PICS: Snow Day

FOOD: The McNatie

CHAZZ: A Scooby Doo X-Mas

When Cousin Chazz was seven he dreamed of getting Scooby Doo action figures for Christmas.  He wrote a letter to Santa asking for Scooby Do0 action figures.
Then on Christmas morning lil'Chazz opened a Scooby Doo stuffed animal.  He was happy with this stuffed animal.
But something bothered Chazz that day, and for many after.  His letter to Santa had been specific -- five inch plastic figures of the entire gang of mystery solvers, not a 20 inch high plush Great Dane.  His Scooby was suspiciously like the one he saw at Toys R Us.  Sure, Lil'Chazz understood that Santa subbed work out to Nintendo and others, (elves obviously nowhere near the video game programmers the Japanese were), but he also thought the entire point of sending a letter was because Santa's Workshop built to one's specifications; lil'Chazz had sent them a blueprint.  A Goddamned blueprint.
Yes this was the Christmas Chazz realized a sad truth all kids must learn sooner or later:
.. Santa is a hack.

COMIC: Some Tests

just some thumbnails...

ON: Guns

PIC?: Learning To Draw

I'd like to post half as much next year, and those be twice as good.  Fat chance, I know.  I want to draw much of next year.  But I'm not good at it.  Anything  as artistically frustrating  to be bad at as drawing is, keep it.  But drawing is easier to read than words.
So here come pictures.  I'm drawing until one picture is good.  But really good.
Good thing my blog is for mediocre work.  I mean, look at all those twelves.. 

TWENTY12: Primo Lines

Cousin Chazz (@cousinchazz)
Accepted being called Bro by dude who is not my bro, but just a dude.

The year of blog writing chopped, cut, excerpted and back-linked.  Dainty morsels.    
2012, most worthy!  If you missed any, click the titles.  

PICS: 2012 Collected

the favorited images from this blog over the last year.. trees and dump trucks and signs and telephone poles, the same dull stuff.

AUDIT: Fort Rags

Old Ragsnarolk
  "Butter.  Buttered bread.  Dern it." says Hoff.
  "Butter.  God's Wounds -- to bring it up!" says Alec.
  Dead goat.  Dragged for a day in the tool harness provided by the Outfit.  Dead goats don't milk.   No milk, no butter.
  Down in the valley are leafless trees like leaf rakes stuck handle in the dirt.   Like scarecrows.  No crops.  No birds.  No butter.
  "No bread, Ass.  Your mouth is an ass.  That's what hole that is." says Alec.
  Dawning over the valley, the boys get to changing out the batteries on their saws. 
  "We have to eat the goat." says Hoff. "Gone as bad as we can let him."
  "Rechain." says Alec.
  "How did I end up here?" says Hoff.
  Now Alec is on him, grabbing Hoff by the coat, and pulling him up, and steering him roughly, until they face the rising light of sun like a dollop of melting butter at the cleft of the two hills.
"Because of there.  Look there."
  As Alec growls it the tell-tale cube of Old Ragsnarolk, the fortress, burrows out some blackberry blackness under the ascent of the sun. 
  "There, there, and there.  The complex.  No one told you to come.  No one drafted you, butter-eater.  You've been subcontracted, and when they came to you, you licked your lips!  We promised them a road.  And they promised us a cut of the loot.  Now chain your saw.  We're cutting to there.  Soldiery to make such a place.  Think.."
  Alec rubs Hoff's neck.
  "Butter?" Hoff says, and he laughs.
  "Butter.  All this valley's butter, and up there is the pot!  Fort Rags." says Alec.  "A good week, and we'll be on the doorstep.  Re-chain.  The Outfit are days behind.  We can get inside, and have a good long look.  Get lean to get fat."
  "Get mean, get far." Hoff says. "But, Alec.."
  "What?"
  "I want to eat this goat."

GYPSY: 41 Tupelo Gravestone 57

the heart of it.  Ma and Pa.  Tupelo and Memphis.  Danny and the Colonel.  1967, 1947, 1937, 1927.  And 1955.

