Angry Bulls and Fiery Zealots

The Republicans seem to be getting desperate and really kooky guys have been riled up. Like ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper writes in a post yesterday:

The McCain campaign has no intention of letting up on the same character attacks on Obama that have been met on the stump with angry supporters yelling "treason!" "terrorist!" and "kill him!" when McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin invoke Obama's name.

Palin yesterday in Cleveland said, "we've got to start connecting the dots between Barack Obama and some of his associations, some of the things he has done in the past, and more importantly, some of the things that he intends to do in the future, so that Americans will know clearly their choices. We'll lay this out to American voters in the next couple of days.”

They're kind of in a weird place, let's say. They want to keep attacking Obama on these "associations," but they don't want to be held responsible for the kinds of ugly reactions these attacks find on the trail from McCain-Palin supporters.

ABC News' Imtiyaz Delawala, traveling with Palin, reports that a Palin supporter in Johnstown, Pa., today was holding a Curious George monkey doll on which he'd put an Obama sticker.

At a McCain event, as the crowd waited for McCain himself to arrive, Pastor Arnold Conrad of the Grace Evangelical Free Church of Davenport, Iowa, gave an invocation that included the following: "I would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day."

God to the rescue, huh! We all know what happened the last time they prayed for some divine intervention, no? :)

Jokes aside, I hope there is a vigorous backlash against the Republicans and I hope their lowly low methods (even by politics of negative campaigning standards) do not result in some obscene October surprise but somehow Obama gets through the next 3 weeks without any damage. They are really stooping low and may spring some crude obscene surprise in the next few weeks, I fear!

Like Frank Rich writes in the NYT today:

If you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

..

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

And so on and so forth. I don't even feel like reading the article. It is downright depressing. We live in a sick world!

P.S. Talk about sick world. This makes me genuinely sick! OBSCENE!!!!!!!!!

Update: Perhaps humor is the only way to deal with such absurdness and obscenity, no? Here's Jon Stewart's take about "An Arab Family Man" :)

--
“In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal.” - Thomas Jefferson

The Night Wind Carries

Ran into this poem by Denise Levertov, while looking for something about Creeley (since he wrote the Introduction to a book of her Selected Poems; adapted from a lecture he gave at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in honor of her life and work.)

September 1961

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"-Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me"-
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
I can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don't
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea...

Seems, 1961 was the year William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle both had severe strokes, and Ezra Pound stopped writing and this poem is in honor of those great ones leaving us alone on the road.

Picture titled Night Wind Landscape I is © Karen Kucharski (kkucharskiart@yahoo.com)

But, of course, to me...this is the year of loss in a different way. How will it be without him is difficult to fathom but sometimes the night wind carries him back to me through dreams.

Always the self returns

I remember reading Robert Creeley's poetry many years back and loving it and so have picked up 3 books of poetry by him today - Life & Death, Echoes, and If I were writing this.

Just one of his early poems for now...

Poem for D.H. Lawrence

I would begin by explaining
that by reason of being
I am and no other.

Always the self returns to
self-consciousness, seeing
the figure drawn by the window
by its own hand, standing
alone and unwanted by others.
It sees this, the self sees
and returns to the figure
there in the evening, the darkness
alone and unwanted by others.

In the beginning was this self,
perhaps, without the figure,
without consciousness of self
or figure or evening. In the
beginning was this self only,
alone and unwanted by others.

In the beginning was that and this
is different, is changed and how
it is changed is not known but felt.
It is felt by the self and the self
is feeling, is changed by feeling,
but not known, is changed, is felt.

Remembering the figure by the window,
in the evening drawn there by the window,
is to see the thing like money, is to be
sure of materials, but not to know
where they came from or how
they got there or when they came.
Remembering the figure by the window
the evening is remembered, the darkness
remembered as the figure by the window,
but is not to know how they came there.

The self is being, is in being and
because of it. The figure is not being
nor the self but is in the self and
in the being and because of them.

Always the self returns to, because of
being, the figure drawn by the window,
there in the evening, the darkness,
alone and unwanted by others.

Hmmm... There are some deep questions and ruminations about the self here but I am not sure I get the whole poem.

a great picture, which I call The Evolution of Self; © Alfredo Gomez Jr.

I'll try to post some of his more accessible poems in the days to come from the three books, which I hope to read in the next couple weeks.

