LIBERTY ~

Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events. 



http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/1/ 






 Photo : Melina Mara / The Washington Post

HELEN NEARING ~

~

When homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing left their mark after  ground-breaking years in Vermont (Jamaica) and re-settled their homestead and work on the coast of Maine, they met a salty old timer by the name of Jarvis Green. Jarvis taught the newcomers some things, starting with cats. . .

This is Helen's story, with photographs, and an afterword by Nearing scholar Greg Joly

$15

with Free Shipping in the USA

until December 31, 2012  

 

pier paolo pasolini

LINES OF A TESTAMENT



One needs to be very strong
to love solitude; one needs to have good legs
and an unusual resistance; one shouldn't risk
catching a cold, or flu or a sore throat; you mustn't
be afraid of robbers and killers; if one has to walk
through an afternoon or even all night long
one needs to know how to do it without even thinking.
There's no chance for one to sit, particularly
in winter; with a wind that blows over the wet grass
and with big, wet, muddy stones between garbage,
there's really no relief—no doubt about it—
beyond that of having a whole day and night ahead of one
without duties or limits of whatever kind.
Sex is a pretext. Because the encounters are many
—in winter too, on streets abandoned to the wind,
among the litter strewn against the distant buildings—
they're many—but they're only moments of loneliness;
the warmer and more alive the gentle body is
that anoints with sperm and moves on,
the colder and more mortal the beloved desert is around one;
and that's what fills one with joy,
like a miraculous wind, not the innocent smile
or the gloomy insolence of the one who goes away;
he carries with him a youth that's enormously young
and in this he's inhuman
because he leaves no traces, or rather he leaves
a single trace that's always
the same one in every season.
A young man in his first loves
is nothing else but the fecundity of the world.
It's the world that arrives with him: he appears and disappears
like changing form. All things remain intact
and you could walk half the city and not find him again.
The act's done, its repetition's a ritual. So
loneliness is even greater if a whole crowd
waits its turn: the number of disappearances in fact grows—
going away is fleeing—and
what follows looms over the present
like a duty, a sacrifice to offer to death's desire.
In getting older, however, weariness begins to be felt,
particularly in the moment just after dinnertime,
when for you nothing's changed; then, for a hair's breath,
you don't cry out or weep;
and that would be enormous if it weren't just the weariness
and maybe a bit of hunger. Enormous because
it'd mean that your desire for solitude
couldn't ever be satisfied, and so isn't what's
awaiting you, if not considered solitude,
real solitude, what you can't accept?
There's no dinner or lunch or satisfaction
in the world that's worth an endless stroll
through poor streets where one needs to be
wretched and strong, brothers of dogs.


1971. Translated by Jack Hirschman 


 _____________________________ 


from In Danger
A Pasolini Anthology
edited, with an introduction
by Jack Hirschman
(City Lights Books 2110) 

Pasolini murdered



The Lost Pasolini Interview

GOODBYE ~

	Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)
Tear It Down   by Jack Gilbert
We find out the heart only by dismantling what    the heart knows. By redefining the morning,    we find a morning that comes just after darkness.    We can break through marriage into marriage.    By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond    affection and wade mouth-deep into love.    We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.    But going back toward childhood will not help.    The village is not better than Pittsburgh.    Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.    Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound    of racoon tongues licking the inside walls    of the garbage tub is more than the stir    of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not    enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.    We should insist while there is still time. We must    eat through the wildness of her sweet body already    in our bed to reach the body within the body.      http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-poet-jack-gilbert-dies-20121113,0,2268324.story

EARTH ~

Stars




Bigger as the night got later.

Nearing winter.

I’d walk out last thing of the day.

Bring in two armloads of stovewood.

For the next morning.

That’s when I heard the gunshots.

Unreal. In the middle of nowhere.

Louder than anything I’ve heard for weeks.

Native knew I could hear him jacking deer.

No one else in the world was down here.

One of those things we never talked about.