PICS: Old Hartford Industry

POEM: Dec 2

mythology or wolf work.
you heroic, you.
or else sniff, shit, and sniff, and lick.
be perfect by love someone has for you.
catch a rut.  find a hut.
and go to work.

HOTEL REVIEW: East Hartford Econolodge

I don't remember now if the fighter was Harry Greb1, but there was a turn of the century boxer, an infamously dirty fighter, a fighter known for ruining younger stronger fighters via outright nastiness; whichever old name in a book I read about once this was, the interesting thing was this fighter's training regimen was opposite the archetypal monastic prize fighter prep with the mountain running and abstinence, this fighter, (Greb or not), would drink straight whiskey, chain smoke, and pick the meanest prostitutes he could find, taking them on two at a time.  This routine I have fondly titled, Irish Martial Arts.

PICS: 2012 F-book Pics Dump

some pictures from facebook previously unpublished here; and the answer is yes, I am saving the good posts for December.

PICS: Springfield

PICS: #Moving Pics

FRAG: Mighty Monster

1. Mighty Monster

I'm not doing Mexico.  If we do this, I'll start scratch.

The lawyer says it being an orphan story appeals to your readers and so the beginning won't be so bad.  But I wasn't an orphan.  That's all a work.  My mother was a dancer.  She and her sisters as children dancing in rich peoples' parlors.  This was Fall River.  Show people from way back.

HOTEL REVIEW: Springfield Econolodge

Didn't make it fifty yards off the highway tonight before a state cop pulled me over; it went well, only five minutes of outright screaming in my face before giving me a DOT quiz, making me sit in the parking lot for 45 more minutes while I imagine he sat in his cruiser playing Angry Birds, then seeing me off with a written warning for having an "unsecured" 2x6 in the back of the truck.  

You'd think a brick wall would keep the sound of the motel pub's video poker machines out of this room on the second floor; no such luck.  Ring a ding ding.

-- Yes, I misrepresent these as actual hotel reviews.. I'm sorry.  No, I won't stop.  Okay, here's my review: If you look directly at the Springfield Econolodge you will catch a violent flu. 

BOOKS: Hamlet Is A Prick 1

one -- list
1 the greatest tragedy of the english language is a sick comedy
2 so off the wall and experimental it makes Ionesco read like Neil Simon
3 so propulsive it makes David Mamet read like Neil Simon
4 a ghost story riveted on to a revenge tragedy, a soap opera crammed into a castle waiting on a war to break out
5 at one point the main character forgets about the revenge plot, and spends a half hour of stage time giving unsolicited advice to a pack of actors who must be quite hungry and tired from their travels
6 this same asshole jumps into a grave to show up the grieving brother of a girl he used to fuck around with back in the day, just because
7 stabs an elderly man to death, then jokes about it
8 likes to touch skulls
9 and this character, this spoiled rich sociopath, this prince, is the most cherished character of all english literature; is considered a supreme artistic work to sit alongside Beethoven ad Da Vinci.

two -- back story
Amleth is a boy prince.  his uncle kills his father to steal the crown.  to escape death Amleth feigns insanity so as to appear unthreatening to his uncle.  for twenty years or so Amleth plays with sticks and drools all over the place.  when he is old enough he stabs his uncle to death with those sticks.
-- there's the story taken out of Saxo Grammaticus.  Saxo was this old Dane who wrote some stories.  The point: it's a Bros Grimm joint, it's Snow White.  Clean, classic, simple revenge tragedy.  Then William Shakespeare fucked it three ways to Sunday.

