeth;
Just the ticking of the clock of nature.
Tock I tick don't know why."
Once created, the thing has to talk.
Don't listen to it.
- James McColley Eilers, 6-10 March 2007
Today I feel the Autumn in March.
Why do I write? To furnish the emptiness.
Sometimes it feels like home.My hands are cold.
No warm back will feel them today.
You can hang curtains in the emptiness,fill it with many distractions,
but one good wind and your house collapses,
and you're out on the streetsor walking a desert,
another tumbleweed.
No Mecca ahead.
Or they drag you from some river,
a worm pudding.
II.
"The silence crunches me until I fit inside my skin.
It planes me, and skin appears.
What is that form within my chaos?
It breathes. It's alive.It is too wooden for terror:
One thing crunches another in its teeth;
Just the ticking of the clock of nature.
Tock I tick don't know why."
Once created, the thing has to talk.
Don't listen to it.
- James McColley Eilers, 6-10 March 2007
Friday, March 02, 2007
FLOWERING TREES
It is that time in San Francisco when trees begin to blossom....
And tonight (1 March 2007) there was also A FLOWERING TREE at the symphony where John Adams conducted his new opera by that name. It featured three young American singers whose characters were interpreted by three traditional Balinese dancers. It is a tale of transformations where a maid turns herself into a flowering tree in the first act. The second act descends into horrifying pain, transforming all later into light. The opera is magic as a fairy tale, grim as a fairy tale.
The audience felt it was a special event, not only because of the beauty of the music and the production, but there was also the thrill of its being "new," Adams' first opera since DR. ATOMIC, and so different from that opera. An added thrill was the actual earthquake that rocked the top balcony, where I was seated, during the intermission between the two acts.
Peter Sellars directed, and he spoke before this performance, as he had before DR. ATOMIC, which he also directed. As always, his enthusiasm knew no bounds so that I felt it would be wrong not to record the moment with my unobtrusive digital (self-appointed rule-breaker) for so long as I could before scolded into stopping by an usher:
And tonight (1 March 2007) there was also A FLOWERING TREE at the symphony where John Adams conducted his new opera by that name. It featured three young American singers whose characters were interpreted by three traditional Balinese dancers. It is a tale of transformations where a maid turns herself into a flowering tree in the first act. The second act descends into horrifying pain, transforming all later into light. The opera is magic as a fairy tale, grim as a fairy tale.
The audience felt it was a special event, not only because of the beauty of the music and the production, but there was also the thrill of its being "new," Adams' first opera since DR. ATOMIC, and so different from that opera. An added thrill was the actual earthquake that rocked the top balcony, where I was seated, during the intermission between the two acts.
Peter Sellars directed, and he spoke before this performance, as he had before DR. ATOMIC, which he also directed. As always, his enthusiasm knew no bounds so that I felt it would be wrong not to record the moment with my unobtrusive digital (self-appointed rule-breaker) for so long as I could before scolded into stopping by an usher:
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Random Photos and Remarks
NOTES SUMMARIZING A LECTURE BY MARGARET MEADE, TELEVISED ON 3 JULY 1973:
1. Mother and Child, the first relationship – and then …
2. Family and Father,
3. Father and Son, and
4. Brothers and Sisters.
5. Consider how the human has been altered to become a cog in a machine in some gigantic system – turning humans to ants.
6. Do not be dominated by the computer, or other mechanical devices; they are but servants to our Humankindness, which is our true Genius.
7. And let us not linger, mourning, amid the ghosts that linger in the new morning.
8. People can learn.
9. Think of such a Human Nature and realize it in political will.
10. Resentment and Murder is the alternative.
11. Conquer technology with brains, by not being afraid to use it quickly and get the growing pains behind you: Get out into the bloody Bloom of things.
12. The voice of an Elder [such as Margaret Meade]
13. Our Family is the Earth.
14. We cannot save the Earth unless we save the nation. We cannot save the nation unless we save the family – the larger one: It is smaller than nation-size, and larger than little-white-bungalow-size (families extended and families maverick – our social and political network).
