GARY SNYDER ~

Gary Snyder at roughly the time of this reading

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/191219

photo : Harry Redl

VALLEY OF THE GODS ~

Valley of the Gods, India
(take on the developers)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/business/global/american-thwarted-in-quest-to-build-a-ski-resort-in-india.html?hp




photo : Kuni Takahashi (New York Times)

ONCE ~

Scott McKenzie
w/ Michelle Phillips & Cass Elliot

January 10, 1939 – August 18, 2012

"Scott McKenzie (born Philip Wallach Blondheim, January 10, 1939 – August 18, 2012) was an American singer. He was best known for his 1967 hit single and generational anthem, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)".

Blondheim was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1939. His family moved to Asheville, North Carolina when he was six months old. He grew up in North Carolina and Virginia, where he became friends with the son of one of his mother's friends, John Phillips. In the mid 1950s, he sang briefly with Tim Rose in a high school group called The Singing Strings, and later with Phillips, Mike Boran and Bill Cleary formed a doo wop band, The Abstracts.

In New York, The Abstracts became The Smoothies and recorded two singles with Decca Records, produced by Milt Gabler. During his time with The Smoothies, Blondheim decided to change his name for business reasons:

"[We] were working at one of the last great night clubs, The Elmwood Casino in Windsor, Ontario. We were part of a variety show ... three acts, dancing girls, and the entire cast took part in elaborate, choreographed stage productions ... As you might imagine, after-show parties were common.
"At one of these parties I complained that nobody could understand my real name ... [and] pointed out that this was a definite liability in a profession that benefited from instant name recognition. Everyone started trying to come up with a new name for me. It was [comedian] Jackie Curtis who said he thought I looked like a Scottie dog. Phillips came up with Laura's middle name after Jackie's suggestion. I didn't like being called "Scottie" so everybody agreed my new name could be Scott McKenzie."

In 1961 Phillips and McKenzie met Dick Weissman and formed The Journeymen, which recorded three albums and seven singles for Capitol Records. After The Beatles became popular in 1964, The Journeymen disbanded. McKenzie and Weissman became solo performers, while Phillips formed the group The Mamas & the Papas with Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips and moved to California.

McKenzie originally declined an opportunity to join the group, saying in a 1977 interview, "I was trying to see if I could do something by myself. And I didn't think I could take that much pressure". Two years later, he left New York and signed with Lou Adler's Ode Records.

Phillips wrote and co-produced "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)" for McKenzie. John Phillips played guitar on the recording and session musician Gary L Coleman played orchestra bells and chimes. The bass line of the song was supplied by session musician Joe Osborn. Hal Blaine played drums.

It was released on 13 May 1967 in the United States and was an instant hit, reaching #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also a #1 in the UK and several other countries, selling over seven million copies globally.

McKenzie followed the song with "Like An Old Time Movie", also written and produced by Phillips, which was a minor hit. His first album, The Voice of Scott McKenzie, was followed with an album called Stained Glass Morning. He stopped recording in the early 1970s and lived in Joshua Tree, California, and Virginia Beach, Virginia.

In 1986, he started singing with a new version of The Mamas and the Papas. With Terry Melcher, Mike Love and John Phillips, he co-wrote "Kokomo" (1988), a #1 single for the Beach Boys.

By 1998, he had retired from the road version of The Mamas and Papas, and resided in Los Angeles, California, until his death. He appeared at the Los Angeles tribute concert for John Phillips in 2001, amongst other 1960s contemporary acts.

He had suffered from Guillain–Barré syndrome since 2010.

McKenzie died on August 18, 2012 in Los Angeles."


wikipedia

JOE'S ~

Joe Hutchison lays it out

here:

http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/search/label/Bob%20Arnold

I wasn't sure how to go about it — shyness I guess — just how to show Joe Hutchison's review of my two new books Yokel and I'm In Love With You Who Is In Love With Me. Of course I love my two books or else I wouldn't have lived the life that made the poems that made the books, but I also love the words and care of a sincere reader. I've been reading Joe's reviews for a long long time now, and his own poems, and I like the muscle and webbing of his thinking. The books are done and the life is going along whether anyone likes anything about it or not. I'm not worried. But I do worry about the loss of fair thinkers, and wise and gifting teachers, and I'm happy to say Joe is one.