three--the math
to think Shakespeare meant Hamlet to be played straight is an insult to him.  All one must do is read Othello or King Lear to understand Hamlet was not meant as family tragedy.  If one reads Romeo and Juliet one knows Hamlet was not meant as romantic hero.  If one reads the plays between Hamlet and Othello: Measure For Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Twelfth Night, one might wonder if there is such thing as a three year nervous breakdown.
One wonders if the author of this play despised his audience.  One wonders how apocryphal the worn bio of having lost both his father and young son in the year prior is.  One wonders how a writer can knock out Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, all in 1599, (what a year!), then not show up again for nearly two years, and when he does, he comes with this manifesto called The Prince of Denmark.  One wonders if the author's mates, his fellow actors, his business partners ever said, "Will, what the hell, man?  This play is five hours long."  or "Bill, why does the main character age ten years between act 4 and act 5?" or "Shakey, baby, what is up with all these soliloquies?  Rogue and peasant slave?  It's a bit high-falutin, brother."  To which I imagine him showing them sonnet 29, and continually repeating, "I wrote that, I wrote that, I wrote that." over and over again while picking scabs off of his head.
four--my movie
a Hamlet movie shot like an overwrought Elvis vehicle, complete with cheesy 60's pop songs on the score like Lightning Strikes by Lou Christie and Sunny by Bobby Hebb, where Hamlet in full on Jailhouse Rock mode responds to Ophelia's concern for his erratic behavior with: "That ain't tactics, mama, that's just the beast in me."
five--the perfect opening
T.S. Eliot was right when he said the opening scene of Hamlet is perfection.  So freaking tight.  It is one of those beautiful Shakespeare opening bits where we meet a bunch of nobodies, in this case some castle watchmen on shift watching out over the spooky night from the castle rampart.  They've called on a young nobleman named Horatio to meet with them for some old fashioned ghost hunting.  No, you heard me.  This Horatio is friends with the young prince Hamlet(Amleth), and as these hack guards swear they've seen a ghost dressed up like an armored king, and as the very King Hamlet has recently died, they all think the young Prince Hamlet might be interested, so they get his boy to come up for a stakeout!  The scene goes something like this:
Horatio: A ghost you say?
Guard: Friggin A, dude.
Horatio: Seen it tonight?
Guard: Nope.
Horatio: What's it look like?
Guard: Well it's big, scary, and --
Guard 2: HERE!!!!
(enter Ghost)
Unfortunately this sweet set-up is soon ruined when Hamlet shows up.  But before Hamlet wordplays the ghost of his Dad back into purgatory, he completely snubs king and court inside the castle where the new king, (his Uncle), beautifully eases his subjects' worries about both his marriage to the widowed queen, and a possible feud over land rights with the other vikings down the lane.  While everyone is dressed to the nines, getting drunk on Blue Moon, and pairing off for some old fashioned Danish screwing, the Prince is pouting in emo dress -- it would be unbearable if the twat wasn't so clever.

QUEEN:

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, 

And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. 
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids 

Seek for thy noble father in the dust. 

Thou know'st 'tis common. All that lives must die, 

Passing through nature to eternity.

HAMLET:

Ay, madam, it is common.

five--the first soliloquoy 

After snarking the whole court, he turns to the audience, and gives one of the strangest speeches ever, full of the kind of name-drops one would expect from a film school geek.
Here's my version:
I want to melt away.
Why does God think killing yourself is a bad thing anyway?
Every reason to live is useless, stupid, boring, and played out.
This world is like a house on that Hoarders show; the people are cat shit and twenty year old newspaper collections.
My dad's only been dead for two months!  And now my Uncle is king?
My dad was like Han Solo, this uncle is Jabba the Hut.
My dad loved my mother so much; he'd have bitch-smacked Superman if he hovered in my mother's general direction.
I don't want to think about it.
She fed on his love for her; the more she ate the hungrier she was, this was love!
And a month later -- WTF!
Women are some weak-ass people
A month.  She's wearing the same shoes from the funeral, and this woman buys a lot of shoes
Oh sure, at the funeral she was Meryl Streep with the tears
A monkey would have mourned longer
And now married to my uncle; this chubby drunk is as much like my dad as I'm like Optimus Prime
A month.  Before those phony tears had dried up, she's hitched her wagon to a donkey
It's a world incest record.  Bad juju.
So break heart, but I have to keep quiet.

Let me confirm that the last thing he does is keep quiet.  It is important to know, this is what the Prince is like BEFORE he meets the ghost, BEFORE he finds out his father was murdered, BEFORE he has something to revenge; at this moment the only thing rotten in the state of Denmark is his filthy mouth.  You can already see this is no straight fairy tale revenge: where Amleth feigned insanity to the court to buy himself time, Hamlet has shown his inner nature to the audience prior to revenge, (and let me also say: in this same court scene King Claudius is clear: Hamlet is next in line to be King -- and mind, what with this other viking Fortinbras over the hill spoiling for a fight, Claudius is better suited to the wartime crown than our teenage pretty boy.  THERE IS NOTHING WRONG -- Claudius and Gertrude's hasty wedding is smart business when it comes to protecting their people.

