Thursday, December 4, 2025
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Lazarus II -2022
LAZARUS II
Two summers ago
In the black night of Brooklyn
I
A sixty-nine year old man spewed blood
Into the bathroom tub
After wiping the retch
From my face
More spew, more blood, liters of blood red red red
Something not right
Something very wrong
And I went back to sleep
Planning to go to a hospital
If I make the morn__
At dawn
I crossed the East River
Not in an amubulance
In a taxi
To a 1st Avenue hospital
Inside the emergency room
The staff took one look
A scrum of nurses, orderlies, and doctors speed my body from ER to OR
Many hands stripped my old body naked
“Sir, can you hear me?
A young intern
Nod
“You are bleeding to death from the varices.”
“Varices?”
“Small stomach fissures."
A nod
"Do you have family in New York?”
Head shake from side to side
“Do you want to be revived?”
“From the dead?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”___
An oxygen mask
Over my mouth and nose
“If you have any prayers, say them.”
“Síoraíocht.”
The Celtic word for eternity
No meaning to Christians
Their only afterlifes
Heaven hell or purgatory__
None of that now
Only the hiss of gas
Propofol
Me
Into a Limbo
White light
Nothing, only white
There was something else___
Eternal nothingness
Síoraíocht times zero equals zero
This was death
This was eternity
I was cool with that__
And then I was back
Life
The waking eternity
Here
Pain
The Here not my own bed__
Their hospital
The pain mine.
None of this a dream
Sucked air
The other patient in the room
Not breathing
Never again
Lost to eternity___
Me
Hospital
Nurses
Doctors
An earnest doctor reading a chart
“You were very lucky. We stopped the bleeding.”
“I like luck.”
Ahd in Gaelic
“I have bad news.”
Plenty of bad news__
Cancer
Cirrhosis
The looming threat of death
The forever that death's eternity__
I 69
Alone in a hospital bed
In a city of millions
Bad news
It was all right
I had had a grand life__
And I was not dead yet
Still alive
Straddling eternity
No fear for the past, present or future or nothing__
I had died before
Car crashes
Beatings
Broken hearts
Whatever didn’t kill me
Made me wish I was__
My friends thought this was the end
Some saw death in my eyes
My children in Thailand prayed to Buddha
That I will live forever
People believed in life eternal
In Heaven, Limbo,or Hell
I had believed the same
As a child
Not now
I had had a good life___
New England, New York, California, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, Quebec, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Nepal, Tibet, Kenya, Tanzania, and Belize, Guatamala, Honduras, Peru, Jamaica
How can I forget India, the Ganges at dawn
The burning bodies with a raga drifting on the smoke from a ghat temple
Friends by the thousands
Two family in Thailand
Five children
Two grandchildren
A good life__
But I was not dead
Still alive
Straddling eternity
Why fight for life?
Why not accept this fate?
Acceptance
Surrender
Freedom__
Morphine made surrender easy
Free five days later
Never to drink again__
And there was still more to come___
Months passed
A year and more
Pain, jaundice, weight loss
Down to 142 pounds
People thought
I looked like a Rolling Stone
Keith Richards___
Ahead my last days
Fly to Thailand
Watch the sun set
Over the emerald green rice fields
My family by my side
Loaded on morphine__
Then a miracle__
Yulemas
An available transplant.
That night back in the OR
The room cuts to black
Clear light
I know this Limbo well
No gods, no heaven, no hell
Nowhere
Nothing
No one
The embrace of eternity
Goen from the white light
A detour
To London
The Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse
My body on a chopping block
Entrails scattered across the wood
Then snap back to life__
Sniff the air
Antiseptic smell
The gore of the abattoir gone
Clean sheets
The machines beep
A nurse gave me water
Tasting of life
My fingers touch
A black scar
Marking the execution of the old me.
A new me alive
Alive with another soul within me
Paula My donor
Forty years old
300 pounds
A suicide
I love her and she me
Old School Lazarus II
Where’s the morphine?__
From the white propofol extinction
Back from the Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse
Back to the eternity__
The new me
In a hospital bed
High over the East River
Not alone
Just Paula and Lazarus II
Wicked scars
Never dead before my time
Only dead to the time before now
Now a gray winter sky o’er Brooklyn
Time eternal
Because there is no time in nothingness
Only Nothing Paula and Lazarus II__
We are not lonely together
Living forever again
Remember from whence thee came and where we’re going
Ashes to Ashes not___
poetry lives with me. this poem has gone through many metamorphosis. Every time I read or recite it, the poem spawns newness with the previously unseen. Always alive like me and Paula and eternity and Síoraíocht__
HERMAPHRODITE by Peter Nolan Smith
Starting in 1984 the construction of IM Pei’s pyramid blocked the courtyard access to the Louvre Museum, leaving the ancient palace of the Bourbon kings mostly to art historians and a few tourists, however I had discovered that the museum possessed a second entrance on the Quai du Louvre and regularly wandered the museum’s desolate corridors to admire its vast collection famed for the Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of a quixotic woman was surrounded by a small crowd. Every other gallery in the Louvre had been empty. Maybe forty people gathered before the painting. I didn't get it and turned to leave. I didn't like crowds.
To the left lay an ancient white marble statue on a graying marble mattress of a prone naked woman with her back to me. A robe haphazardly wrapped around ankles. A left foot dangled in the air. Knees swiveled to heighten her buttocks' fullness. A few chips marred by her back. Another chipped her right shoulder. Her hair coiffed like a tame Medusa and her eyes blind as stone. Her face was at peace. I read the placard.
Le Borghese Hermaphroditus.
Hermaphroditus
Hermaphrodite.
My Catholic high school had us read Bullfinch's Mythology. The word's etymology originated from the union of the Greek gods Hermes and Aphrodite. I rounded the near-perfect statue to discover this succubus possessed a penis and breasts. A few more scars to her left arm. I saw not a hint of a vagina. I thought the model to have been a a young transvestite. My friend back in New York, Dove, was one. The guards watched the Mona Lisa. The Hermaphrodite garnered no attention from the tourists. Her body lay as an invitation. I had to touch the marble. My right palm slid across the stone thigh. Thousands of years ago the sculptor had created her from stone like Pygmalion had done so for Galatea as told by Ovid. I had also read his Metamorphoses in high school. Latin was my first second language. The first word we learned was amo. I love.
This statue had seduced men throughout the centuries. The placard explained that the Hermaphroditus had been found buried under the Diocletian Baths until its disinterment in 1618. The Borghese family possessed le Hermaphroditus, until the sleeping beauty had been sold to the Bourbon in the late-18th Century.
I took away my hand. No one had seen me. I left the Louvre in love with a treasure, who could never love me. It was alright. For me there was no love more faithful than unrequited love.
I learned through reading that Lady Townsend was said by Horace Walpole to have remarked, upon viewing his bronze copy of the sleeping hermaphrodite, that "it is the only happy couple she ever saw."
At that time I was employed as the Bains-Douches’ psychionomiste or doorman. The bains-Douches was the coolest boite-de-nuit in Paris along with le Privilege under thLa Palace disco. My friend Alabama Tony tended bar at Paris’ only Mexican restaurant. We threw a football in the cour or courtyard off Rue de Vielle Temple. The chestnut tree in the corner restricted our range and the cobblestones were murder on our feet. Still the French clientele were charmed by our re-enactment of Joe Namath and Don Maynard in Super Bowl III, especially after a menage a trois of margaritas. Young American models flocked to le Studio on Rue du Temple. The restaurant was a grand success and at night’s Alabama Tony played Lynard Skynard and Blue Cheer on his guitar to homesick Southern models, who loved the long-haired redneck for being Alabama Tony in a city of Yves and Jacques.
“You came all the way from Birmingham to hang out with girls from below the Mason-Dixon line?”
“Hold your horns, a pretty girl is a pretty girl, but even prettier with a drawl.”
“Can’t argue with you about that.” I was having an affair with his sister, a blonde army sergeant stationed in Germany. I had a thing for women in a uniform. After hearing about the Louvre’s desolation, Tony said, “I’d like to go with y’all.”