http://www.longhousepoetry.com/bobarnold.html

SPORT ~

Workers covered the statue of former football coach Joe Paterno near Beaver Stadium on Penn State's campus before taking it down.
(AP PHOTO/CENTRE DAILY TIMES, CHRISTOPHER WEDDLE)

PATERNO

By Joe Posnanski

(Simon & Schuster)



excellent review by Dwight Garner (New York Times):

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/books/paterno-by-joe-posnanski-a-biography-of-the-coach.html?hp

IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL ~

Henry Darger

One of only three known photographs
of the artist ~
photo by David Berglund in 1971
two years before Darger's passing

Henry Darger's one-room Chicago apartment
(pre-1973)







Known, now, as one of the celebrated examples of outsider art, Henry Joseph Darger Jr was born in Chicago on April 12, 1892 and died in the same city April 13, 1973. He worked as a custodian in a Chicago Catholic hospital almost all of his adult life. When not on the job, he was barely known or seen, living mainly as a recluse with his exclusive private world as a writer and artist. His posthumously-discovered 15,145 page, single spaced fantasy manuscript was his companion — it's title The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion is bound in fifteen volumes, densely packed with a myriad of illustrations and scroll-like watercolor paintings, spanning six decades of the artist's creation. A second work of fiction, written by Darger after The Realms is the 10,000 handwritten manuscript Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago. There was even a third manuscript, The History of My Life, covering almost 5,000 pages, in eight volumes, where the artist makes a stab at detailing his early life before being swept away in his memories by a devastating midwest tornado he witnessed in 1908 that he calls "Sweetie Pie". There are gorgeous books and more books and more books to come showcasing the artist's paintings and inner sanctum. Exhibits have been shown, and at least one exceptional documentary of the artist's life and work is available.

please click on images to read the text

MORE WOOD(Y) ~

Woody Guthrie Concerts

BLUES ~

BLUES


Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the sky,

Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the sky,

Sometimes I feel I'm gonna lay me down & die.



You can't love a woman, if that woman don't love you,

You can't love a woman, if that woman don't love you,

You can't love a woman that don't care what you do.



She gotta want you like whiskey, she gotta need you like rain,

She gotta want you like whiskey, she gotta need you like rain,

She gotta cry when you leave her, and cry till you come back again.

(enter Pee Wee Russell)



: DATE AND TEXT
12 July 1943: MS letter to JBS (Hull DP 174/2/70). Published in
Tolley (2005), 201, as continuous text instead of the three-line
stanzas of the MS. In the present edition the ampersand in l. 3 is
retained (Tolley substitutes 'and' and sacrifices informality), and, as
in Tolley, a needed comma is inserted at the end of line 2.

Immediately after the poem L. writes '(enter Pee Wee Russell)':
this should, I think, be part of the text, on the grounds that L writes
a horizontal line after this section off the text from the rest of the letter.

Below this, he comments 'The above blues has been in my head
some time, I think it's awfully good. (Swells up & bursts).' See the
discussion of blues in the note on Fuel From Blues.

Pee Wee Russell: 1906-69, jazz musician (saxophone and clarinet player).
See the note on 'And did you once see Russell plain?'

'And did you once see Russell plain?
And did he start at Condon's nod,
Ten choruses of 'Da-da Strain'?
--------You lucky fucking sod!'

(from "Laforgue")

Pee Wee Russell, Little Red School House, New York City, 1940
photo: Charles Peterson





Philip Larkin
The Complete Poems
ed. Archie Burnett
(Farrar, 2012)

EVENING SONGS ~

Laura Marling

Born 22 years ago and already so many terrific songs, three albums, forever touring, Laura Marling was born in Eversley, Hampshire, UK.

Laura Marling Tiny Desk Concert




Discography
______________________


Alas, I Cannot Swim (2008)

I Speak Because I Can (2010)

A Creature I Don't Know (2011)

LUNCH ~

Wolves in the room





http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/

AMAZING BEFORE BREAKFAST ~

link here

Booker T Jones

Kayhan Kalhor






http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/

SLEEPERS AWAKE ~

"As USA Today reported, the 90 million people who are unlikely to vote in November prefer Obama over Romney by 2 to 1, and “they could turn a too-close-to-call race into a landslide for President Obama — but by definition they probably won’t.”

If this underhanded dirty dealing by the Republican ticket doesn’t jolt some of these unlikely voters into likely ones, I don’t know what will. "

Charles M. Blow

New York Times

LOVE LIBRARIES ~

Love Libraries ~ public or private


This film means to showcase a few moments for me in a very fine town library and what I could find and sweep up to read, and likewise share with you. If a book is showing, I'm recommending it. Plus the aptitude to use our village, town and city libraries.