(This was a difficult decision, to cut this Hamlet essay into multiple parts.  But I don't want readers stuck in a 10,000 word essay that they won't finish in one sitting.  As writing is simply a hobby, i have to play it as it lays -- more to come.. developing... Look at it this way: you're reading it minutes/seconds after I write it)

FLASH: Unfortunate Boys' Night

He was crying like a baby.  But that's not fair to babies.  He was crying like in little league when he was that kid who had a phantom injury every game and stretched it out until his embarrassed mother came on the field.

ROAD JOURNAL: The Morning After

Went to bed early, awoke at 3am, got on the internet and read the big news.  It wasn't what I wanted.  The 'why' is a shifting set of variables so uninteresting even my grandiose self-involvement can barely stand to write it.  That I didn't believe in the guy doesn't make me feel pain about it.  Because I don't know that I'm right.

AUDIT: Last Nov's Forgotten Muskrats

ROAD JOURNAL: November Cape Girls

1. A dead beach town is autumnal murder mystery make-up; good DNA for a story, rough on a work week. Disconcerting. Chucks one off. The sand dunes, more so the weedy bluffs, scored by the cool nothing of an empty town behind, all feels awry.

BIT: A Weird Polling Thought

Go ahead.  I promise this is the last one.  Now or after.  I voted.  I'm at peace.  It's out of my system.  It's just a thought I've had about the differences in national polls that might answer it.  If you are a supporter of President Obama, you might like this.
So here it is -- many pollsters when looking at the Obama-leading polls think those polls are oversampling Democrats based on the 2008 election; it makes sense: not evened the most hardened Democrat can think Obama has the excitement behind his incumbency that he did as a challenger.  These Obama-leading polls see the voting public falling as something like 40% Democrat, 32% Republican, and 28% Independent; the Romney leading polls see it as 36-36-28.  The key to this is that no poll does not have the challenger up big in independents.  Up big in independents when the raw electorate is +8 Democrat means a tightening race that could very well go Obama 51-49, like the polls show.  Up big in independents for Romney if it's 36-36 means it's Romney by 3 to 5.  And these are the two kinds of polls you see out there.  But here is where I think the Obama polls "could" be accurate, (because every other stat really makes more sense of Romney's narrow lead), if Romney's lead in independents (something between 8% and 20%) is really Republican-leaning voters now registered independent; that makes the number closer to the 36-36, but then Romney doesn't have a lead in independents, because those aren't independents -- either way the incumbent narrow lead is plausible either way -- they can't count it as a dead heat and Romney big with independents, it's like counting the number twice to get to Romney up by 5 like Gallup had.  It's tight either way.  Just thought I might have found something here that was worth passing along.  So go vote.  Have fun.

CHAZZ: Lusts For Rachel Maddow

ENDGAME: Draper Sells Kools and Pics With No Home

DRAPER: Gentleman, your minty fresh cigarettes have not been the hit with housewives you thought they'd be.  I have an idea whereby we can save your menthol cigarettes.  Black people, Gentlemen --

VID: Dogmeat

ROAD JOURNAL: Politics Is For Suckers

PICS: Trout Pond

with the water level of this pond very low, with a little playing around, has the fish showing up.  Kind of cool, I thought.   More below.

FOOD: Meatball Pasta

yeah I put meat in the sauce
what i look like
top chef guido edition?

BRG/TNL/500:14. Al Ferez

Oliver.

14. Henny was different when I came back to the Dump.  He was cool.  By this time he'd spent half the money hiring PMC boys to sit at the tower and protect him.  The tower boys would challenge me to wrestling matches sometimes, and David was the only one who could make it a minute with me.  This kid liked to tangle assholes; he was tough.  When I got back, David was waiting on me down here at the horse house.  We walked one of our routes, and he told me things were going astray with Al Ferez, which was what we called Henny; in the drinking one night, one of the Spanish kids told us alférez was like an ensign, a flag carrier, which is exactly what Henny was: walking around with all these tough kids protecting him, waving the flag, part of the gang -- so, Al Ferez.