“You like Art?”
“Not even as a name for a boy, but I’d love to chunk a football in the Louvre, if it’s empty as you says.” Tony had a good arm and I was fast on my feet. The Studio’s touch football team had beaten every expat squad this side of the Seine. Tony strummed the opening chords of FREEBIRD.
“Maybe three people in each gallery.”
“Guards.”
“Few.”
“Then let’s do it.”
Next day the two of us entered the Louvre with a pigskin in Alabama Tony’s backpack. We climbed to the second-floor galleries overlooking the Seine the river. The afternoon sun glowed through unwashed windows the height of a three-story building. Epic paintings scaled the walls to the vaulted ceilings.
“The king used to live here? Pretty darned big palace.” Tony was impressed by the regal surroundings.
“Until 1682 when the Sun King moved to Versailles.”
“Louis Fourteen, right?” The City of Light had worked its magic on the redneck. He loved its history, as would anyone from Mobile, Alabama.
“One and the same and the palace stored their art collection until the Revolution.”
“Damn, the rich were rich back then and the poor were poor. Same as now.” “Except none of them had indoor plumbing and the upper-classes had to shit in a bucket same as the hoi polloi.”
“A bas le Roi.” Tony tugged out the football. No one else was in the long hall and he waved his left hand “Go long for the lower classes.”
I sprinted down the wooden floor and caught the long spiral around a secondary Delacroix. We were a little careful with our passes. These paintings were worth millions. A group of Japanese tourists appeared in the distance and Tony stashed the football.
“What y’all know about this ‘art’?”
“A little.” I had taken Art Appreciation 101 at university.
“Then give me a tour.”
“Okay.”
I introduced the Davids, Vermeers, George de la Tours, artifacts from ancient civilizations and royal jewelry learned from listening to the group guides during my previous visits and said, “Actually there is only one piece here I love.”
“The Mona Lisa?”
“Over-rated. But not far from it. When we get there, I’ll show you.”
I guided him to the Mona Lisa. Gawking foreign visitors stood before Leonardo’s masterpiece, which was considered the most famous painting in the world. The great artist’s muse Salai had sold the painting to Francis I for 4000 ecrus of gold, but we had not come here to see La Joconda and I told him, “Turn your head to the right.”
Tony swung his gaze to a reclining marble naked figure on a buttoned mattress.
“The Sleeping Hermaphroditus.”
“Hermaphrodite? I heard of them, but thought they were mythical like mermaids.”
“They exist. Both as man and a woman."
“You ever meet one?”
“At a carnival in Maine a barker wanted a dollar for a look. My mother considered the sideshow a blasphemy and dragged me from temptation.”
Tony stepped forward to examine the sheer white sleeping enigma of sexuality, its marble unblemished by war, riots, or neglect and he asked, “How old is it?”
“Dates back 2500 years. Artist unknown.”
“Old as dirt.”
“Yes, the statue had been lost for centuries. The Romans thought hermaphrodites were demons and cast them into the sea or rivers. Someone buried this to protect it from that fate. it was uncovered in the 17th Century. The statue became known as the Sleeping or Borghese Hermaphroditus, since it had been sold to the Borghese family, one of the richest in Europe. Old name. Old money. Old blood.”
“Lot of them uppity types in Paris. ‘Bama too.” Tony looked at the crowd before Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting. Visitors passed without a simple glance at the naked statue.
“They’re here for the Mona Lisa. Some people say that the sitter was Beatrice d'Este, the wife of Milanese duke, but the Leonardo supposedly said, “The Mona Lisa is androgynous—half man and half woman,” and the other model for the painting might have been da Vinci's lover. No one of them knows for sure just like no one knows the sculptor of leHermaphroditus.”
“L’Hermaphrodite is more beautiful and you consider this the most important piece in the Louvre?”
“Yes.” “If you had a choice, who would you take?”
“As A lover? L’hermaphrodite, bien sur. Leonardo’s model was his boyfriend. Bearded youth. I don’t play that way.”
Tony caressed the ancient stone.
“Cool and smooth.”
“Yes, but be careful touching it with someone else. You might fall in love.”
"That true."
"No."
He withdrew his hand and laughed, “You’ll got some funny stories.”
That night I dined at the Studio with Tony’s sister, Eliie. Her brother was with a runaway beauty from Louisiana. During dessert he suggested that they visit the Louvre.
“What for?” the blonde asked with a bayou accent.
“Because I want you to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“Herma. Don’t look so disappointed. Herma is very old. Italian. She sees nothing and everything. The French talk about a curse. How if you touch the statue with someone else, you’ll fall in love.”
“Sounds scary,” Tony’s sister, Ellie, wasn’t scared of anything. Her barracks in Germany were on the front line of the Iron Curtain. This was the height of the Cold War.
“I like scary.” The blonde signed up for the tour and we agreed to meet in the afternoon.
After dinner Tony departed with the blonde, Ellie and I walked back to my Marais hotel on Rue des Ecouffes and the army sergeant lay in bed, smelling of the Cold War, and asked, “So who is Herma? I hate secrets, so tell me the truth or you’re sleeping on the floor.”
“Herma is a statue. A beautiful statue of a Hermaphrodite. The best piece in the Louvre and neglected by everyone since she is next to the Mona Lisa.” I explained it in detail and she assumed the position. "Close, but you're thinner."
"And flesh, not stone."
I climbed naked into bed and caressed her flesh. Smooth as stone. Warm to the touch. Alive.
"I like you more."
“No accounting forbad taste. Like you and me.”
“Taste has nothing to do with us.”
Later the next afternoon the four of us met in the courtyard of the Louvre. Pigeons swirled in the air and the few tourists looked lost in the Pryamid's construction. We wandered over to the Seine entrance. Tony and I paid thirty-five francs for the girls and guided them to the riverside galleries, where the southern light off the Seine cloaked the Louvre’s forgotten passages in gold. We refrained from throwing the football and Tony ordered our guests, “Don’t look at the paintings.”
“Why not?” asked Ellie, expecting a good answer and the Lower Alabama native said, “Hundreds of thousand of people have seen them. Usually for only seventeen seconds according to art dealers and no painting are satisfied with an attention span of seventeen seconds.”
He fixed his gaze on the blonde. It lasted almost a minute.
“Forget Michelangelo, David, or Delacroix. You’re more beautiful than any of theses paintings and you’ll be more beautiful, if y’all don’t let them steal your beauty.”
“Like a camera stealing your soul,” asked the rookie model.
“Everything gets older faster when someone is watching.” Alabama Tony led us through the Louvre and the blonde believed everything he said with that mush-mouthed drawl, since he sounded like two hundred miles east of ‘home’.
“Where Tony learn that shit?” Ellie held my hand.
“I gave him a lesson or two.”
“I thought that bullshit sounded familiar.” She was familiar with my rap from two previous expeditions of Paris.
“Merde peut-etre, mais regardez pas les tableaux.”
“Let me guess. They want to steal our souls.”
Our eyes-down tour passed Bellini’s sculptures, Raphael’s cherubs, and the treasures of France, and at the Mona Lisa, where Tony announced, “Don’t lift your head, but y’all standing in front of the most famous painting in the world. Everyone knows its name. Maybe it’s a woman. Maybe it’s a man. She has a smile. No one knows why.”
“The Mona Lisa.” Even the blonde knew that and she was only eighteen.
The girls wanted to see the Mona Lisa, but Tony and I blocked their field of vision.
“The Mona Lisa is better known than the Crimson Tide football team and everyone wants fame, but to your left is the most exquisite statue in existence this side of the Boll Weevil Monument in downtown Enterprise, Alabama.”
“I hate that creepy thing.” Ellie shuddered with disgust.
“Well, this ain’t that.” Tony played his grits card with vingt-et-un cool and his French was impeccable for someone brought up north of Mobile. “Fermay tes ewes and donnez moi y’all hands.”
Our ‘dates’ obeyed his instruction and we led them to the Hermaphrodite.