Going backwards down a narrow staircase with books involved is tricky, but I like the looks of it.











Once In Vermont films © bob arnold

YOUTH ~

Marina Keegan

It's the photograph of Marina Keegan that pulled me in, tiny and on the front page of the screen version of Thursday's New York Times. There is something about that photograph, the tilt of seaside face, the eyes to our eyes.

She may be a stranger to most of us.

Marina Keegan died in May 2012 on the road in Dennis, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, a rollover car wreck, with her boyfriend driving, who survived. A week earlier she had graduated from Yale. I know Dennis well having put a roof on there, and built a deck and hiked along the beaches of the National Seashore for decades. Somehow now it will never be the same.

Marina Keegan is an accomplished writer, poet, essayist. Is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/theater/marina-keegans-independents-at-the-fringe.html?src=dayp

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/business/marina-keegan-journalist-and-playwright-dies-at-22.html









photo : Luke Vargas

EARTH ~

Walden Pond
7AM

NUMBERS

_________________________


. 2,000 population of Concord during Thoreau's stay at the pond

. 2 years, 2 months, 2 days : length of Thoreau's stay at Walden (before deducting a month spent at home while his cabin was being winterproofed and his two-week Maine trip)

. 1.3 miles distance from Thoreau's cabin to Emerson's house

. 28-36 : Thoreau's age during Walden composition

. 550 yards : distance from Thoreau's cabin to the Fitchburg railroad line

. 204 feet : distance from Thoreau's cabin to Walden Pond

. 612 acres : size of Walden Pond

. 31 : tools Thoreau used at Walden

. over 3,000 : uses of first-person pronoun Walden

. less than half a mile : distance from Thoreau's cabin to Irish railroad laborers' huts

. 10' x 15' : size of Thoreau's cabin

. 30 : people that could fit in the cabin without removing the furniture

. almost 7 miles : total length of Thoreau's bean rows

. over 700 : reference to animals in Walden

. 6 : languages Thoreau could read fluently (English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian)

. 25 : Harvard faculty members when Thoreau was a student

. over $1 million : 1988 sale price of Thoreau family house

"7 miles"?

Robert R. Ray
from Walden x 40
(essays on Thoreau)
Indiana University Press, 2012


photo © susan arnold

evil ~
(small print)

read here:

evil

evil 2

evil 3

evil 4

VERMONT HERITAGE ~

for more Margaret MacArthur please link here

art : Herbert Cole
British, 1867 - 1930
"The Three Bears"
Date: 1906

HOT CHOCOLATE ~

Rescue Me

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/when-gps-leads-to-s-o-s.html?hp

DREAMERS ~

Buckminster Fuller & Isamu Noguchi



An informal and personal biography of the friendship between Fuller and Noguchi via Shoji Sadao, friend and partner to both men. With its deep survey on the development of Fuller's Dymaxion Map, Geodesic geometry, and Dymaxion Car, as well as Noguchi's vast career as an artist without borders: sculptor, landscape architect and industrial designer. Poets of space.

________________________

[NOGUCHI]

This appreciation for man's innate urge to create artifacts commemorating or memorializing important events would remain with Isamu for the rest of his life. In his reverence for nature he sought in his work to probe its inner, timeless meaning and its relevance to contemporary society. His interest in prehistoric sites, the dolmens and menhirs in Europe, Cycladic sculpture, and Jomon and Haniwa sculpture in Japan, attest to his fascination with and the influence of primitive objects on his works. Traveling with Isamu to Paris we visited the ethnographic museum whose ritual objects I remember he observed with an intense interest. His friendship with Joseph Campbell stemmed from their shared quest for the truth in ancient meanings and interpretation of symbolic language, myths, and archaic rituals. He subscribed to Joseph Campbell's conviction that "It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations." During a 1962 interview, Isamu responded to Katherine Kuh's question, "What kind of art do you admire?" with, "Actually the older it is, the more archaic and primitive, the better I like it. I don't know why, but perhaps it's simply because the repeated distillation of art brings you back to the primordial: the monoliths, the cave paintings, the scratching, the shorthand by which the earliest people tried to indicate their sense of significance, and even further back until you get to the fundamental material itself."

