DHAMMPADA (adapted)

"Love yourself and be awake--
today, tomorrow, and always.

First establish yourself in the way,
then teach others,
and so defeat sorrow.

To straighten the crooked
you must first do the harder thing--
straighten yourself.

You are your only master,
who else?
Subdue yourself, and discover your master."

Kiss Off

"I hope you know
that this will go down
on your permanent record
Oh yeah?
Well dont get so distressed.
Did I happen to mention that I'm impressed?"

Last night, I saw a great friend of mine play in his band, The Telepaths. The show was a breast cancer cure fundraiser, and, having nearly missed early detection four years ago (yes, I almost even missed finding the inkling of possible cancer had it not been for my intuition and insistence), I believe any type of awareness is positively vital, no matter how small a gathering. Everything counts in large amounts, the boys from Essex said.

The Telepaths are comprised of my buddy PMcD; a blast from my high school past who used to call everyone "a piece of shit"; Cory from the popular group The Cells (for last night); and genius James (White Wolf), the other half to my previous workmate, Carla (Sonic Princess). The Telepaths did a raw version of "Cover Me" (Springsteen), a kickin' cover of "Dirty Work" (Steely Dan) and a dirrrty version of "Area 51" (with Hoopa Freaks)! I much enjoyed the soulful, searching ballad for "Susan Sontag".

This all got me thinking about live band karaoke and what song I'd do. This one (Kiss Off-Femmes) is angry, and I'm not angry, but I imagine I could twist my pipes around it and really get salty on stage.

Ring Tones

I don't give a shit about your ring tone. They have become the new "life flair". They are so Spencer Gifts. If you feel the need to define yourself by a noise, then fart. It would be far more profound.

Elevation

My encounters in the elevator in my building have spurned the idea that universal consciousness has never been so relevant as it is in this day and age. As I age and observe people observing me, I still do not realize that my perception of myself is expertly cloaked beneath the veil of a world-weary woman. (This is the air I give off though I have no clue from where it hails). I recall an cluster of Indian women one evening, all elegantly ornamented in beautiful silken saris, glowing from a wedding celebration, laughing and sharing with me their joy.

There is a projection of yourself in your immediate space that you ooze, and human beings read these signals; the urge for human connection is evident more than ever before--even in a friendly city like Chicago where it is quite plausible for an immigrant of any nationality to come up to you on the street and tell you his or her life story.

But in the elevator, there is something about a chance encounter, a meeting with someone alone in an enclosed space for a brief moment in time, under harsh flourescent lights that evokes a spirit of interrogation and confession. I also attribute my reception of these encounters to the expressive nature of my face and spirit. I seem to invite storytellers to me. I should have been an investigative journalist or a psychologist.

My first encounter: a South African gentleman who kindly shared with me his short story of being in this country thus far. It was a recounting of how he was now somehow responsible for several payments for magazine subscriptions. I am sure he was coerced into them by slick advertisers (the likes of whom I know all too well). He was kind and extended his hand. I shook it and felt an awakening of my spirit then, how else to describe seeing a flash in my mind of long travels and distant lands, vegetation, wildlife I have only seen in photos. He had come so far and was proud to be here. He had warmth to give a small blonde girl in the elevator. There was an assurance that whatever trouble I had been grappling with in my mind at that moment, that it was insignificant in the grand scheme of life.

The second was with a small man of Serbian or Russian decent--it was difficult to localize his accent in a short span of time. He studied my face with such intensity I thought he might grab my face between his small, rough palms and devour me. After a moment, a voiced question with a soft caress to his own cheek, asking, "Of where I come from." I told him I was Lithuanian. He nodded and left the elevator.

The next was with a man who opened a dialogue after I sighed painfully while waiting for the next car to arrive. "You look like you've been rode hard and put up wet." I remarked that was weird to say. He countered with, "Well, I'm a cowboy." I asked, "Oh yeah? Where are you from?" He answered, "I'm from the East coast originally, but I'm a Michigan cowboy." I said, "There's no cowboys in Michigan." I began to study the numbers on the elevator. He got off at 16 telling me, "Yeah, I'm the disappointment to the family. I left home, went off to Vietnam and fought, and then went to school." I sarcastically commented, as the doors closed between us, "Yeah, that's pretty disappointing."

Caught

Giant squid, the most giant squid, wrapped in cold salt of man's man's nets
I ate all the tentacles last night

Pervading Theme

by Cristian Vargas, Bogota, Colombia

Li Nan, Poet

"only those who do love
are far from love"

-Li Nan

LI NAN'S BOOK, SMALL AVAILABLE AT VISUAL ARTIST'S COLLECTIVE

Pauses

RASA KALINAUSKAITE, a journalist from Vilnius:

"...when I construct voices by myself, a montage is done, performed by you - you cut out pauses. If we consider voice as a construct of modern epoch, that is the voice without pauses. These days, people avoid pauses, they fear pauses. Because voice without pauses is information...and the more information, the more it is valuable. Although I think that the voice principally resists such castration, as perhaps the most valuable elements are sighs, natural inhalations, exhalations, some kind of bodily physiology, everything what is inclusive in pauses...You just observe it how physical bits of voice...are cut out...the voice is no longer there…"

I have translated one of Kalinauskaite's poems, Coversations with Teo. I take great care in the pauses when reading.

"Wife to Doug"

"She loves the satisfaction of unearthing a treasure among the long rejected."

Nothing/Everything

Apoplectic Butterfly / Fin de siècle

winged and warping,
current event raws her;
a vegetation still life,
garage slipcover, combustion dance,
this random cluster of cork
typical of the Aesthetic movements
fleshtones, flavors. agricola
and villa collide to make agrilla,
an Edwardian viceroy illustration
each line a place to burn
the census, thorax
threaded against time.