15. There must be ways to remember, without despair, our dangerous place.
Mural off Gough Street, San Francisco (on Eddy?):
WHY MUST A WOMAN FEEL MORALLY OBLIGATED TO GIVE BIRTH TO THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING?
Images of the tiny person visible in the peanut-sized embryo make one marvel, but the woman who brings that embryo to term will not be taking on a peanut-sized task; after 18 years of parental labors and obligations the cumulative weight of that little peanut will be equal to the weight of 500 elephants. Not a fate that should be imiposed on anyone who does not want to take on such a mountain-sized commitment.
WHO IS THAT RAP, RAP, RAPPING ON MY RADIO?
I know that if I had the patience, some of the messages in Rap Music might be meaningful, but I find the repetitious rhythm and the sing-song rhyming boring as hell. "This is the very false gallop of verses," a Shakespeare character said of doggerel rhyming, "Why do you infect yourself with them?" (Touchstone, Act III, scene ii, As You LIke It)
1. Mother and Child, the first relationship – and then …
2. Family and Father,
3. Father and Son, and
4. Brothers and Sisters.
5. Consider how the human has been altered to become a cog in a machine in some gigantic system – turning humans to ants.
6. Do not be dominated by the computer, or other mechanical devices; they are but servants to our Humankindness, which is our true Genius.
7. And let us not linger, mourning, amid the ghosts that linger in the new morning.
8. People can learn.
9. Think of such a Human Nature and realize it in political will.
10. Resentment and Murder is the alternative.
11. Conquer technology with brains, by not being afraid to use it quickly and get the growing pains behind you: Get out into the bloody Bloom of things.
12. The voice of an Elder [such as Margaret Meade]
13. Our Family is the Earth.
14. We cannot save the Earth unless we save the nation. We cannot save the nation unless we save the family – the larger one: It is smaller than nation-size, and larger than little-white-bungalow-size (families extended and families maverick – our social and political network).
15. There must be ways to remember, without despair, our dangerous place.
Mural off Gough Street, San Francisco (on Eddy?):
WHY MUST A WOMAN FEEL MORALLY OBLIGATED TO GIVE BIRTH TO THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING?
Images of the tiny person visible in the peanut-sized embryo make one marvel, but the woman who brings that embryo to term will not be taking on a peanut-sized task; after 18 years of parental labors and obligations the cumulative weight of that little peanut will be equal to the weight of 500 elephants. Not a fate that should be imiposed on anyone who does not want to take on such a mountain-sized commitment.
WHO IS THAT RAP, RAP, RAPPING ON MY RADIO?
I know that if I had the patience, some of the messages in Rap Music might be meaningful, but I find the repetitious rhythm and the sing-song rhyming boring as hell. "This is the very false gallop of verses," a Shakespeare character said of doggerel rhyming, "Why do you infect yourself with them?" (Touchstone, Act III, scene ii, As You LIke It)
Friday, February 16, 2007
A Letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Hoping they will support Speaker Pelosi in the following matters, I am sending this letter also to my Representative Barbara Lee, Representative John Murtha, and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.
Ms. Pelosi:
Having a progressive woman from our Bay Area elevated to the high position of Speaker of the House gives us such great hope, but that hope arouses great anxiety: You have the chance to do so much, and I am certain you will do your best, but I hope you can bear the fact that those who should most be on your side will be your most extreme gadflies – and I hope that will not prevent you from hearing what they have to say. I suppose I am among them when I say that I fear you will not recognize it when you have put on the blinders of those who live and work within that globe-embracing, yet insular and provincial world, the Beltway.
So willing to state your positions strongly, with such refreshing candor, will you use that determined attitude on behalf of a great “new” place beyond the political machinery that is in that place? Are you too much a lifelong product of that very machinery (and too much affected by longtime personal prestige and property) to really understand the intense needs and problems of many citizens (and soldiers) who have only you, or street demonstrations, on their side?
Can we place our hopes with you and your cohort?
