"Succession" - Father & Children

The Italian villa dinner scene between right wing media magnate Logan Roy and his son Kendall in the most recent episode of "Succession" is a very great piece of drama and a portrait of, well, of... humanity on the precipice in 2021. The background - Conniving, lost shitbag son Roman is sufficiently cynical to want to replicate the role of his "master of the world" father. Grasping-to-define-herself daughter Siobhan is trying to insert herself into the male-dominated, brutish media company of her father, but cannot seem to make it work for her or be fully accepted into the asshole boys club. Chronically directionless son Connor is making a quixotic run at the presidency as a harebrained way to define himself in late middle age. While son Kendall, after attempting to compete against his father in the media universe, is now negotiating with his him to get out, definitively, from the family business and cut all ties with his father. He realizes he is just not sufficiently a "killer" (as both Logan Roy and Donald Trump describe such characters) to exist in that world. He wants a payout and to cash out his shares and move on. He seems trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place - unsure if he has any skills that will permit him to do something else, but sure the remaining in the world of corporate cut-throats is definitively not for him.

The Greatest Delusion & The Question of Happiness

Perhaps the greatest misapprehension of all is that which is that held by this society's "winners" - the financial, business and political elites: That life is game to be won. This turns the habitat of the planet into a foldable game board and actual people and other sentient beings into plastic pieces to be bought and sold with money - which, ironically, is that which is most real to such people. This misapprehension creates misery for most of us in the short term and will render the planet a barely habitable hellscape by the end of this century. It is a lethal delusion.

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There is no true happiness when you know that the way we live is killing the planet.

An Originalist Speaks

I am an originalist. Washington Jefferson Madison Franklin received a code, from where I know not. They read it in the mists above the Potomac. Or heard it chiming in the smoky air of a Mason ritual. This code made them wealthy - this is the pursuit of happiness. I like the smell of old documents - parchment and ink suffused with the passage of time, though the document be eternal. They broke with the King because it was time to cross the mountains. Appalachia and the Ohio Valley would be ours. Damn the Indians to an un-sacred oblivion - for they know not what is destiny, what is destined. I am an originalist. I took a blood oath. I saw Washington's death mask in the Masonic Temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The contours of his face, the look he had facing death: It was like he knew the slaves he had kept were waiting for him. Terror and absence. The words the founders wrote constitute a code. The constitution of an eternal form. There was talk in England of winding down the unique Southern project. The English did not understand what this country was meant to be. This land would not be tamed by the timid. Great works are not made without divisions between the high and the lowly. This is part of the code. Ten commandments were written in stone. Moses understood what it is to receive a code perched on the other side of a mountain - residing in the mouth of God. All one need to do is ask God to open his mouth and extract the words. 'Sixteen days in Georgia, I went out beyond the barn. Goose in the mill pond, cow's in the corn.'

                                                woodcut by Tom Killon

1Larry Parker

Portrait of Boebert

Wearing jeggings and heels and telling racist jokes. Blowing shit up in TV commercials. Inventing stories that make her look like a monster: Cruelty signaling. Glasses clink as funds are raised to do more dumb shit. Spectacles of bad comedy fueled by malice. An orange swine in Florida as mentor. Pickup trucks for grocery runs. Guns as wearable fashion. The pursuit of a smaller mind and reduced empathy. Bitterness, heart-freeze. Vocal cords dipped in acid. Tapeworm mind. Frontier viciousness. A permanent state of dyspepsia. Mediocrity turned into terror.

We Are the Ghosts or They Are the Ghosts

We are the ghosts or they are the ghosts. We are or they are. Did we come to haunt them? That I'll not believe. We sold them rifles, gun powder, learned to cure buckskin, built trading posts on the bends of the rivers. We are the ghosts or they are the ghosts. They learned our language and spoke to us beneath the harvest moon, wheat in the barn. We could not appear as apparitions or mist, foul odors that will not relent. "Ink ink a bottle of ink, the cork fell out and you stink." We are the ghosts or they are the ghosts. We did not come bobbing as corks on the eastern horizon one cold Plymouth morning - hazy, shimmering, fading, reappearing. We did not come to haunt them or bring them into our nightmares. "Poor old man, your horse must die, and we say so, and we hope so, Oh poor old man."

Dolphy

optical illusions

on the bass clarinet

sound like sonic confusion

but it's just something

not met before

score exploding

onto new terrain

don't need a weather vane

to hear the song the wind gave

in europe reaching out to souls

with george gervin

finger rolls of light

the vibraphone blinks

blue sights

navigation signals

in the blue night

sending messages from

stratocumulus cool heights

tony williams drums tic-toc

salvador dali trip clocks

melodies mesmerize minds

like a dream fox

dolphy watched ships

on the seine

as they reached docks

sailed rhythms

mingus and coleman

helped unlock

folks flock

stop talk

take stock

as their jaws drop

2 Aphorisms on Artistic Creation

Among the lifelong vocations of the artist is the fight against self-censorship. In a functionally insane society, the colonization of one's consciousness is composed of multiple layers - most of them undetected. To create something worthwhile, these levels of captured consciousness must be bypassed or exposed and dissolved.

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A central role of art in societies that have divorced themselves from ancient, Earth-rooted wisdom traditions is to make visible the crimes, idiocies and daily miseries that have become normalized and therefore invisible to the society's members.