[ FULLER ]

Bucky's aesthetics, if this term can be used, were similar, but Fuller began with the concept of an inherently complex and eternally regenerative Universe. He believed in the primacy of the forces of the Universe, and in staying true to nature's principles in the design of artifacts. "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. . .But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." He applied to design the principle of Occam's razor (which holds that the simplest solution is often the best) and from his New England heritage, Emerson's precepts on beauty: "Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or quill of the bird gives the most alar strength. 'It is the purgation of superfluities,' said Michael Angelo [sic]. There is not a particle to spare in natural structures."





Buckminster Fuller & Isamu Noguchi
Best of Friends
by Shoji Sadao
5 Continents Editions, 2011

THANK YOU, FRIEND ~

Bob & Susan say thanks (out of the rain)


The complete Susan edited Birthday tribute anthology is here

Once In Vermont films © bob & susan arnold

small print ~
(paul ryan)

"The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a well-respected liberal think tank, describes the Ryan budget this way:

The new Ryan budget is a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature. In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids. It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).

The Ryan plan, which has received majority backing twice from Republicans in the House and once from Republicans in the Senate, calls for a major retrenchment of the welfare state.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,

Even as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would impose trillions of dollars in spending cuts, at least 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs, it would enact new tax cuts that would provide huge windfalls to households at the top of the income scale. New analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center finds that people earning more than $1 million a year would receive $265,000 apiece in new tax cuts, on average, on top of the $129,000 they would receive from the Ryan budget’s extension of President Bush’s tax cuts. The new tax cuts at the top would dwarf those for middle-income families. After-tax incomes would rise by 12.5 percent among millionaires, but just 1.8 percent for middle-income households. Low-income working families would actually be hit with tax increases.

In addition, the budget Ryan presented to the House in April last year called for the elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividend income. Romney pointed out in a January 2012 debate that “Under that plan, I’d have paid no taxes in the last two years.”

Even more important, in political terms, those now under 55 would face an utterly transformed Medicare when they reach 65, a health care program that would steadily shift costs to beneficiaries. The Ryan budget would also cap total federal Medicaid spending, which would force sharp reductions in eligibility and coverage.

In an email to the Times, Robert Shapiro, Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs under President Clinton, wrote:

Medicare is voucherized and then increases at GDP [Gross Domestic Product] growth + 1 percent per -year, versus actual increases in health care costs averaging over the last two decades 5.7%; and Medicaid is block-granted at current levels and grows at the rate of overall inflation – and neither formula takes account of increases in the number of recipients.

Medicaid is currently the single largest source of support for long-term care of the elderly and disabled. While just over three quarters of Medicaid recipients are children and families receiving basic health coverage, 64 percent of all Medicaid dollars go for the most expensive care (of old people in nursing homes and of the disabled), according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Most of the elderly population is not equipped to absorb higher medical costs. Almost half of those over the age of 65 depend on Social Security for 80 percent or more of their total income. At the start of 2012, the average annual Social Security benefit was $14,760.

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer there, see the cost-cutting Ryan budget as a plus:

Republicans own the Ryan budget. And so does Mitt Romney. The question, it seems to us, is not whether Republicans and their presidential nominee own the Ryan budget, but how they choose to talk about it. Republicans shouldn’t worry about having entitlement reform as part of the campaign debate; they should want it there. The 2012 campaign should be about leadership, and about the failure of Barack Obama to provide it on the big issues, including – especially – on entitlement reform, debt, and deficits.

Bill Burton, who was Obama’s deputy press secretary and is now a senior strategist at Priorities USA, is delighted to see Romney wrap his arms around Ryan: “The Ryan budget is one of the most toxic documents that a political party has ever embraced,” Burton said in a phone interview with the Times (which was also conducted before Ryan was unveiled). When Priorities USA tested reactions to specific provisions of the budget in focus groups, according to Burton, the participants thought the cuts were so draconian that “they couldn’t believe a politician would support those policies.”

The momentum behind the Ryan plan within the Republican Party is so strong that Romney has had no qualms about giving it his blessing. In a March 22 interview with a Milwaukee radio station, Romney defended the controversial package of budget and tax cuts:

It’s time to tell people the truth. And if they want to vote for something less than the truth, that’s their right. But I’ve got a campaign of telling people the truth and I believe the American people are ready for the truth and understand that all of the promises and the attacks and so forth that are part of the political process have to be pushed aside for the truth. And so my campaign’s about telling people we’ve got to cut back on our spending and finally live within our means or we could face economic calamity where what we’ve gone through over the last three years would look like a cakewalk.