For now, here is a quote from his poem that I had posted elsewhere and I had also excerpted lines from Creeley's poems as a prologue to a poem I wrote in 2005, which is when I first was introduced to his poetry through a book of selected poems - this one, if I remember right. (I believe there is a new book of collected poems this year, collecting poems from 1945-2005.)

Also a review of his work in the NYT and an interview with Creeley from 2003 after a reading at Emerson College in Boston.

Art, Dreams, and Hamza

My blog this week in a cloud tag, via Wordle, which can create such a cloud for any website you want.

Tweethearts

The world we live in!

Blogger proposes to nerd girlfriend over Twitter, she tweets back acceptance

And this is not a first. It's been done before. See link to the Wired blog post at the bottom of the above link.

Bollywood songs

Considering my roots, it is strange that I hardly ever post music from India. So, here's some fare from Bollywood ... but not the blockbuster song-and-dance routines of recent years (mostly item numbers of late!) but songs from the 1950s, which I absolutely love more than any other period in Bollywood's history.

First up... Nutan and Dev Anand in a famous song from Paying Guest



And is there someone with a more beautiful screen presence than Madhubala in Indian films? Again, with Dev Anand (whose films from the 50s I love; though he's made nothing but c**p since; a few ok movies in the 60s and 70s notwithstanding! At 85, though, he has the kind of energy and enthusiasm for life that one wants to still root for him to continue making movies (that not many see; and its been so for almost 3 decades at least now!)



And the last one is actually from Pakistan, which I found it here. The picturization is not so great but the voice, that of Naseem Begum, is haunting in some ways and I loved it.



P.S. Given that a friend recently emailed me saying she remembered I used to love a particular S. D. Burman song, I should at least provide links to a few songs sung by him here; considering I have no idea when I will post Bollywood fare again!

Kaahe Ko Roye
o re mahji
wahan kaun hai tera musafir jaye ga kahan

Apparently, it was the 3rd in the above list that was my favorite! However, I have no recollection of being so much in love with this song back in the 90s when I knew this friend but memory is such a beast. We remember different things about each other and sometimes about ourselves!

Moving Lines

I am no art enthusiast nor do I write art/movie/book reviews well (a recent post by Amit comes to mind -- easy to critique; difficult to create, no?)... but thought I'd share a short review of an art exhibition I saw today.

I went to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square this afternoon and saw that they had an exhibition of drawings by Channing Penna on display at the BPL.

MOVINGLINE is the outcome of a seven-year exploration of the science and humanity of movement. With pencil, Channing Penna captures nature's energy, beauty, and rhythms in a series of sixty-seven drawings with accompanying prose. In this extraordinary body of work, the intimacy of her art is initially represented by images of crashing waves, birds in flight, and racing horses. Her pursuit of motion then evolves into renditions of dancers and musicians performing, and complex portrayals of the human face. Organic and surprising, Channing's drawings are unforgettable for the power of their line, the drama of their black and white compositions, and the innovation with which they are rendered.

And here is the artist's statement about the work. Some of the work from the exhibition can be seen in a recently released book or even at her website.

However, I think enjoying it at a public gallery gave me a whole different experience, which I would not have got if I had stumbled into the book or the website. In both cases, one would lose a lot without the scale and the ambiance of walking around a big room looking at the drawings. Also, with the website, one loses the impact of experiencing the pictures in combination with Channing's words and quotes which accompany each picture. In my opinion, the art and the words feed off each other and the words complement the art, instead of detracting from it. No doubt, the art can stand by itself but the words helped me understand the artist's thought process better and hence helped me appreciate it more.

From waves to horses to soaring eagles to doves and cranes (and even cranes of a different kind - see last picture in her online gallery), the drawings draw you into a world of motion (or should I say a whirl of motion), leaving the viewer breathless. And then she slows it down a bit with the portraits, also often portraying motion (especially liked the one with Seiji Ozawa conducting) but more cleverly, with the the human touch perhaps bringing it down to a quieter more reminiscing feel and a less ferocious end.

A wonderful exhibition. Half an hour or so of pure joy! Ferocious and full of life.

P.S. Some of her work is also in a Flickr album but I am not sure if this is someone who knows her who has put it up there with her permission.

--
Chaos is the law of nature. Order is the dream of man -- Henry Brooks Adams