AUDIT: Rocktober! Last!

BOOKS: Blood Meridian

Calling Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian dark is like calling the sun big or the Sistine Chapel cool.  Published in 1985, this is the book that made Cormac McCarthy's reputation as a great writer, (it has been compared to Moby Dick and MacBeth); these days his reputation has never been higher what with the likes of the Coen Brothers and John Hillcoat making movies of No Country For Old Men and The Road, (while each is spare, desolate, violent, and beautiful, which is his style, neither approaches the depths of darkness where Blood Meridian is, nor it's quality).  Blood Meridian feels more like an artifact than a scripted story by a modern author.  It is one of three or four of my favorite books, but I would never recommend it to a friend -- recommending someone read Blood Meridian is like recommending someone join a templar cult, or recommend they bring someone back from the dead by appropriating a pet cemetery; it's revelatory power you're contracting, and will likely end badly.

ON: Let's Save Sesame Street!

+ A world without Sesame Street is not a world I want to live in.  If the unimaginable happens, and Mormon Sauron, err, 55 year old Jack Shephard, err, Mitt Romney, becomes president, we need a plan to keep Sesame Street around for many generations of children to come.
Here is my idea.  It is time to merchandise Sesame Street characters.  Perhaps if they sold something like an Elmo doll, the revenue generated could fund the budget of a television show.

ON: The Presidential Debate

POLL: CNN Poll: Who won the debate?

Who won the debate?

Romney

67%

Obama

25%

Source: CNN/ORC International

Date conducted: 10/3/2012

Sample: 430 adult Americans

Margin of error: +/- 4.5% pts

CHAZZ: In Defense of Naming Your Dog Damien

NOTE: Blog Under Reconstruction

Callipygous Lady

ENDGAME: Lagging Half Bits And Dollar Books

After writing this blog for a year and much of a second year, I've figured out that when you post something of note at the end of a month, it has a shorter shelf life than when posted earlier in a month -- being the 12th post in September is difficult to see when readers are scanning October, so one should post the prime bits early, and let them sit for a good month before they go bad.  So then.. ENDGAME will be the half-completed frags of the month, the throwaways that might be gems not yet fully recovered from the ground.  This page is chock full o nuts.

PICS: Limtucky Proper

BRG/TNL/500:13. Henny Penny

Oliver.

13. Henny Newton stole her out of NY, and had made of their romance a lucrative comeback in the world; when we met later he told me he was finished in pictures, and had stumbled badly pitching a picture about Bridge and Tunnel Day.  They're still counting bodies, he's painting the re-creation in ninety minutes.  Do you know how they got the subways, Maggie?  How they hit so many?  On Bridge and Tunnel day?  Hack Bridge and Tunnel boys set the explosives.  They've covered all that up by now, but that's who did it.  Nineteen Tacticals: A, Q, B; ding, ding, ding.

Somewhere, not far from here, a man named Elric Schmidt sang his last song as the Q caved in and sucked him down.  The song was "Oneida", about a girl who leaves him for the slick promises of a con artist.  Therese was in France with the Henny Newton convoy when the island shit itself.

PICS: Breakfast Sammich!

There's just one thing holding me back from stardom in the world of phone.photography: an obsession with power lines and telephone poles.  I can't deny what people are saying, (these people went to a different school), What's with all the pictures of nothing  framed by power lines?
Well no more!  Now all my pictures will be of breakfast sandwiches!

ON: The Best 90's Movie

Take Private Ryan and shove it.  
So too Titanic, GoodFellas, (I said it!), and Pulp Fiction.
The best movie of the 90's is a little something called Immortal Beloved.

ON: Politicians Oil and Roads

Republicans aren't conservative, republicans are politicians, there's nothing sublime in the world for politicians, just the expansion and cultivation of power.  Politics are dull and venal: when there are more homosexuals in the country than there are christians, republicans will be for gay marriage, and democrats will stop fake-going to church.  They're all bean counters.  That we can work with these people (either party) as some sort of social human growth hormone to speed up the fixing of cultural inadequacies is to me as useful as praying to the gods for rain.  If you look to your political representation the way you look to your accountant, than you feel me.