(1) Although it would be the last thing members of either the Democratic or the Republican parties will want to support, I hope you will not force the public to go through long petition drives to establish ranked voting for national positions, including the presidency, the Senate, and the House. You must recognize that the two-party impasse is strangling us. With ranked voting, people could show their support for alternate candidates with alternate ideas (that members of the major parties will always fear to support for fear of losing elections) so that votes for someone like a Ralph Nader will not cause the defeat of someone like an Al Gore. In their current state of frustration, people will continue to make such dangerous pyrrhic choices so that you yourself as an individual citizen lose as the rest of us are losing. Propose ranked voting, and you win by winning great approval from American citizens for acting beyond fear; it would be a plus for you and the Democratic Party.
(2) Perhaps this is an “aside,” but I hope you and the representatives and senators to whom I am sending copies of this letter will ask that the existence of two films be placed in the Congressional and/or Senate records. It would be better yet if you could set up times and places for senators and representatives to watch them, or could get PBS stations to show them. I hope you have seen or will see WHY WE FIGHT and THE GROUND TRUTH (I believe Representative Murtha is supportive of the latter). You might mention that THE GROUND TRUTH would indicate the nature of true “support for troops,” removing them as soon as possible from their experience in Iraq, destructive to them and destructive for the average Iraqi. (I also hope you will help in any way you can Lt. Ehren Watada, the first officer to refuse to serve in an illegal war.)
(3) Typically, our liberal politicians decry the diminishing numbers in “the Middle Class,” the implicit message being that everyone below the middle class is not worth our concern. While democracy depends on a thriving and healthy middle class (although those who feel no pinch are apt to have little empathy—that is, will be Republicans), acceptance of the current mass of homeless people is proof that our democracy has gone into permanent decline as I cannot see how a great democracy will go on tolerating a heartless attitude toward any group of its citizens. (Pockets of the Great Depression, recreated, have existed in the U.S. for so long now that people think it is a normal part of U.S. life.) Are we deluding ourselves to think that those in the American political system, so tied up with big money and the powerful, can comprehend the extent of our nation’s cold-hearted nature? Can that cynicism and hard-heartedness be part of the reason why U.S. service people are committing extensive atrocities in Iraq? End dehumanization.
(4) Along those lines currently would be assuming a politic attitude about the war in Iraq. To themselves, I am sure the Republicans sound very “adult” and “responsible” about the war in Iraq. Getting firsthand reports, or seeing the reality in a film like THE GROUND TRUTH, demolishes the bland patriotic sentiments and rhetoric the Republicans use to promote the insane invasion and occupation of Iraq. You need something so far beyond a “compromise” with the Republican Party. You need to conceive something that so clearly leaps beyond the sophomoric debating society mentality of the Democrat/Republican game – another reason why you might do your best to see a wide broadcast of THE GROUND TRUTH and WHY WE FIGHT. Few will listen to sweet Dennis Kucinich, and I dare not hope that his Department of Peace will come to pass any time soon, but someone with a more forceful manner needs to let the public know that nothing short of a psychological and cultural revolution will resolve our problems (supplanting our culture of violence and its perpetuation). Unfortunately, revealing the backward thinking of Republicans may be necessary. Metaphorically, if not really, we need something like a split screen presentation – the images of THE GROUND TRUTH on one side, and the empty macho rhetoric of Republicans arguing warrior mentality on the other side.
(5) Speaker Pelosi, you may have already become inextricably a part of that giant collective mind-octopus of the beltway where politicians and journalists, no matter what their private differences, become members of the same club (out of some simple-minded version of civilized dialogue – always backing away from the prickliness of truth), becoming part of that one world in the beltway that has no connection to citizens of the U.S. There is a great desperation in U.S. citizens that only an empathetic passion in their representatives can address or respond to adequately, but such true empathy does not exist in the watered-down getting-along of “My good friend, my worthy opponent,” where both sides of the political dialogue are on the same side, more in love with their mutual membersip in the power club than dedicated to the service of the average American who elected them – or to the average citizen in all territories on earth that America occupies or controls.
(6) Speaking of that, it is time to get rid of the slave status of the citizens of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico and the other members of the so-called U.S. commonwealth: We have a mass of citizens who are denied the small portion of power that other citizens are allowed. Those exclusions create festering wounds. Those exclusions also make members of the U.S. commonwealth the victims of U.S. military and drug experiments (the newspapers recently celebrated how a new rocket launched from the U.S. landed successfully in the Marianas) – Ask Puerto Ricans what they have suffered at the hands of the U.S.