“This is the Borghese Hermaphroditus. It’s not famous like the Mona Lisa, but the Hermaphrodite survived the fall of Rome. The Louvre is filled with Greek and Roman statues without noses, arms, or legs, but this statue escaped all harm for over two thousand years. It is immortal.”
Tony had the timing of a Delta tide and paused for a span of time not needing a count.
“Y’all can open your eyes.”
The statue’s whiteness glowed in the light of the approaching dusk.
“Maybe a boy, maybe a girl, but certainly not the Mona Lisa.” Alabama Tony pointed back to Da Vinci’s immortal painting.
“No one can touch the Mona Lisa, but anyone who touches the Borghese Hermaphroditus will fall in love.”
That line was my cue to finish up the tour. We had created the curse, but both of us were in awe of the statue’s power to have existed for centuries without any damage.
“You girls care to drink some wine in the Palais Royal?”
Ellie said yes and we retreated to a renowned cafe at the northern end of the garden. The barman knew our names. Les Bains and Studio were on his list of after-closing bars. We toasted the magic of the Borghese Hermaphroditus. Everyone was happy.
Throughout the following months we perfected our non-seeing tours of Le Louvre with other models, Sorbonne painters, dancers from the Crazy Horse, and wandering heiresses. Our best time from the Seine entrance to le Hermaphrodite was twelve minutes, but our luck couldn’t last as long as the existence of a naked transvestite’s statue.
Tony spent that winter with one girl. Tracy was a brunette from Vermont, a twenty year-old dripping with North Country innocence. Her smile was too lovely for a cover girl, but Tony had been blinded by her maple syrup brown eyes and I met him at the Studio to see how he was.
“I think she wants to get serious.”
“How serious?”
“I’m not seeing anyone else.”
Those words explained the sad faces on the Dixie girls at the Studio. Tony wasn’t playing FREEBIRD after last call anymore.
“She wants to go to the Louvre.”
“You going to give her the tour?”
“What you’ll think?”
“You like her?” I thought she was a good woman. Like me Traci was a New Englander.
“More than like.”
“Then do what you think is best as long as you remember the danger of the Hermaphrodite.”
“You mean I’ll fall in love?”
“It happened to me.” A young artist from La Ruche had dared me to touch Herma. I hadn’t looked at any woman since. We were in love.
“That falling love story’s a bunch of phooey. Intouched it and Didn't fall in love with you.” Tony smirked at my caution. “Besides Traci’s from Vermont.”
“What’s that have to do with it?”
“She’s just another Yankee girl.”
“And you’re Johnny Reb. Every town squares in Vermont had a statue of a Union soldier defiantly facing the South. The South will not rise again.”
“We will, you damn Yankee, but I want you to come along, so I don't touch Herma."
The next day Tony led the way through the museum. Tracy was smart for a teenager. She had studied art at a real school in Brattleboro. She pouted at his warning to not regard the other paintings.
“I didn’t come to Paris to be told what to do. I could have stayed in Vermont for that.” Tracy pointed to the wall. “That painting's English. That’s French and that’s Delacroix’s LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE.”
“How you know that?” Tony had been coming to the Louvre on his own. He looked at the paintings. The color of the light showed him the truth about Art. Paris had him in its power.
“I’ve been here before.” Tracy stepped closer.
“I’ve never seen you here.” Tony held her hand and felt the softness of a stalled breeze.
“And I’ve never seen you here until now.”
A vagrant ray of sunset struck the wall mirror. The only camera was their memory. Time slowed to the pace of their breathing and she hushed, “What now?”
“I’ll show you my favorite piece in the Louvre.”
“The Sleeping Hermaphroditus.”
She laughed like she had been waiting for this punchline.
“How you know?”
“Every model in Paris talks about how you two bring them here and have them touch the Sleeping Hermaphroditus’ ass to fall in love. Funny, but they all loved you for a few days. Maybe that’s the power of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus. You willing to try?”
“I am, if you are.”
Tracy led him toward the Mona Lisa. They passed the gaggle of admirers before Leonardo’s painting and stopped before the blemishless statue.
“It’s so perfect.”
“Saved from a grave of dirt.”
“To sleep on stone.”
They touched the marble together.
That autumn the two got married at the Studio. Leaves from the old Chestnut tree covered cobblestones. We drank tequila and danced to the owner playing OLD ROCKY TOP on the fiddle.
At the end of the night Tony and I threw a football in the medieval Marais courtyard. Two high stakes Ivy League lawyers challenged us to a game. We beat them like rented mules. Cobblestones were our home advantage and we toasted our victory, yelling “Joe Namath.”
Tony stopped.
“What?”
“Look.”
I did.
Tracy beamed at her football hero. Neither of us had broken a window in the courtyard. At dawn the newlyweds went home. The Louvre was never the same for me after that. As IM Pei’s Pyramid took form, people once more discovered the museum.
French first. English. Dutch. German. Japanese. It wasn't same with all them. it no longer belonged to me. The foreign crowds flocked to see the masterpieces. All of them stopped at the Mona Lisa.
As always few bothered to at le Borghese Hermaphroditus, because the fame of Mona Lisa was a tough act to follow even for the cool stone of her sleeping beauty.
None touched her.
I always did, because nothing else felt more of eternity, when you wanted to fall in love during football season.
Even in Paris.
Go long.
Frank the owner of Le Studio, Tracy, and Tony 1983.
"Her prayers found favour with the gods: for, as they lay together, their bodies were united and from being two persons they became one. As when a gardener grafts a branch on to a tree, and sees the two unite as they grow, and come to maturity together, so when their limbs met in that clinging embrace the nymph and the boy were no longer two, but a single form, possessed of a dual nature, which could not be called male or female, but seemed to be at once both and neither."
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Nude Modeling Day # 1 - Mar 19, 2025
On Canal Street
In Chinatown
Seven minutes to 1
On time
Climb three flights of stairs
First floor a wonton shop
Second floor a Mah-Jong parlor
The clack of tiles
Third floor a massage parlor
A faint aroma of tobacco
One more set of steps to the drawing studio___
Seven older artists before easels
Sitting on folding chairs
Fluorescent lights overhead
I say hello
No hello back
They are here to draw
I am here to be naked
Three hours
$75 cash___
Strip in a corner
A green robe
Ralph Lauren
Twelve years old tattered
Covering my nakedness
I 72
In a state of ruin
Like the Acropolis
Once we had been something___
Stand on the platform
The wood clean to my feet
Robe off from my shoulders
See me
I now officially a nude model
Timer on
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
Three hours
Sit in a folding chair
Take the pose
Not Rodin's THE THINKER
$25 an hour
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
I see no one___
They see my body
Wonder how they see me
Doesn't matter
I am only a naked body
Lines, curves, shadows
I look at none of them
Eyes ahead
To the brick wall across Canal Street___
Strange to be the object of no desire.
Thirty years past my prime
Skin hangs off my bones
Muscles shadows of ruin
A long scar across my abdomen___
No one talks
Pencils scratch on paper
Electric heaters moan
I am naked
Not cold___
No phone in my hand
No music
No talking
My mind runs rampant
Seeking to land somewhere
I pick prime numbers
1,3,5, 7 ad 1001
1001 is divisible by 7 and more
It is not a prime
I did the math in my head___
Change focus
The Sexual Revolution.
So long ago
So forgotten by the followers of the Nailed God
I sit naked
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
My pose
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Naked
Exposed
Dream of the Sexual Revolution
1964 to Now
Michelangelo's David
I am bigger___
More reminescences
1967
Finding Steven Hammer's THE ITCH
The stroke book had all the answers
Atop Nahanton Hill
Glossy sex magazines in the Combat Zone
The smell of Pine Sol
XXX double-bills in Times Square
Sticky floors
Libbie in the hallway of the Ritz Hotel
Alice crying God in a swimming pool
Beer little Beer on Soi Six
Elena under the Brooklyn Bridge
Candida at the Piscine Deligny
Sharon everywhere
Ro
I was her angel under candle light
She got me this job
Nude modeling
Three hours
$75 cash
I look down
Not a rise
A flaccid penis
Just like Michelangelo's David__
Twenty minute pose
Five minute break
Furious strokes from one artist
They are all older than thirty
Two women
I turn off my wicked thoughts
Resuming the pose
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
I fall on Tinoretto's drawings
A revelation
At the Morgan Library
The bare bones of paintings
All starts with pencil and paper
Light shadows form lines
Filling in the space
This is not Magic, only Art ___
Once again my gaze on the brick wall
Across Canal Street
The bricks yellow orange___
Two more sessions to go
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
The Adonis theater
On Eighth Avenue north of ShowWorld
Naked, but for a jock strap.