AUDIT: Huttle Puddle and Nearly Canada

PICS: Sep2Rem

ON: Low End Conservatism

There is this generation, generation and a half, grown up with divorce the norm, the absentee fathers; without church, family, strict schooling -- latchkey kiddos now waking up at 30 with a craving for the grooves of discipline from an earlier time cut into them.  But alas, they're pock-free.  And here is where the reversal, youthful conservatism, is born.  Instead of looking beyond the injustice of the present to a dreamy optimized future, skipping back generations to paradise lost.

Not given the opportunity to be shamed and disciplined by the evils of religion and conservative upbringing, freewheeling trailer kids with lotto ticket parenting never benefited from the code as those who did grow into adulthood with the natural step of questioning that code.  You understand that finding out your parents are wrong about everything they taught you is an advantageous position to being taught nothing.  So when you try to figure out from why libertarian uprisings catch on with young poor people, you must understand there is an underclass trying to go back in time to something they had no opportunity to take part in and then reject.  It's sweeter stuff than the utopia.  It's Fantasy not Sci-Fi, both equally ridiculous.

ON: Counter-Culture

I wish I knew some priests who looked like Karl Malden and taught the kids in the neighborhood how to box.  This is too many movies and having been raised without religion. 
I know there is a shallow and spiteful conservative streak in me from having no foundation of others' conservatism to question in life; no belief system to work out an opposition to.

I craved order.  It showed itself in an immediate and visceral distaste for counter-culture; reasoning that counter-culture is square, that counter-culture can only exist by the obscene success of the culture they counter, and the would-be counterists I knew seemed less like they fought the power, and more like the beneficiaries.  I was poor.  I rooted for soulless rubes in movies.

ON: Game Of Thrones And Middle Earth

There's no more devastating undercut to the success of fantasy genre writing than to be compared to Lord of The Rings.  The acclaimed works of this genre tend to self-consciously set themselves apart from that turgid old bible of orcs, wraiths, and Balrogs; so far apart as to negate their worth.

ON: Michael Irvin

Many NFL fans have disliked Michael Irvin for twenty years.  As a Dallas Cowboys fan I rooted for him for the reasons sports fans root for players of questionable morality: he won games for the laundry I pledged allegiance to, (that being the white shirt, the silver pants, the blue star).  That's basic sports fan math: your bad guys aren't as bad as the bad guys on the other team -- rooting interest.  But I love Michael Irvin; I love the idea of Michael Irvin.  I love him for the reasons fans who romanticize code words for white players like "grit" "toughness" and "smarts", hate him: he's the ghettoest motherfucker that ever played.  A man who had the "grit" "toughness" and "smarts" to go from the Lauderdale black ghetto to Miami to Dallas to Canton.

BRG/TNL/500: 12. Oliver's Daughter Story

OLIVER.

12. Whispered the story.

My daughter was lost to me.  I remember.  As I tumbled through life, I knew she was a daughter, yet I had no recollection of making her.  So then: she was lost to me.

I found her in a Santa Fe trailer park, abandoned to a swing set.  The mother in with bad people.  I left my truck running.  Men came out of trailers.

PICS: Pit Dogs

POEM: Debt

opinions are desires and she bestrides her cart like she's hard.

makes the others sabine colossi
lumbering under the final night as birds fall from the sky.

the case is pocked from stairway climbs.

a heart can ossify 

from disambiguated word counts, placard phrases, 

and a pyramid scheme of passcodes: 

her first pet, her first love, the guise of a marriage she took part in once

years of a man who's initials combined with her birthday unlock the debt on her visa card.

opinions are desires and she unlocks her case.

and wonders what happened to elliptical lives, to not knowing things, and dollar bills for the maids.

now every ordinary day polished and every dullard serialized.  And no one stays.

What happened to boredom? she thinks.  

What happened to a man who looked for you in the same old place.

LIST: New Fake Identities

Raif Whiterose

June 14, 2011 via mobile

First Poet Laureate of the Fryeburg Fair