(7) I guess I prefer “progressive politics,” looking ceaselessly and always toward improvements extending into the future. I hope that if you are a “liberal,” you will not let the word stand for “half-assed progressive.” The problems faced by the planet and the U.S. do not allow for any more pussyfooting around. Don’t learn that the hard way by helping us to continue to drift into national impotence – and crimes against other nations and the earth itself.
(8) Was there once a democracy? Was I too much a child when I thought the FDR era was great, and can I trust that my memory is accurate that the urban school I attended was a clean place where families liked to gather, as if it were a town hall as much as a school? Have you been in any urban schools lately? Seen the filthy bathrooms? Felt the oppressive fear in the halls?
As a child, I witnessed the Democratic Party as experienced by my parents in the interwoven complex of Gary, East Chicago, and Chicago, and all the cities around and in between them called “the Region,” where local Democrats were part of a system that allowed local problems to move up through the system so that solutions could work their way back down. That was some form of democracy where every voice could, in some sense, be heard.
Now we have the imperial state, so that someone like me feels there is no way that what he has to say can reach those who can see that problems are addressed and solved. It feels as if we live in the world of Kafka’s GREAT WALL OF CHINA, where someone with an important message for the Emperor travels a long distance with his message, passes through many gates, but can never reach “the distant Emperor” and never speak his message into the ear of the Emperor – a message that might even be some kind of solution, not a cry for help.
Our government has become that Emperor that will never truly hear the voice of ordinary citizens as there is actually no true set-up that would represent democratic participation with the permanent presence of the electoral college (our only hope being organization through the internet, and we know the day will come soon when the powerful will destroy that breath of freedom also).
(9) Of great importance is the elimination of President-As-Dictator. It is maddening to witness a President who is a destroyer on such a vast scale that the people of the earth will never forgive or forget the America-as-Criminal-Oppressors he has made of us – yet he presents his actions in a manner that is mind-numbing and banal – the stunted soul at the center of the horrendous ramifications of his regime: So why does anyone now wonder how Hitler held power? And who are closest to helping Bush hold such destructive power? You.
Listening to President Bush’s Valentine’s Day press conference, I was compelled to write the following that I hope will provide you a laugh at the end of this sober letter:
A LITTLE THING SYMBOLIC OF EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM:
An unknown group kidnapped the President of the United States. When they removed the hood from his head, he recited from a piece of paper, as ordered, “We will not permit Iran to have any kind of nucular program.”
The leader of the kidnappers said, “Nuclear – Say ‘nuclear.’”
“Nucular,” said the President.
After a few more attempts, the kidnapper said, “Now – pronounce it one syllable at a time: new – klee – er.”
“Nucular,” said the President.
“So it’s true – No matter how many people explain to you how you are wrong, you will stubbornly continue in an error forever.”
-- Jim Eilers
Sent to
Senator Barbara Boxer (1) 1700 Montgomery Street, Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111. (2) 112 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (1) One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104. (2) 331 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510
Representative John P. Murtha (1) 647 Main Street, Suite 401, Johnston, PA 15901. (2) 2423 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515-3812
Representative Barbara Lee (1) 1301 Clay Street, #100N, Oakland, CA 94612. (2) 2444 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515-0509
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (1) 450 Golden Gate Avenue, 14th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94102. (2) 235 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515-0508
Ms. Pelosi:
Having a progressive woman from our Bay Area elevated to the high position of Speaker of the House gives us such great hope, but that hope arouses great anxiety: You have the chance to do so much, and I am certain you will do your best, but I hope you can bear the fact that those who should most be on your side will be your most extreme gadflies – and I hope that will not prevent you from hearing what they have to say. I suppose I am among them when I say that I fear you will not recognize it when you have put on the blinders of those who live and work within that globe-embracing, yet insular and provincial world, the Beltway.
So willing to state your positions strongly, with such refreshing candor, will you use that determined attitude on behalf of a great “new” place beyond the political machinery that is in that place? Are you too much a lifelong product of that very machinery (and too much affected by longtime personal prestige and property) to really understand the intense needs and problems of many citizens (and soldiers) who have only you, or street demonstrations, on their side?