A little stiffness
The Sexual Revolution
Is not dead
For in me
It is alive
Simmering in our veins
Awaiting the awakening___
Last session
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
My mind blank
No thoughts
No erection
Across the street
The bricks yellow tan
Only four artists left
One leaves
Rolls up his drawing
Color pencils
Good work
Looks nothing like me
I am only a naked body
My mind blank
No erection___
Maybe next time
I'll take Viagra
Viva le Sexual Revolution___
ps I was later fired from this job for tardiness__
ps The penis on Michelangelo's 17-foot-tall David statue measures approximately 5.43 inches long. I am slightly bigger. Just slightly.
Hippie Power Forever
"I am very happy to see so many flowers here today and that is why I want to remind you that flowers by themselves have no power whatsoever."
Herbert Marcuse from a speech at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, London 1967
I was a late blooming hippie in 1969. Before that I was just a normal American teenager, believing in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Never In God We Trust. I missed out on Woodstock. I dropped LSD in 1970. I reached San Francisco well after the Summer of Love. I cut my long hair in 1974 to convey a good image to a judge ruling over my charge of a high-speed chase. I was driving a VW. I still believe that flowers have a power. Maybe I'm wrong, but this autumn the roses appeared once more in Fort Greene park and to me that's a miracle. I wake up every day expecting for the sun to shine. This is the dawning of Aquarius.
"When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars". Lyrics from Aquarius the musical.
According to Wikipedia Analytical psychologist Carl Jung mentions the "age of Aquarius" in his book Aion, believing that the "age of Aquarius" will "constellate the problem of the union of the opposites". In accordance with prominent astrologers, Jung believed the "age of Aquarius" will be a dark and spiritually deficient time for humanity, writing that, "It will no longer be possible to write off evil as the mere privation of good; its real existence will have to be recognized in the age of Aquarius". ps Aion a Greek deity ruled the cosmos and eternity where the future is a recurring past or vice versa.
In 2025 evil seems to have triumphed over good, especially in this country/ Many of my fellow citizens worship an all-powerful America and aspire to gain wealth trhough greed. Their trillions of dollars exist only in the wealth cloud via stocks and crypto-currency. None of which really exist, although they are able to acquire estates, private yachts, young wives, and a elitist life in which no crime applies to them.
I have nothing or almost nothing.
A poet's life.
This summer I slept in a tent on a beach.
I write what I want. I seek neither fame nor fortune. I only spend what I have, whihc is almost nothing, since I am a river to my people. My families et al. Deconsume, Deconsume. All of us together now.
ps foto is from 1973 when I drove taxi in Boston.
Birthday Suit Swimming - 2009
Man and woman are emerged naked from their mothers. Nudity is our natural state. Adam and Eve roamed through the Garden of Eden without any Gucci grape leaves covering their genitalia. despite this biblical precedent New York retains several laws on the penal code banning public nakedness. Most were written to prevent the spread of pornography, however law § 245.01 against exposure of a person's private parts. Friday night I protested this odious restriction by skinny-dipping at the dumpsters pool along the Gowanus Canal.
It was late. The full moon was hidden by clouds. Our host Jocko Weyland green-lighted my nakedness and I climbed onto the deck with my female accomplice. Shelley was wearing a bathing suit and expressed no need to bare her flesh to the four elements on a summer night. The glimmer of silver moonlight bathed the transformed parking lot and I stripped off my jeans and shirt. I was commando on the underwear front.
The swimmers in the pools laughed, as I approached the water. Fifty-seven year-old naked men are funny, especially since my hands were cupped over my genitalia to avoid any embarrassment about the size of my penis. I leaped in the water. It was cold. Not as cold as the air, but my cock shriveled to a cashew. The other bathers veered away from me, until my accomplice joined me. Shelley was young. Twenty-two. A fellow poet. The companion of a female tends to lessen the collective disdain for naked old men. I kept my distance. Room for the Holy Ghost. I was no longer a pervert.
Only cold and I climbed from the dumpster filled with water to dressed in my clothing. No one had really saw my member and I was glad. I'm definitely bigger than Michelangelo's DAVID.
At least after I'm shaken off the cold.
I only believe in indecent exposure in the bedroom.
Both alone and with my wife.
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Thai Tattoos Too -2007
Pattaya must be the per capita capitol of farangs with tattoos. Shirtless westerners parade the streets to exhibit the beauty of their body art, despite the collateral damage to the colored flesh from the tropical sun. Most tattoos are eagles, dragons, and declarations of never-ending love to go-go girls festooned with vows of fidelity to previous girlfriends. Occasionally you come across tattoos of incredible stupidity.
Several years ago I spotted a twenty year-old Brit with the name DAVID tattooed down his spine.
"Why David?" I asked him.
“So people know who they just saw.”
"You're David?" Conventioneers wear a simple name tag to say hello.
"The one and only." A name tag through his pierced nipple would have been a more effective form of introduction.
"If you say so." David is the second most common name in America. The same has to be true for Britain.
Later I mentioned the stupidity of this particular David to my friend, Jamie Parker. We sat at the Buffalo Bar on Sai 3. More than a few of the girls had tattoos and a trio of British lager louts bore years of blue ink on their forearms, necks, and faces.
"Can't you imagine Michelangelo's Statue of David with a tattoo?"
"Good, unless it wasn't on that little acorn of a penis." Jamie hated male nude statues and their mini-cocks. "You know that I don't have any tattoos. "
I didn't say anything about the tracks on his arm. Jamie had been clean for ten years now.
"Me neither." The nuns at Our Lady of the Foothills warned their students that any skin art banned them from heaven. I had none, even though my faith was atheism. The sisters were excellent teachers.
"Last thing I needed as a kid was an identification scar or body marking." Jamie had been a criminal in his younger years. "In prison cons tattoo to their bodies out of boredom or rebellion. I was always thinking that one day I'd be on the outside and I intended to stay on the outside, but a couple of months ago I was taking a whitewater rafting trip at the Sabaii Massage."
"I know the place." Whitewater rafting was the local euphemism for a soapie with a naked girl or two.
"This one spinner had the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE to the American flag tattooed on her back. Being with her made me feel a little patriotic."
"I can imagine the feeling." Neither of us had been back in the USA for years. "I have a friend who had MADE IN THE UK tattooed on his forehead."
"Stupid place for a tattoo."
"Even worse his mother told him he had been born in Poland."
"Dumb Polack."
"What about Thai tattoos?"
"I don't talk about that. I'm a guest of this country and those tattoos are magic." Jamie had a healthy fear of red-lom.
"Traditional Thai tattoos or 'sakyant' are supposed to protect the wearers from misfortune and evil spirits and anyone getting men tattooed are asked to obey the five following rules; honor your parents, be faithful to your wife, no drugs, don't eat any fruit from off the ground, and no oral sex with women."
"I'm good with honoring my parents, faithful to my wife, and fruit off the trees, unless you're hungry."
"I'm good with most of them too." The oral sex was impossible." "My problem with tattoos has been finding one I could live with the rest of my life. 69, Born to be Wild, Mom, the name of my son or daughter might have fit the bill."
"But not the Pledge of Allegiance."
"Not a chance." I don't need to prove my allegiance to the USA."
"I doubt that poor girl knows what she’s wearing."
"Probably true, but America salutes her patriotism."
We lifted our beer glasses to toast her.
"USA USA USA."