Conservatives joyful over the selection of Ryan contend that whatever damage Democrats can inflict on Romney with the Ryan budget will be more than made up for by two factors: the willingness of the Republican ticket to forthrightly campaign on a detailed economic agenda, and Ryan’s appeal to white voters, including many blue-collar and Catholic voters.

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard argues that a Romney-Ryan ticket will now be equipped to take on the Obama White House:

Mitt Romney, the cautious candidate, wary of being specific, and counting on the bad economy to defeat President Obama – forget all that! The Romney who picked Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate is an entirely different person. He’s prepared to take the fight to Obama on the biggest bundle of issues – spending, debt, the deficit, taxes, entitlements, and the reversing of America’s accelerating decline under Obama. Specifics? There will be plenty.

The National Review stresses Ryan’s Catholicism:

One strength he brings to the ticket is a grounding in the social teaching of the Catholic Church, to which he belongs, and a willingness to engage with those who thoughtlessly equate this teaching with support for an ever-expanding welfare state. These traits could have more than parochial interest this year, because a disproportionate number of Catholic voters are up for grabs.

The overarching strategy of the Romney campaign is to turn out as many white voters as possible in a contest that may well come down to turnout on Election Day.

The Ryan budget, however, tackles a broad array of domestic social spending, and in slicing Medicare and Medicaid, Ryan’s plan imposes harsh costs on a very large proportion of white voters. An overwhelming majority of Medicare recipients, 78 percent, are white. Just 9 percent are black, 8 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian-American and 3 percent “other.” A solid plurality, 43 percent, of Medicaid recipients is white, 22 percent are black, 28 percent Hispanic and the rest are “other.”

A February 2012 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of all federal entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare), the school lunch program, Earned Income Tax Credit, and the refundable Child Tax Credit – finds that non-Hispanic whites, who make up 64 percent of the nation’s population, received 69 percent of the total benefits. Hispanics, who make up 16 percent of the population, received 12 percent of the payments, and blacks, who account for 12 percent of the population, received 14 percent of the benefits.

The Obama campaign and its allies are preparing to show that the Ryan plan will severely cut social insurance programs that not only provide help to poor people, but also to many in the middle class, including millions and millions of whites. The Romney campaign and its supporters, in turn, will try to make the case that these programs go disproportionately to the undeserving (and heavily minority) poor, who should not be subsidized by taxpayer dollars.

Until now, the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA has concentrated its commercials attacking Romney on his stewardship of Bain Capital, especially on decisions by the company to put businesses Bain acquired into bankruptcy, to close plants and to lay off workers. It has done so in part because of the focus group findings that voters were reluctant to believe that a mainstream politician would back the scope of cuts called for in the Ryan proposal.

Those Democratic anti-Bain ads, according to Burton, have been designed to soften up the electorate to make it possible to run, in the near future, commercials linking Romney to the Ryan budget. The anti-Bain commercials have the long-range goal, in Burton’s words, of “building a ‘thought structure’ among voters of a guy who makes decisions based on profits, and not on the concerns of middle class families.” Adding Ryan to the ticket serves to greatly facilitate development of this ‘thought structure.’

Which bring us to another problematic aspect of Romney’s decision to pick Ryan. The very qualities that attract the right to Ryan — his ideological purity and his verbal dexterity in making the case for smaller government — are very likely to eclipse Romney, who despite the boldness of his choice still projects a weak political persona and ideological ambiguity. No candidate willingly demotes himself from first to second fiddle, but Romney has chosen to do so.

In this context, Fred Barnes paid the ticket a backhanded compliment:

Romney showed that, like a smart businessman, he knows his shortcomings. For all his attacks on Obama’s economic policies, Romney has failed to create a sense of urgency about the country’s faltering economic situation. And without a national fear of an impending catastrophe, he can’t defeat Obama.

Romney’s solution, Barnes wrote, is to get someone who can: “No one in America is better than Ryan in spelling out, with figures and facts, the crisis America faces.”

For very different reasons, Democrat strategists like Burton and Garin would agree."

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University

from nytimes "Paul Ryan's Liberal Fan Cub"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/us/politics/family-faith-and-politics-describe-life-of-paul-ryan.html?hp


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/13/paul-ryan-sold-shares-banking-crisis

photo: from the film "Darkman"