Can we place our hopes with you and your cohort?
(1) Although it would be the last thing members of either the Democratic or the Republican parties will want to support, I hope you will not force the public to go through long petition drives to establish ranked voting for national positions, including the presidency, the Senate, and the House. You must recognize that the two-party impasse is strangling us. With ranked voting, people could show their support for alternate candidates with alternate ideas (that members of the major parties will always fear to support for fear of losing elections) so that votes for someone like a Ralph Nader will not cause the defeat of someone like an Al Gore. In their current state of frustration, people will continue to make such dangerous pyrrhic choices so that you yourself as an individual citizen lose as the rest of us are losing. Propose ranked voting, and you win by winning great approval from American citizens for acting beyond fear; it would be a plus for you and the Democratic Party.
(2) Perhaps this is an “aside,” but I hope you and the representatives and senators to whom I am sending copies of this letter will ask that the existence of two films be placed in the Congressional and/or Senate records. It would be better yet if you could set up times and places for senators and representatives to watch them, or could get PBS stations to show them. I hope you have seen or will see WHY WE FIGHT and THE GROUND TRUTH (I believe Representative Murtha is supportive of the latter). You might mention that THE GROUND TRUTH would indicate the nature of true “support for troops,” removing them as soon as possible from their experience in Iraq, destructive to them and destructive for the average Iraqi. (I also hope you will help in any way you can Lt. Ehren Watada, the first officer to refuse to serve in an illegal war.)
(3) Typically, our liberal politicians decry the diminishing numbers in “the Middle Class,” the implicit message being that everyone below the middle class is not worth our concern. While democracy depends on a thriving and healthy middle class (although those who feel no pinch are apt to have little empathy—that is, will be Republicans), acceptance of the current mass of homeless people is proof that our democracy has gone into permanent decline as I cannot see how a great democracy will go on tolerating a heartless attitude toward any group of its citizens. (Pockets of the Great Depression, recreated, have existed in the U.S. for so long now that people think it is a normal part of U.S. life.) Are we deluding ourselves to think that those in the American political system, so tied up with big money and the powerful, can comprehend the extent of our nation’s cold-hearted nature? Can that cynicism and hard-heartedness be part of the reason why U.S. service people are committing extensive atrocities in Iraq? End dehumanization.
(4) Along those lines currently would be assuming a politic attitude about the war in Iraq. To themselves, I am sure the Republicans sound very “adult” and “responsible” about the war in Iraq. Getting firsthand reports, or seeing the reality in a film like THE GROUND TRUTH, demolishes the bland patriotic sentiments and rhetoric the Republicans use to promote the insane invasion and occupation of Iraq. You need something so far beyond a “compromise” with the Republican Party. You need to conceive something that so clearly leaps beyond the sophomoric debating society mentality of the Democrat/Republican game – another reason why you might do your best to see a wide broadcast of THE GROUND TRUTH and WHY WE FIGHT. Few will listen to sweet Dennis Kucinich, and I dare not hope that his Department of Peace will come to pass any time soon, but someone with a more forceful manner needs to let the public know that nothing short of a psychological and cultural revolution will resolve our problems (supplanting our culture of violence and its perpetuation). Unfortunately, revealing the backward thinking of Republicans may be necessary. Metaphorically, if not really, we need something like a split screen presentation – the images of THE GROUND TRUTH on one side, and the empty macho rhetoric of Republicans arguing warrior mentality on the other side.
(5) Speaker Pelosi, you may have already become inextricably a part of that giant collective mind-octopus of the beltway where politicians and journalists, no matter what their private differences, become members of the same club (out of some simple-minded version of civilized dialogue – always backing away from the prickliness of truth), becoming part of that one world in the beltway that has no connection to citizens of the U.S. There is a great desperation in U.S. citizens that only an empathetic passion in their representatives can address or respond to adequately, but such true empathy does not exist in the watered-down getting-along of “My good friend, my worthy opponent,” where both sides of the political dialogue are on the same side, more in love with their mutual membersip in the power club than dedicated to the service of the average American who elected them – or to the average citizen in all territories on earth that America occupies or controls.