The Brits at the bar glared at us. Jamie glared right back. We weren't going to heaven, but we were in Pattaya and as anyone knows who has lived in the Last Babylon for more than two weeks it's paradise on earth.
December 6, 1985 Paris Journal
What a night! Hundreds upon hundreds of BCBG young people thronged to the Royal Lieu on a side street off Boulevard l'Opera. Total chaos, but Jacques Negrit and I filtered in the wanted and told the unwanted to please go somewhere else. Out capacity was 260. We let in close to 500. We made everyone pay. 150 Francs. Almost $15. And drinks were $10. The clientele didn't care. They came from the 16th Arrondisement. The BCBG or Boone Chic Bonne Gens were slobs. They thought themselves better than us. Maybe they were right, but we treated those types to a simple, "Not tonight."
A good night. Good money for all of us. Thanks to Albert de Paname and Serge Duprat. DJs Mondial.
Black Friday Plus One
On Black Friday November 28, 2025. I awoke at 5:55am. My alarm went off at 6am. I rose from bed and shower, then packed my bag to catch the 7:38 Montauk train. The sun had yet to rise over Brooklyn. Thirty minutes passed fast. I was ready to go. Not quite. I couldn't find my phone. I was alone. No one to help me find it. I have a favorite adage.
"You can never find something, if you are looking for it."
I couldn't find my phone. It was here. Someplace and the clock on the wall was ticking. No logner 6:30, but 6:41. The Atlantic Terminal was a twenty-three minute walk over Front Greene Park. I heard a ring. My phone was under a stack of photos. I stuck it in my pocket and ran downstairs. 6:51am. The B54 hauled into the station and I rode it down Myrtle Avenue to the Brooklyn Hospital. 7:01am. I double marched to the terminal. Ten paces at a run. Twenty paces at a fast walk. 7:29.
At Ali's coffee stand I spent $5 for a coffee, buttered bagel, and bottle of water. The first money spent on Black Friday. Downstairs at the LIRR ticket booth I give Jessie cash for a one-way ticket to Montauk. $15.75 with the senior discount. A sunny three-hour ride to Montauk. ETA 10:58 ETA. Richie Boy drives me to the store at 771 Montauk Highway. I get us coffees at Something Good, which we call something expensive. $10 cash for two small cups. Lunch $8 for a slice and a can of Root Beer. Cash.
And that completed my spending for Black Friday. The kickoff day for the Christmas consumer frenzy of gluttony inspired by the feeding fest of Thanksgiving.. Nothing bought from the Amazon, no visit to the mall, no use of the ATM card, nothing purchased other than food and travel.
Not so my fellow countrymen who topped 2024's Black Friday spending by 9% with a total of $11.8 billion. According to AI More than 87.3 million people shopped online in the U.S., while 81.7 million shopped in physical stores or almost 50% of the US population found themselves glutting on widescreen TVs, slave-made sneakers, clothing and corporate items, although part of the increase can be attributed to 47's tarriffs on foreign imports and the increase in inflation due to his economic chaos, even worst was poeple recognition that there wasn't anyting new to buy. Just the same old same old. Still they loyally reacted to the constant barrage to buy from the TV ads like sheep led to the slaughter.
Americans will spend an average of $274 this holiday season. I will spend more, but not in the USA. My family is in Thailand. I will sent them $$$. The can spend it as they want. It is the season of cheer.
ps my total expenditures for Black Friday amounted to $23. It was best I could not do on Black Friday 2025. Always the beach bum.
ZOMBIE DREAMS by Peter Nolan Smith
My boss at the diamond exchange wasn’t happy with my taking off two weeks.
“He’s paying me $1000 a week.” I had been asking for a raise for the last year.
“Have a good trip.” Manny had a good head for numbers. He was saving my salary and fought off another attempt for an increase in my salary.
“Sei Gesund.” I wished the eighty year-old well in Yiddish. His only other language was almost dead.
A week later Brock and I flew to Chicago and hired a car at O’Hare. The Scot didn’t know how to drive, but he unfolded a map to plot out a route on the Interstates.
“No fucking interstates.” I ripped the map off his lap and threw it in the backseat.
“Aren’t the interstates faster?” Brock wanted to visit five statues in St. Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis and we had eight days to cover six big states.
“Only if you’re heading to shopping mall.” I-80 was rammed with SUVs and long-haul trucks. I pointed out a state trooper cruising in the opposite direction. “We want to stay far away from them.”
“Aren’t there speed traps on the back roads?” Brock’s vision of rural America had been formed by the movies DELIVERANCE and EASY RIDER.
“The cops go where the money is and that’s the interstates.” I turned off I-80 at exit for Peoria and turned to Brock. “Welcome to The Fly-Over.”
“Fly-Over?” The Scot was unfamiliar with the American term.
“This is the land you fly over from New York to LA.” The square states of the Midwest are mostly flat corn fields. They offer little for New Yorkers, Californians, and Europeans.
“I get it.” Brock relaxed in his seat. He had chosen me for my ability to take the least obvious course of action for the next week we avoided the Interstates like a plague.
Our path wandered along a flooded Illinois River down the broad Mississippi across the spring farmland of Missouri into the terra incognita of Iowa.
Sometimes my Scottish friend and I didn’t have any human contact for hours. The straight roads were devoid of cars. Everyone was on the Interstate heading to a WalMart.
South of Des Moines I remarked to Brock, “Not many people living out here.”
“No reason for anyone to live out here.” The small towns were empty and the big cities looked, as if they had been hit by a neutron bomb.
“Young people move out as soon as they finish high school.” The farmboys treated their boredom with crystal meth. They hid well of of sight.
“Leaving only the dead and the dying.”
“Like we were in a zombie movie.” It was almost as if the real world had been replaced by scenes from MAD MAX II and I accelerated to 100 mph. We hadn’t seen any police cars in days.
“I haven’t seen any zombies.” Brock scanned the bare expanse of fields on either side of the road.
“They would starve out here.” Zombies liked cities, because fat people were slower than them. “I once had a horrible dream about zombies.”
“Really?” Brock took out his camera and shot a minute of the passing void. This trip was as much about us as the sculptor.
“It was 1975. I was 23 at the time. I had caught a Trois Estellas bus from Monterrey, Mexico to Texas.” I hadn’t thought about that bus in ages. driving the car must have resurrected that memory from the grave. “It was a long ride and I was reading a book by HP Lovecraft. THE TERROR AT INNSMOUTH. The bus stopped in a small town. I ate a taco. It tasted a little funny and that night I fell sick with food poisoning. I checked into a small hotel at the border. The Mexican side was cheaper. I lay on the bed with a fever. I read my book and fell asleep. Sometime in the night I dreamed I was being chased through a garden by slow-moving zombies.”
“I hate the way zombies moved fast in RESIDENT EVIL.” My Scottish friend was a horror film buff and he turned to camera to me. A nod was the signal to start my monologue.
“Slow zombies are classic, but there were too many of turtle dead in my dream.” I had told his story a thousand times. It was like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “They cut off my escape and I ran to a gazebo. Old screens to keep out mosquitoes covered the windows. I locked the flimsy door. The zombies huddled around the gazebo. Their breath smelled of rotting flesh. They scrapped at the screen with long yellow fingernails. Their teeth ground in anticipation of sinking into my flesh, then a voice deeper than a six-foot grave said, “Tell us the secret of human life.”
“The secret of human life?” Brock like interrupting my spiel. He felt the breaks gave me time to collect my thoughts.
“I didn’t know what the secret of human life was and there was no stalling the zombies either. When they’re hungry, they’re hungry. They broke through the screens. I shut my eyes expecting the worse.” I usually stopped here to check, if I hadn’t lost my audience.
“You’re not supposed to die in dreams.” Brock was listening to every word. He picked up the map. We were coming to a turning.
"Freud said everything was driven by pleasure or death. Death in dreams was a way of understanding your personal sexual repression levels or you hated yourself, which wasn’t the case, since I was 23.” I put on the left-turn signal. The intersection didn't even have a name.