Fitzcarraldo




The time we worked in the woods

Cutting trees in the old sugar stand

Opening back up to the light and the

World some of the largest maples we

Had ever seen, Sweetheart called the

Job our Fitzcarraldo, after the Herzog

Film, when they cut a wide swath over

The mountain in a jungle to pull the

Ship over to reach another waterway —

But we were after no waterway

Just cutting tree after tree and

Brush and piling it all but still

Like the movie Sweetheart

Said she had the same opera

Music playing in her head


for Susan








Rule of Thumb




don’t stay

long in



any

town



with

out a



real

hard



ware

store





[ BA ]

from Yokel
(2011)

poems & photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

'Rhino Wars': An anti-poaching team guards a northern white rhino, part of a 24-hour watch, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya last July. The park is home to four of the world's remaining eight northern white rhinos.

uk: the guardian

EARTH ~

FRIEND



This sparrow must

Love the sun —

All day it has perched

On the stone well

Beside the empty

Trough of seed



All day its feathers

Lifted in the breeze



Its head turning

The oddest angles



If I could have him

He would fit in

The palm of my hand


___________________________________________

Where Rivers Meet

Bob Arnold

 

EARTH ~

Peter Garland

http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Garland.shtml

farewell, Elliott Carter ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/arts/music/elliott-carter-avant-garde-composer-dies-at-103.html?hp

SONG ~

John Lurie

"Twelfth proposition"

Twelfth proposition, that all things must pass. John Lurie has been ill for a few years now, and he has trouble playing his horn these days, so much so that the Lounge Lizards are probably on indefinite hiatus. It therefore now seems that the amazing last two albums, Voice of Chunk and Queen of All Ears, are the end points of an astonishing and perennially underrated musical career, a musical career that at least for me was an influential thing, a career that has made me a better writer, in a way, because of how it has reminded me to stay loose, to allow language and inspiration to flourish without getting precious or exercising too much control. That said, I want to append one last morsel of story. A couple of years ago, in the course of speaking in public about how much I love the Lounge Lizards, I got to know Lurie a little bit, and one night we did a reading together, on the Lower East Side. As part of this reading series (Happy Endings), each reader was meant to try something that he had never done in public before. This was hard work for Lurie, because he has done a lot of things in public, and probably reading from his memoir-in-progress was the thing he had never done in public before. But after he read from his memoir, which was enthusiastically admired by the crowd, he got out his harmonica. Harmonica was among John's first instruments, and he's an extremely good harmonica player, and for a couple of minutes, despite his not great physical condition, he played one of the most heartrending and beautiful harmonica solos I've ever heard, after which he stumbled out of the room and literally collapsed in the hall. He said to me later that it might have been the last time he ever plays music in public. A respectful silence is probably the only way to greet this news. It's sad, for sure, very sad. Still, I feel lucky to have been there. By its nature, live music has only its immediate duration. After that comes the respectful silence. With Lurie and the Lounge Lizards, the music is in the province of memory now, and that's where it's kept alive. A real shame for those who won't get to see them play. Memory is faulty, full of mistakes, full of longing, but still interacts with music in a flexible way; memory is kind of like music itself; like jazz, it's unpredictable, and memory gives musicians something to work toward, as it also gives writers something to write about.


Rick Moody
from ON CELESTIAL MUSIC and other adventures in listening
(Back Bay Books, 2012)

_______________________


John Lurie (born December 14, 1952) is an American actor, musician, painter, director and producer. He is co-founder of The Lounge Lizards, a jazz ensemble. Lurie has acted in 19 films including Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law, composed and performed music for 20 television and film works, and he produced and starred in Fishing with John, a 1991 television series. In 1996 his soundtrack for Get Shorty was nominated for a Grammy Award. For five years he appeared in the HBO television show Oz.

Since 2000, Lurie has suffered from an illness diagnosed as chronic Lyme disease and has refocused his attention on painting. His first major show was in May 2004 in New York City. His primitivist art works have shown in galleries around the world. His painting Bear Surprise became an internet meme in Russia in 2006. (wikipedia)

http://www.strangeandbeautiful.com/ 





john lurie photo : john back

EARTH ~

"These regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be — they were at first, of course — simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons and all their changes are in me."

 (Journal: Oct 25, 1857)

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau spans the years between 1837 and 1861 — a period of twenty- four years, comprising of forty-seven manuscript volumes, all two million words — published in its entirety in 1906. A new, expanded edition of the Journals is in the works,  published by Princeton University Press.  Here is a very brief chronology showing some of the Thoreau years:

1838: Thoreau opened a private school
1838: delivered his first lecture at the Concord Lyceum
1838: traveled to the Maine Woods (and 1846, 1853, 1857)
1839: with his brother John, traveled the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
1840-1844: contributed his writings to the Dial
1842: witnessed and suffered himself the death, from lockjaw, of his brother John
1843: tutored William Emerson's children on New York's Staten Island
1844: accidentally set fire to the Concord Woods
1845:built his Walden cabin on Walden Pond and moved in on Independence Day
1847: moved away from his Walden Pond cabin
1848: lived at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home before returning to his family's home
1848: published "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods"
1849: paid for and published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
1849: traveled to Cape Cod (and 1850, 1855)
1854: Walden published
1854: lectured on slavery
1856: worked as a surveyor and introduced to Walt Whitman
1858: traveled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire
1860: delivered "The Succession of Forest Trees" at the Middlesex Cattle Show
1861: left for Minnesota with Horace Mann, Jr., hoping a change of pace would bolster his failing health, but returned after less than two months to Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived in the family home, downstairs, receiving guests until he passed away of tuberculosis and bronchitis on May 6, 1862.
Last words in a full sentence: "Now comes good sailing."
 (followed by two words "moose". "Indian.")

pine box built by Thoreau to house his journals



"We want a man to give us that which was most precious to him — not his life's blood but even that for which his life's blood circulated what he has got by living —"
 (Journal 2: 1842-1846)

"How to live — How to get the most life! as if you were to teach the young hunter how to entrap his game. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every day business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over all fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the live long day for the sweets of nature. Do I not impregnate and intermix the flowers produce rare and finer varieties by transferring my eyes from one to another? I do as naturally and as joyfully with my own humming music — seek honey all the day. With what honied thought any experience yields me. I take a bee line to my cell. It is with flowers I would deal. Where is the flower there is the honey — which is perchance the nectareous portion of the fruit — there is to be the fruit — and no doubt flowers are thus colored and painted — to attract and guide the bee. So by the dawning of radiance of beauty are we advertised where is the honey and the fruit of thought of discourse and of action — We are first attracted by the beauty of the flower, before we discover the honey which is a foretaste of the future fruit. Did not the young Achilles(?) spend his youth learning how to hunt? The art of spending a day. If it is possible that we may be addressed — it behooves us to be attentive. If by watching all day and all night — I may detect some trace of the Ineffable — then will it not be worth the while to watch? Watch and pray without ceasing. . .I am convinced that men are not well employed — that this is not the way to spend a day."
HDT  (1851)

Thoreau's hut site at Walden Pond

VICTORY ~  

 

EARTH ~

Reuters

The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse
    Hurricane Sandy Rides In
       By Rebecca Solnit
 

The first horseman was named al-Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: that our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition and because of oil, the black gold that fueled most of our machines and our largest corporations and too many of our politicians. The second horseman came not quite four years later. It was named Katrina, and this one too delivered a warning.

Katrina’s message was that we needed to face the dangers we had turned our back on when the country became obsessed with terrorism: failing infrastructure, institutional rot, racial divides, and poverty. And larger than any of these was the climate -- the heating oceans breeding stronger storms, melting the ice and raising the sea level, breaking the patterns of the weather we had always had into sharp shards: burning and dying forests, floods, droughts, heat waves in January, freak blizzards, sudden oscillations, acidifying oceans.

The third horseman came in October of 2008: it was named Wall Street, and when that horseman stumbled and collapsed, we were reminded that it had always been a predator, and all that had changed was the scale -- of deregulation, of greed, of recklessness, of amorality about homes and lives being casually trashed to profit the already wealthy. And the fourth horseman has arrived on schedule.

We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second, and third disasters showed up. This storm’s name shouldn’t be Sandy -- though that means we’ve run through the alphabet all the way up to S this hurricane season, way past brutal Isaac in August -- it should be Climate Change.  If each catastrophe came with a message, then this one’s was that global warming’s here, that the old rules don’t apply, and that not doing anything about it for the past 30 years is going to prove far, far more expensive than doing something would have been.

That is, expensive for us, for human beings, for life on Earth, if not for the carbon profiteers, the ones who are, in a way, tied to all four of these apocalyptic visitors. A reasonable estimate I heard of the cost of this disaster was $30 billion, just a tiny bit more than Chevron’s profits last year (though it might go as high as $50 billion). Except that it’s coming out of the empty wallets of single mothers in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the pensions of the elderly, and the taxes of the rest of us. Disasters cost most of us terribly, in our hearts, in our hopes for the future, and in our ability to lead a decent life. They cost some corporations as well, while leading to ever-greater profits for others.

Disasters Are Born Political

It was in no small part for the benefit of the weapons-makers and oil producers that we propped up dictators and built military bases and earned the resentment of the Muslim world. It was for the benefit of oil and other carbon producers that we did nothing about climate change, and they actively toiled to prevent any such action.

If you wanted, you could even add a fifth horseman, a fifth disaster to our list, the blowout of the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010; cost-cutting on equipment ended 11 lives and contaminated a region dense with wildlife and fishing families and hundreds of thousands of others. It was as horrendous as the other four, but it took fewer lives directly and it should have but didn't produce political change.