(6) Speaking of that, it is time to get rid of the slave status of the citizens of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico and the other members of the so-called U.S. commonwealth: We have a mass of citizens who are denied the small portion of power that other citizens are allowed. Those exclusions create festering wounds. Those exclusions also make members of the U.S. commonwealth the victims of U.S. military and drug experiments (the newspapers recently celebrated how a new rocket launched from the U.S. landed successfully in the Marianas) – Ask Puerto Ricans what they have suffered at the hands of the U.S.
(7) I guess I prefer “progressive politics,” looking ceaselessly and always toward improvements extending into the future. I hope that if you are a “liberal,” you will not let the word stand for “half-assed progressive.” The problems faced by the planet and the U.S. do not allow for any more pussyfooting around. Don’t learn that the hard way by helping us to continue to drift into national impotence – and crimes against other nations and the earth itself.
(8) Was there once a democracy? Was I too much a child when I thought the FDR era was great, and can I trust that my memory is accurate that the urban school I attended was a clean place where families liked to gather, as if it were a town hall as much as a school? Have you been in any urban schools lately? Seen the filthy bathrooms? Felt the oppressive fear in the halls?
As a child, I witnessed the Democratic Party as experienced by my parents in the interwoven complex of Gary, East Chicago, and Chicago, and all the cities around and in between them called “the Region,” where local Democrats were part of a system that allowed local problems to move up through the system so that solutions could work their way back down. That was some form of democracy where every voice could, in some sense, be heard.
Now we have the imperial state, so that someone like me feels there is no way that what he has to say can reach those who can see that problems are addressed and solved. It feels as if we live in the world of Kafka’s GREAT WALL OF CHINA, where someone with an important message for the Emperor travels a long distance with his message, passes through many gates, but can never reach “the distant Emperor” and never speak his message into the ear of the Emperor – a message that might even be some kind of solution, not a cry for help.
Our government has become that Emperor that will never truly hear the voice of ordinary citizens as there is actually no true set-up that would represent democratic participation with the permanent presence of the electoral college (our only hope being organization through the internet, and we know the day will come soon when the powerful will destroy that breath of freedom also).
(9) Of great importance is the elimination of President-As-Dictator. It is maddening to witness a President who is a destroyer on such a vast scale that the people of the earth will never forgive or forget the America-as-Criminal-Oppressors he has made of us – yet he presents his actions in a manner that is mind-numbing and banal – the stunted soul at the center of the horrendous ramifications of his regime: So why does anyone now wonder how Hitler held power? And who are closest to helping Bush hold such destructive power? You.
Listening to President Bush’s Valentine’s Day press conference, I was compelled to write the following that I hope will provide you a laugh at the end of this sober letter:
A LITTLE THING SYMBOLIC OF EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM:
An unknown group kidnapped the President of the United States. When they removed the hood from his head, he recited from a piece of paper, as ordered, “We will not permit Iran to have any kind of nucular program.”
The leader of the kidnappers said, “Nuclear – Say ‘nuclear.’”
“Nucular,” said the President.
After a few more attempts, the kidnapper said, “Now – pronounce it one syllable at a time: new – klee – er.”
“Nucular,” said the President.
“So it’s true – No matter how many people explain to you how you are wrong, you will stubbornly continue in an error forever.”
-- Jim Eilers
Sent to
Senator Barbara Boxer (1) 1700 Montgomery Street, Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111. (2) 112 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (1) One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104. (2) 331 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510
Representative John P. Murtha (1) 647 Main Street, Suite 401, Johnston, PA 15901. (2) 2423 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515-3812
Representative Barbara Lee (1) 1301 Clay Street, #100N, Oakland, CA 94612. (2) 2444 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515-0509
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (1) 450 Golden Gate Avenue, 14th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94102. (2) 235 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515-0508
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Westfield Centre
The long view in the new Westfield Centre:
The old Emporium dome survives in the Westfield Centre, that also houses the new Bloomingdale's:
The old Emporium dome survives in the Westfield Centre, that also houses the new Bloomingdale's:
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