“Freud’s full of Oepidal shit. I’ve seen photos of his mother. She wasn’t worth killing his father for, of course Jung had a different take on death in a dream.
“Screw both of them.” My story had no place for dead psychiatrists. That territory was reserved for Woody Allen. “I tried to wake up, but couldn’t and I heard the voice say, “Tell us the secret of human life and I’ll let you live for another minute.”
“So what happened?” Brock was expecting a horrible demise.
“I realized the secret of human life was that no matter how bad the 61st second would be I still wanted the next 60. The urge to live.”
“And did you tell them to secret?”
“No, I woke up and foiled their attempt to destroy Mankind."
"A hero."
"It's not everyone who saves humanity in their sleep." It had seemed so real, but my flesh bore no teeth marks. " So I’m not really scared of zombies.”
“No?” Brock said that word, as if he wasn’t convinced about their status as myth.
“Zombies exist only in movies and video games. Not all of them bad. You ever see SHAUN OF THE DEAD?”
“That’s not a real zombie movie.” Brock was a traditionalist as was to be expected from a Scot.
I agreed that the British flick wasn't scary, but it was funny and after my dream I like funny zombies better than scary ones. We drove west toward Kansas City. They supposedly had some pretty women their according to Wilbur Harrison’s hit song from 1959.
A pretty girl had to be more fun than a zombie.
Hibiscus and Angel Jack (the Angels of Light) lost to AIDS
Mary Lou Harris posted this phtoto on Fun Gallery. At first I thought these boys belonged to San Francisco's infamous Cockettes dance troupe. Paul Doughery added that Hibiscus appeared in Bernie Boston's Pulitzer Prize-nominated photograph, Flower Power; he was the turtleneck sweater-wearing protester photographed putting flowers into the gun barrels of a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion. Lost soldiers of the Sexual Revolution. This info thanks to Mary Lou Harris, Paul Dougherty, and Fun Gallery. We are still coming for the children. Someone has to save them. Long live flower power.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Mudd Club August 1979
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Mission Delta 88
People drove big cars in the early 70s. My father bought a four-door Delta 88 Royale in 1973. Only 7000 were made that year. The overhead-valve high-compression V8 engine owed its existence to muscle cars such as the GTO. The Delta 88 was no family car. A heavy foot on the pedal rocketed the ton of steel to 100 mph with ease. The tundraesque back seat was designed for teenage submarine races. I had been arrested once for a high-speed chase. The Delta 88 begged for gas. My father rarely let me drive this Detroit monster. It was a bad story waiting for a beginning.
Late summer of 1975. My cousin Cindy had fell in love with a student from Oxford. His family hailed for Rhodesia. His uncle founded National Geographic. A step up from her previous beau, Joe, who had given her a V-8 engine the previous Christmas.
Cindy was flying to London to meet Oliver. She was 22. No parental supervision. Our goodbyes ran long at her house in Wollaston, Massachusetts. Her mother cried a salty Neponset River. My mother joined the current of tears. The two sisters were very close, but the clock ticked overtime on their theatrics. Her father didn't want to say good-bye. Uncle Dave looked at his watch.
12:10.
Cindy's flight was at 12:45. The distance to Logan Airport was 14 miles. Cindy ran to the front door. Someone had to drive here to the airport fast. Uncle Dave looked around the room. His son was too young. My older brother was in law school. His eyes fell on me. He held up his car keys.
A Ford Pinto. Another American car unsafe at any speed.
"They'll never make it in that." My mother stuck the Delta 88's key in my hand. My father opened his mouth. My mother's regard shut it. "Get her there on time."
"I'll do my best." I had driven taxi three years during college. My diploma read 'sin laude'. No one booked more money on the weekend than me. Boston was my city. I took the keys.
"In one piece." Uncle Dave said what my father couldn't.
"I'll call from the airport."
12:11 I started the car. The V-8 was in shape. Our mechanic loved big engines. 303 cubic inches. I goosed the gas and turned on WBCN. BALLROOM BLITZ by Sweet. My two sisters wanted to come along for the ride. My mother stopped them.
"Better only two." She tapped her watch. Cindy's boyfriend was several social stratae higher than ours. We were family.
"No red lights." Cindy fastened her seat belt. She was in love. Women are funny in that state. They have no fear.
"No red lights." My mental map counted four. The Quincy cops changed shifts at noon. Their schedule worked in our favor. The Delta 88 peeled rubber from Anderson Street. Cindy said one word, "Faster."
The Delta 88 fishtailed onto Newport Avenue. A straight line to North Quincy. Traffic was light. Cindy and I had protested against the war in Vietnam. She pulled out a joint.
"I got to get rid of this before I get on the plane."
"Light it up." The light at Beale Street was green. We were going 70. The road dipped past the intersection. The Delta 88 traveled a hundred feet in the air. The suspension prevented our panning out on the asphalt. I pushed the engine. 80. 90. 95. I passed two cars like they were running on lead glue. The lights at West Squantum Street went yellow.
I obeyed the old adage.
"Yellow means faster."
Horns blared in our passage. We were in another time zone. Nothing was in my rearview mirror but empty road. We smoked the joint in peace for several seconds.
"Keep your eyes open." We whipped into Neponset Circle like Bonnie and Clyde. No one was prepared for outlaws. I stomped on the gas. The V-8 honored Detroit with power. I was back up to 100 up the onramp of the Expressway.
"12:17." Cindy had a Cartier watch. Her beau had given it to her as a token of his love. The watch kept good time. WBCN's DJ segued to Slade's "Mama Weer All Crazee Now". Cindy was more into Cat Stevens, but TEA TO THE TILLERMAN was not writing for this ride.
More luck.
No traffic on Route 3. No cops either. I hit 110 at the Mass Ave exit.
"12:20." I was ahead of schedule. The odometer had gained 8 miles. Only 6 more to go.
"You see any cops?"
Cindy had better eyes than me.
"No."
The Delta 88 reached 110 entering the tunnels of Central Artery. I dropped down to 60 in the Sumner Tunnel and we arrived at British Airways' terminal at 12:26. Cindy jumped out of the car. She was carrying one bag. A wave and my cousin was inside the terminal. A state trooper appeared from the right. My trembling hands tensed on the steering wheel. The plastic melted into my flesh.
"Move the car, sport."
"Yes, officer."
I drove away according to the traffic laws of the Massachusetts Commonwealth. I stopped at a bar on Mass Avenue. Kelly's. They had 50 cents beer. Three of them brought me back to earth.
I didn't get back to Wollaston until 1:30.
"Did she get away okay?" My aunt wanted to know.
"Fine."
I told them about the trip intown.
None of them believe me.
"What about the red lights?"
"They were none."
None of them after that statement believed me.
None of them except Uncle Dave.
He thanked me with a beer and I was grateful.
Still am.
Just the way I am.
Friday, November 28, 2025
9th Street Station - Gowanus
Burning Credit Cards
In 2011 Antonio Villaraigosa Mayor of LA has accused the Occupy LA protestors of damaging the grass in their campsite. Riots police have been deployed to protect the lawn from further harm.
"After 56 days of not enforcing three city laws that prohibit the use of that park, the time is now," announced Police Chief Beck, however the midnight deadline passed without the planned eviction, thus disrupting the security of the nation. Tear gas, billy clubs, and officers trained by Homeland Security to quell violent demonstrators remain at the ready.
Banks are worried that the protests will disrupt the holiday buying frenzy, but shoppers faithfully swarmed to the malls on Black Friday to outspend 2010's orgy of consumerism by 7%. ATMs were flooded by consumers eager to rescue the economy from the recession, each time getting hit by a charge of $1.50. The banks reap over $2 billion from ATMs along with another $36 billion in fees from the masses. All of this is profit and in this country profit is the bottom line for the corporation.
Carry cash, comrades.
Never buy what you can't afford, unless the aim is to never pay the credit card bills.
Don't worry you credit rating is shit.
Burn the cards to the limit.
You have nothing to lose but a good time.