Published in Fifth Wednesday

Neologisms

A friend sent these and I took great delight in them:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

The Cinema

I absolutely love film. I still have a Korvette's 8mm left behind from my grandfather when he first came to this country from Lithuania. It sits in a box in my closet, begging me to free it and roam about with it in an inspired trance.

I was thinking about the shame of the Oscars, how it, like everything else, has become tarnished by commercialism and banality.

That is not to say that some of the films/actors up for consideration this year are not worthy of praise. To give an Oscar, however, is pretty meaningless anymore. I am sure most agree that this once most prestigious honor has really been soiled by the fact that trustees or bankers or someone other than one who truly understands, supports, and/or is involved with the art is choosing "a winner". In fact, there are so many wonderful movies, the idea of only honoring one as "the best" of the year falls suit with anything Americanized (number one, first place, competition, etc.)

I'd like to see a show that honors all the great films that were released in a single year, showcased via a sleek montage as they do for fallen actors/ directors/ filmmakers/ designers.

Some of the films that I saw this past year (2006) (not necessarily from this year, and some are older films) that I found notable:

1. The Science Of Sleep
2. Zizek
3. My Life As A Dog
4. Breakfast On Pluto
5. Fando y Lis
6. Grey Gardens (finally per request of CS and CC)
7. The Lost City
8. Junebug
9. The Man Who Laughs
10. Everything Is Illuminated
11. The Phantom Of Liberty
12. Veronika Voss
13. The Squid And The Whale
14. El Topo
15. David Lynch's Short Films
16. Goodbye Lenin
17. Children of Men

Tango y Cash?

Listening to: Gotan Project, Epoca, La Revancha del Tango







I call this BLUE STEEL.

"El Topo": A Synopsis Thus Far

Midnight movie at The Music Box:
The movie takes place in two parts. The first half, in an unnamed desert, begins with the title character, accompanied by his naked son, hunting down and killing a band of outlaws who have butchered the inhabitants of a town. After leaving his son with monks he has rescued from the outlaws, he rides off with a woman the outlaws had kept captive to defeat the four great masters of pistol duelling. As El Topo encounters each of the first three masters, the master teaches El Topo a lesson and they then duel, in which El Topo cheats every time. The final master kills himself, in a demonstration of the unimportance of life. The first half ends with El Topo's betrayal and near-murder by the woman and an unnamed informant.

The second half of the movie takes place years later, after El Topo is rescued by a band of deformed outcasts, saving him from death. The outcasts take El Topo to their underground community, where he, comatose, meditates on the four lessons for many years. When he awakes, he is 'born again' with the help of the outcasts, and goes on a quest to free them from their subterranean prison.

With the help of his dwarf girlfriend and his full-grown son, now a priest, El Topo digs an exit out of the cave, only to see the others of his community murdered by cultists from a nearby town. In a rage, El Topo kills them all, then pours oil on himself and sets himself on fire, as he has learned all he can about life.

El Topo's son and girlfriend survive the ordeal and make a grave for his remains, which becomes a beehive full of honey.

Mercury: I Have A Love-Hate Relationship With That Metal

"The people desire their ways to be
looked into but won't come up
with any names."

—William Fuller, "The Same" from Watchword

molecules said this:
a distinct place:
a ruling planet.
Mutability.

The Print Seal Machine

Lithuanian Independence Day Commoration, Feb. 16

Today I went to Maria High School in the old neighborhood, Marquette Park. I saw three speakers and Senator Dick Durbin speak about Lithuanian Independence.


David Satter
Former Moscow correspondent, is a long time observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Satter was born in Chicago in 1947 and graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a B.Litt degree in political philosophy. He worked for four years as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and, in 1976, he was named Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the nature of Soviet society for posterity.

After completing his term in Moscow, Satter became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for The Wall Street Journal, contributing to the paper’s editorial page. In 1990, he was named a Thornton Hooper fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and then a senior fellow at the Institute.

Satter has written two books about Russia, Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996; paperback, Yale) and Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale, 2003). His books have been translated into Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Portugese, and Vietnamese. Age of Delirium is also being made into a documentary film by the Russian director, Andrei Nekrasov, in a U.S.-German- Ukrainian joint production. The film is to appear on the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. He is presently working on a new book about the Russian attitude toward the communist past.

Publications and Media Exposure

Satter has written extensively for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. His articles and op-ed pieces have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The National Interest, National Review, National Review Online, The New Republic, The New York Sun, The New York Review of Books, Reader’s Digest and the Washington Times. He is frequently interviewed in both Russian and English by Radio Liberty, the Voice of America and the BBC and has appeared on Fox News, C-Span, the Charlie Rose Show and other television programs.

Who Killed Alexander Litvinenko? 11/28/2006


Dr. Darius Furmonavicius
MA in International Relations (University of Nottingham, 1996), PhD in European Studies (University of Bradford, 2002), was awarded a 2002 Bernadette E. Schmidt grant for research in European history of the American Historical Association to complete his research for a monograph ‘Lithuania Rejoins Europe’ (forthcoming by the East European Monographs Series of the Columbia University Press in 2006) as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Languages and European Studies, University of Bradford. His main research interests are the international relations of the Baltic States, international aspects of Lithuania’s politics, history, and economy, European security (particularly of the Baltic Sea region), NATO & EU enlargements, and European-American relations. He is also Acting Chairman of the Lithuanian Research & Studies Fund, 16 Hound Rd., West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 6AH, UK.

Andrei Nekrasov, Russian filmmaker

Andrei Nekrasov

Are You As New Man Meticulous

Are You As New Man Meticulous, Blossombones

CANADA