Each of the other catastrophes has redirected American politics and policy in profound ways. 9/11 brought us close to dictatorship, until Katrina corrected course by discrediting the Bush administration and putting poverty and racism, if not climate change, back on the agenda. Wall Street's implosion was the 2008 October Surprise that made Americans leave Republican presidential candidate John McCain's no-change campaign in the dust -- and that, three years later, prompted the birth of Occupy Wall Street.

The Wall Street collapse did a lot for Barack Obama, too, and just in time another October surprise has made Romney look venal, clueless, and irrelevant. Disaster has been good to Obama -- Katrina’s reminder about race may have laid the groundwork for his presidential bid, and the financial implosion in the middle of the presidential campaign, as well as John McCain’s disastrous response to it, may have won him the last election.

The storm that broke the media narrative of an ascending Romney gave Obama the nonpartisan moment of solidarity he always longed for -- including the loving arms of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. But it’s not about the president; it’s about the other seven billion of us and the rest of the Earth’s creatures, from plankton to pikas.

Hope in the Storm

Sandy did what no activist could have done adequately: put climate change back on the agenda, made the argument for reasonably large government, and reminded us of the colossal failures of the Bush administration seven years ago. (Michael “heckuva job” Brown, FEMA's astonishingly incompetent director under George W. Bush, even popped up to underscore just how far we've come.)

Maybe Sandy will also remind us that terrorism was among the least common, if most dramatic, of the dangers we faced then and face now. Though rollercoasters in the surf and cities under water have their own drama -- and so does seawater rushing into the pit at Ground Zero.

Clearly, the game has changed. New York City’s billionaire mayor, when not endorsing police brutality against Wall Street’s Occupiers, has been a huge supporter of work on climate change.  He gave the Sierra Club $50 million to fight coal last year and late last week in Sandy’s wake came out with a tepid endorsement of Obama as the candidate who might do something on the climate. Last week as well, his magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, ran a cover that could’ve run anytime in the past few decades (but didn’t) with the headline: “It’s global warming, stupid.”

There are two things you can hope for after Sandy. The first is that every person stranded without power, running water, open grocery stores, access to transportation, an intact home, and maybe income (if work isn’t reachable or a job has been suspended) is able to return to normal as soon as possible. Or more than that in some cases, because the storm has also brought to light how many people were barely getting by before.  (After all, we also use the word “underwater” for people drowning in debt and houses worth less than what’s owed on their mortgages.) The second is that the fires and the water and the wind this time put climate change where it belongs, in the center of our most pressing issues.

 We Have Power! How Disasters Unfold

A stranger sent me a widely circulated photograph of a front gate in Hoboken with a power strip and extension cord and a little note that reads, “We have power! Please feel free to charge your phone.” We have power, and volunteers are putting it to work in ways that count. In many disasters, government and big bureaucratic relief organizations take time to get it together or they allocate aid in less than ideal ways. The most crucial early work is often done by those on the ground, by the neighbors, by civil society -- and word, as last week ended, was that the government wasn’t always doing it adequately.

Hurricane Sandy seems to be typical in this regard. Occupy Wall Street and 350.org got together to create Occupy Sandy and are already doing splendid relief work, including for those in the flooded housing projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn. My friend Marina Sitrin, a scholar and Occupy organizer, wrote:

“Amazing and inspiring work by community and Occupy folks! Hot nutritious meals for many hundreds. Supplies that people need, like diapers, baby wipes, flashlights etc., all organized. Also saw the first (meaning first set up in NYC -- only tonight) scary FEMA site a few blocks away. Militarized and policed entrance, to an area fenced in with 15-foot fences, where one gets a sort of military/astronaut ration with explanations of how to use in English that I did not understand. Plus Skittles?”

Occupy, declared dead by the mainstream media six weeks ago, is shining in this mess. Kindness, solidarity, mutual aid of this kind can ameliorate a catastrophe, but it can’t prevent one, and this isn’t the kind of power it takes to pump out drowned subway stations or rebuild railroad lines or get the lights back on. There is a role for government in disaster, and for mobilizing all available forces in forestalling our march toward a planet that could look like the New Jersey shore all the time.

When Occupy first began, all those tents, medical clinics, and community kitchens in the encampments reminded me of the aftermath of an earthquake.  The occupiers looked like disaster survivors -- and in a sense they were, though the disaster they had survived was called the economy and its impacts are usually remarkably invisible. Sandy is also an economic disaster: unlimited release of carbon into the atmosphere is very expensive and will get more so.