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Black Friday Beer
Today on Black Friday millions of Americans hit the shopping malls to purchase marked-down electronics and toys. This frenzied spending spree kicked off the Christmas shopping season. This year's Black Friday was an all ugly affair and the event has getting uglier by the year.
The term 'black Friday originated from Philadelphia retailers' description of the four-week holiday season as one that turned the red on their books into black.
The BBC estimated that nearly half America participated in the madness.
Yesterday I restrained from assaulting the XXXL Mall on Fulton Street and purchased two cans of beer from Ralph's Meats on Lafayette Street in Fort Greene. He wasn't opened, but Ralph had some beer for me. We are old school.
They went down so good that I'm thinking of drinking some more today.
Happy Boozy Saturday.
ps the bronze Ballantine beer cans are from Jasper Johns.
No Black Friday For Ken
WRITTEN 11/27/20
Every Black Friday American consumerism outgrossed the previous year's gluttonous excesses, as shoppers descended on the XXXL malls to buy corporate crap at discounted prices. The hoi polloi in the millions fight over wide screen TVs, iPhones, and Barbie dolls. Having never participated in the capitalist frenzy, I left the Fort Greene Observatory on Friday and headed down to the nearest 99 Cent store on Myrtle Avenue only to discover that the management had opted out of the post-Thanksgiving Day tradition.
"Nothing is on sale." The clerk waved me away from the counter.
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
I accepted my defeat and exited from the store with a 99 Cent roll of toilet paper.
No one on Myrtle carried a shopping bag, except for a frazzled white suburban mother in exile. Her daughter had an iPhone. She was happy, but I had to ask myself, "Why doesn't anyone fight over Ken dolls?
The answer was that it's a Barbie World.
She rocks.
Naked or not.
Fugly Americans
Written 11/27/2020
When I was young, I shopped at different stores for different gifts.
The prices were good and the quality guaranteed the products might last six months or more.
Throughout the 21st Century Sam Walmart and his family has eliminated the corner stores, the main streets of America, and the curio stores by a scorched-earth cutthroat policy against middle-class businesses. Their success has been lauded by Democrats and the GOP free marketeers and this Black Friday Walmart proudly oredicted record sales for the day after Thanksgiving.
According to Al-Jazeera a spokesman for the chain predicted that in a span of four hours Thursday evening, Walmart stores across the nation processed 10 million register transactions. On Thanksgiving, Walmart.com received 400 million page views, and on Friday, by noon, customers had purchased 2.8 million towels, 2 million televisions and 1.4 million computer tablets.
"We had record-breaking Black Friday results in our stores."
Videos showed the hordes of shoppers hurtling through the doors to fight over TVs, laptops, tablets, dolls, and anything on sale.
"Buy, buy, buy."
Most of it in my mind was crap and all of it was produced outside of the USA.
Protests against Walmart's starvation wages were met by police.
Courts attempted to block demonstrators with injunctions.
Walmart pays $8/hour in the slave states. That come to about $320/week before taxes. No one can live on that wage and an organizer told Al Jazeera, "We are not slaves. We are people just as well. At the end of the day, we want the things that the people who run Walmart have ... We shouldn't have to pick and choose what bills we are going to pay."
In her four months at Walmart, McKinley says, she has made little over $2,400.
Truthfully Americans should boycott Black Friday, Walmart, and shopping malls, however their minds have been warped by millions of TV ads and I have to say that revolution in America will not depend on those consumers thronging to Walmart.
Before they were the lumpen proletariat.
Now they are simply victims of the global free market.
They produce nothing, they buy crap, and they believe the lies on TV.
These victims of zombie economics number about 200 million Americans with another 100 million of their income-challenged countrymen yearning to join their ranks.
The filthy rich are only .0001% of the population.
They wouldn't be caught dead at Walmart or anywhere where their class wasn't dominant.
That leaves 30 million Americans possibly struggling for good or bad or the in-between.
People get ready.
Our time will come.
Death to Flat-Screen TVs.
Long live the GTO.
And Kim Novak.
Oh Merida 2026
I would love to come down. Get a little motorcycle. Back in the late-80s I hitchhiked around the Yucatan. Mostly between Cancun and Tulum. The Mayans were always friendly, although on Sundays they always wanted me to drive. Too drunk on cheap Agua Caliente to stay on the road.
I have a novel I want to write about a series of bank robberies by a gang on Easter morning in Cancun. They escape on an airplane, whose engine falters and the plane crashes into a remote cenote in the "tu'ux tu" or the middle of nowhere. I'm sure that was where your property was, when you first moved there. The loot from the robbery goes to the bottom of the cave. Robbers, Mayan mystics, an archaeologist seeking the cure for baldness, and a religious sect seeking to convert the Mayans, who think they are ETs, because they don't sweat like most gringos. I have it complete in my head.
It's a gray day here.
I'm going nowhere for Thanksgiving, yet I have much to be thankful for.
I'm here from Monday to Wednesday and then free post-Xmas when I will move from 387 Myrtle to the NYU professor dorms while I await city elderly housing.
Off to Montauk on the 8:18 on Friday morning.
Oh Merida.
SHAWALLAGAH PA. BET ON CRAZY
First published 2008
Thanksgiving Day plus One started the Holiday season on West 47th Street. Accordingly the majority of the ground floor exchanges extend their operating hours and stay open every ding-dong day until Christmas. Throughout the week regular customers and natives to New York flock here, but on the weekends they are replaced by busloads of tourists from Shawallagah, PA or Dover Delaware. Armed with a box of chicken and a bag of quarters, they gawk at the jewelry and demand incredulously, "Those aren't real diamonds, are they?"
"All of our diamonds are real and set in 14K and 18K gold or platinum jewelry," I answer cordially, for the most part.
We might enjoy poking fun at these out-of-towners, yet their purchases can add to our profit line, so once they're in the store we treat them as we would any valued customer, even if they're only looking for a Big Apple charm or want to tell us about an opal ring their great-grandaunt possessed back in Schwallagah, PA. As Manny, my boss says, "Be nice. It can't hurt."
While my company prided itself in dealing relatively fairly with members of the trade and our customers, there are a few diamond dealers who prey on these unsuspecting tourists like wolves tailing a cripple calves and every year ABC NEWS1 20/20 puts out a report to warn about unscrupulous diamond dealings on 47th Street.
Typically during holiday season the show's producers send out a young man to purchase a diamond engagement ring and inevitably ends up getting nailed by the same dealer on the corner of Sixth Avenue. The entire process of the sale is recorded by a hidden video camera to reveal the dealer's misrepresentation of the diamond's quality.
Weeks later Diane Sawyer, the network news commentator, will confront the dealer with the proof of his lies and close with a warning for the public to beware. One would expect that the dishonest merchant would be punished by such negative publicity, however the dealer points to a photo of Diane Sawyer hanging on his wall and proudly states, "Diane shops here every year. One of my best customers."
To avoid getting fleeced, we suggest anyone looking for a diamond to head up to Tiffany's or Cartier first and get one of their diamond buying guides, which are free and offer a great thumbnail source of information to the novice.
Otherwise caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware and remember if it sounds to good to be true than it is too good to be true.
For any questions on jewelry or the diamond trade stop Manny Winick at 34 West 47th Street.
The first piece of advice is always free.
Everything thereafter cost. How much? Depends on the hour.
First sale of the day always gets the best price.
Sie gesund.
The Harder They Come
Boston weather can be miserable in the winter, especially in the last century.
January 1973. I was walking up Mass Avenue in Cambridge on the way to Harvard Square. Underfoot a gray cold wet ankle high slush. In the air frozen rain. My sneakers and coast were drenched to the bone. I neared the Orson Welles Theater and spotted a poster promoting THE HARDER THEY COME. Charlie, a white college friend, a wasta from Jamaica, had introduced his classmates to reggae. We smoked huge spliffs and listened to Toots and Maytals, Bob Marley, and scores of other Jamaican artists singing in their dread dialect, a foreign langauge to our suburban ears, but we got it. The struggle against the oppressors existed everywhere.