The increasingly turbulent, disaster-prone planet we’re on is our beautiful old Earth with the temperature raised almost one degree celsius. It’s going to get hotter than that, though we can still make a difference in how hot it gets. Right now, locally, in the soaked places, we need people to aid the stranded, the homeless, and the hungry. Globally we need to uncouple government from the Big Energy corporations, and ensure that most of the carbon energy left on the planet stays where it belongs: underground.

After the Status Quo

Disasters often unfold a little like revolutions. They create a tremendous rupture with the past. Today has nothing much in common with yesterday -- in how the system works or doesn’t, in what people have in common, in how they see their priorities and possibilities. The people in power are often most interested in returning to yesterday, because the status quo was working for them -- though Mayor Bloomberg is to be commended for taking the storm as a wake-up call to do more about climate change. For the rest of us, after such a disaster, sometimes the status quo doesn’t look so good.

Disasters often produce real political change, not always for the better (and not always for the worse). I called four of the last five big calamities in this country the four horsemen of the apocalypse because directly or otherwise they caused so much suffering, because they brought us closer to the brink, and because they changed our national direction. Disaster has now become our national policy: we invite it in and it directs us, for better and worse.

As the horsemen trample over all the things we love most, it becomes impossible to distinguish natural disaster from man-made calamity: maybe the point is that there is no difference anymore. But there’s another point: that we can prevent the worst of the impact in all sorts of ways, from evacuation plans to carbon emissions reductions to economic justice, and that it’s all tied up together.

I wish Sandy hadn’t happened. But it did, and there have been and will be more disasters like this. I hope that radical change arises from it. The climate has already changed. May we change to meet the challenges.

Rebecca Solnit wrote about disasters and civil society in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and in many reports for TomDispatch and other websites.

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175613/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_the_name_of_the_hurricane_is_climate_change/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=0d687dfc72-TD_Solnit11_6_2012&utm_medium=email#more

Hurricane Sandy in Cuba

BREATHE ~

~ President Barack Obama Re-elected ~




(Solid Obama end to end in New England, folks)






http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/long-lines-id-demands-and-provisional-ballots-mar-voting.html?hp

HONEYMOON ~

I just watched Barack Obama deliver his last campaign speech (in Iowa) and I taped that off C-Span while I was watching, for Sweetheart (asleep). Bruce Springsteen spoke well at this rally. Michelle and Barack Obama looked like lovers. They've already won, despite any election.

12:09AM 6 Nov '12




Vote! Break down the doors, and vote.

photo : Associated Press/Carolyn Kaster

SNOOPING ~

http://www.edisonresearch.com/us_exit_polling.php

PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE ~

The Pathway of Hurricane Sandy ~
 coastline New York City, New Jersey
October ~ November 2012

 

 

photographers ~ locations

________________

Reuters: Homes flooded Tuckerton, New Jersey

Damon Winter, New York Times : A parking garage in the Wall Street area

Allison Joyce, Getty: The flooded Hugh L. Carey Tunnel

Timothy A. Clary, Getty: Phones and laptops to charge in the West Village, New York City

Craig Ruttle AP: People, cars, bicycles line up for free gas in Jamaica, New York

Librado Romero, New York Times: Car smashed Broadway at Van Cortlandt, Bronx


Patrick Semansky, AP: Shoveling sand out of a home in Longport, New Jersey


Lucas Jackson, Reuters: Water splashed into window Bellport, New York

Mario Tama , Getty: Burned homes in the  Breezy Point section of Queens.


Justin Lane, European Press: A flooded plaza along Water Street, Manhattan


Spencer Platt, Getty: A woman walked along a beach with destroyed houses in Rockaway, Queens


Shannon Stapleton, Reuters: Angelina Macdonald, 5, held onto food given to her family by the Army National Guard in Long Beach, New York


Doug Mills, New York Times: Mr. Obama hugged a woman in Brigantine, NJ


Kirsten Luce, New York Times: Residents on Michigan Avenue in Long Beach, New York band together to look out for looters


Seth Wenig, AP: A sign opposing the NY Marathon in Staten Island which was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy

Tony Cenicola, New York Times: A lost boat outside homes in Green Island, New Jersey

Jason DeCrow, AP: Swan, flooded street Lindenhurst, New York



http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/health/a-collective-effort-to-save-decades-of-research-at-nyu.html?ref=health?src=dayp

http://stormy.msrc.sunysb.edu/