I had seen the film Burn about a 19th Century slave rebellion in a mythical Portugese colony. Marlon Brando played the agent provocateur, who betrays the uprising for his sugar barons in London. It wasn't Jamaica, but I had read about the many revolts on that island. None had succeeded, except for the Maroons who lived free of the western world in the mountains. The first James Bond movie, Doctor No, was filmed on the island in 1969. None of us could forget Sean Connery sucked the urchin needle out of Ursala Andress' foot. This movie was not that one.
The poster was dominated by Jimmy Cliff playing a rude boy gunman brandishing two six-guns dressed in dance hall fashion ready for fast cars, motorcycles, and life. The hero looked warm. Jamaica was in the Caribbean. It had never snowed there. The next show started in ten minutes. I had nowhere to go, except here and paid $2 and entered the counter-culture theater happy to be out of the weather.
I sat in the middle with pop corn and a coke. The audience was small, mostly hippies as was I. THe lights went down. On screen the rough film caught an up-country bus heading into a city. Kingston. The capitol. Subtitles translated the Jamaican patois. Jimmy Cliff singing The Harder They Come. I wasn't warm, but I was getting there and almost two hours of gun fights with the police and criminal and church people I was dry and exited from the cinema a convert to the rasta criminal life by the Slickers' Johnny Too Bad and Cliff You Can get It If You Want It, ever knowing I was only a fan for life to the Rasta cause.
Reggae spread across globe from the island of Jamaica. Rastas lived in exile in New York, London, and Ethiopia. Other islanders adopted the lifestyle and the music. I never saw any on my circumnavigations of the planet, but paintings of Bob Marley along with Serpico adorned the trucks, buses, and taxis throughout South Easst Asia. The outlaw life appealed everywhere as freedom against the ruling classes.
In 1990 I jumped on bus in a Sumatran coastal market town bound for the Batak Highlands. The seats and aisles were packed with Sunday shoppers and I stood at the back door smoking a kretek cigarette. The clove and tobacco smoke mixed well with the diesel fumes from the bus' laboring engine. I studied the chattering passengers. Their smiling faces were ethnically different from the dour lowlanders and halfway up the mountain they sang a song which I recognized as BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON. I loved the Melodians’ reggae version.
When I joined the impromptu choir, the closest passengers stared at me with amusement. At the end of the song an old man rose from his seat and shook my hand.
“Chretian?” He had several front teeth. They looked sharp.
“Christian,” I replied without hesitation. My atheism was a secret better kept from the devout. They didn't know Johnny Too Bad, but they played Bob Marley on the tape decks on the lake. The ganga was weak. Forbidden by the Jakarta government. Lake Toba belonged to the Bataks. Not the Javanese. Just like jamaica belongs to all the people of Jamaica. My good friend says that there is no white or black in Jamaica. Just Jamaicans and I'm good with that. Always and a day
RIP Jimmy Cliff - he started it all for me.
The movie was based on a real man according to Wikipedia Vincent "Ivanhoe" Martin (1924–9 September 1948), known as "Rhyging", was a Jamaican criminal who became a legendary outlaw and folk hero, often regarded as the "original rude boy".He became notorious in 1948 after escaping from prison, going on the run and committing a string of robberies, murders and attempted murders before he was gunned down by police. In subsequent decades his life became mythologised in Jamaican popular culture, culminating in the 1972 cult film The Harder They Come, in which he is portrayed by Jimmy Cliff. His nickname comes from the term rhyging, also spelled rhygin, a variant of "raging".[3] In Jamaican Patois it is used to mean wild, hot, or bad.
Provincetown Lore - niizh manitoag
In the summer of 1620 my antecedent, John Howland, crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. Mid-voyage a storm washed passenger the indentured servant was overboard. He sank about twelve feet (4 m), but a crew member threw a rope, which Howland managed to grab, and he was safely hauled back onboard. The pilgrims landed after the prevailing winds prevented their sailing south to Virginia. The settlers left the peninsula, which the Nauset people called Meeshaun or 'going by boat'. Seemed the Puritans were upset by native gays or niizh manitoag” (two spirits) the Algonquin term for transgender or homosexual genders. No one was said to see the back of the grim saganash or white men. We queers like our freedom offered by such dead end communities such as P-Town, Fire Island or Key West.
According to https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/ Tennessee Williams later described the four groups who made up Provincetown’s residents. He belonged to the first two: The flamboyant gay summer visitors and the elite artists and writers who came to write, paint, dance or act. Third, gay wash-ashores who came as visitors and stayed year-round to work or run businesses. Finally, the Yankee, Portuguese and mixed-race native gays.
The playwright Tennessee Williams, then 29, arrived in the summer of 1940. He joined a group “dominated by a platinum blonde Hollywood belle named Doug and a bull-dike named Wanda who [was] a well-known writer under a male pen name.” P-town, he wrote, was “screaming with creatures not all of whom are seagulls.”
It remains a safe haven for sailors and other wanderers to this day.
My first trip there was in 1971 with Bruce and Paul. Friends from the 1270 Club in Boston. Bruce and I drank at the Shipwreck and fucked complete strangers from the Meat Rack. Paul was in love with me and watched from the shadows.
Please read Cape Queer? A Case Study of Provincetown, Massachusetts and Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort by Karen Christel Krahulik,for a better grasp of P-town's his/her/themtory.
ps John Howland fathered eleven children in a long life in the Bay Colony.
Happy Thanks Wampanoags
My family’s ancestors crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620. The Howland clan spent that first autumn on the Cape and then sailed to what became the Plymouth Colony. Their spring pkantings failed and autumn found their food supplies were dangerously low. Only the intervention by Wampanoags, the native tribe, spared the settlers from starvation. Americans have celebrated the largess of the Indians with an annual feast of turkey and all the fixings.
Little if any mention is made of the Wampanoag Indians, who were nearly wiped out by European diseases and the Puritans in the King Philip's War in order to steal their lands, then again talk of extermination has no place at the holiday dinner table in America.
Prayers of thanks are saved for family friends and God.
Turkey is the main meal.
I’ve had the bird most every Thanksgiving in my life.
Mothers around the USA spent hours preparing the feast.
My family was no different from the rest of America. The early part of the day was filled by the chore of peeling apples, potatoes, turnips, carrots for our eight family members and another 5-10 guests. My older brother called it ‘KP Day’. My mother would cool the bird in the garage. Why was never explained to us. She would just take the big bird out of the oven and say, “Put it in the garage to cool.”
One Thanksgiving I obeyed her command. The garage door was open. The air was cold. I had spent the morning at the football game between my hometown and their arch-rivals. My next-door neighbor came over to the driveway with a football. We went into the backyard to emulate the day’s heroes. After bobbling a long pass Chuckie pointed to the front lawn.
"What's with DJ?"
DJ was a neighborhood dog. I was in love with his owner, Kyla. The German Shepard had his entire head was stuck inside a turkey. My mother's stuffing was delicious. I had not shut the door to the garage. I ran from the backyard and heard my mother scream.
“The turkey.”
I picked up a stick from the ground and charged to save our holiday meal. The big black dog fled from our yard with a slobbering snarl, leaving behind a mauled meal. My mother cried, “Where are we going to find a turkey now?”
My father looked at me. This was my fault. I didn’t even bother to explain my side of the story. When you’re wrong as a child, proving you’re right is a waste of breath.
My older brother and younger siblings thanked me for ruining Thanksgiving, although it didn’t turn out so bad, since DJ’s owners paid for our meal at a nearby hotel. Kyla kissed me on the cheek. The food was good and my mother didn’t have to wash any dishes.
We didn’t have a home-cooked Thanksgiving meal for the next five years.
We still thanked family, friends, and God, but my older brother and I also thanked DJ. Even bad deeds can turn out good as long as no one brings up the extermination of the New England tribes on the Fourth Thursday of November. The People of the First Light survive to this day on the Cape and Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket and are free to say Âs Nutayuneân or we still live here. ps there is no word for thanksgiving in Algonquin, but I do thank them. Always.