Hangover this season from all the so-called newsmakers

About this time of year, when you're a bit hung over and on the edges of a really good flu, don't some of the news stories of the past year and a little before-- just want to make you sharpen a miniature hatchet against the media poseurs who hog all the headlines.
Like...

Politicians

Environmentalists.

Lawyers.

Anti-smoking grinches rich on the public trough.

Health care professionals and their preaching.

The Canadian Cancer Society.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Party- pooper Mayor Bloomberg, of New York.

Al Gore.

Lady Gaga.

Justin Beiber.

Snookie

Power-mad police chiefs, as in Toronto.

Gangbangers.

TV Evangelists.

Professional Atheists a' la Christopher Hitchens

De Paki Chopra

All health news

Afghanistan--all of it.

Any further news this season from Israel.



All those media hogs.
The only exception, it seems to me, is Sarah Palin.
She is worth her weight in gold as an oddly attractive lightning rod, badly needed food for the talk shows. She's cute, stoopid and says some really funny things.

Like "Happy Hannukah-Quansa, and how's that working out for ya?"

Sarah Palin for President! :)

The Black Icon seems to shine again

Christmas is surely a time of miracles, some large, some small. The small miracle is in a number of Ukrainian professors out west, who are demanding a reprint of my first novel,The Black Icon. The book was published thirty-five years ago by the Bradford Witness Publishing company, it is out of print, and so unfortunately is The Bradford Witness. It has been bought by Metroland. I don't have an immediate in with Metroland, but the gods there seem friendly.
So in the short run, I am between publishers right now, but I will surely knock off enough copies from here to satisfy the demand. Better read(again?) than dead!
Sort of a small miracle to have the Icon still kinda shining.

And Merry Christmas, everybody!

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Rap sheet

When I first heard it on the radio, I swear the rap I was almost jiving to-- was written by Mark, or Jim or any number of my fellow blogger poets from Michigan.

But no. It was Lil Wayne and Eminem, who last Saturday night went Socko Boffo on SNL.

[Verse 1 - Lil Wayne]

Throw dirt on me and grow a wildflower
But it's "fuck the world", get a child out her
Yeah, my life a bitch, but you know nothing bout her
Been to hell and back, I can show you vouchers
I'm rolling Sweets, I'm smoking sour
Married to the game but she broke her vows
That's why my bars are full of broken bottles
And my night stands are full of open Bibles
I think about more than I forget
But I don't go around fire expecting not to sweat
And these niggas know I lay them down, make their bed
Bitches try to kick me while I'm down: I'll break your leg
Money outweighing problems on the triple beam
I'm sticking to the script, you niggas skipping scenes
Be good or be good at it
Fucking right I've got my gun, semi-Cartermatic
Yeah, put a dick in their mouth, so I guess it's "fuck what they say"
I'm high as a bitch: up, up and away
Man, I come down in a couple of days
OK, you want me up in the cage, then I'll come out in beast mode
I got this world stuck in the safe, combination is the G-code
It's Weezy motherfucker, blood gang and I'm in bleed mode
All about my dough but I don't even check the peephole
So you can keep knocking but won't knock me down
No love lost, no love found

"NO LOVE" indeed.

Not from from Detroit, but from NYC. It is an amazing performance by Emminem.
Yet the performance did bring to mind some of the writing I'd been getting from Detroit.
It is almost rap in places, but it is not Emminem.

In Detroit, Mark is in the coffee house, Jim is in the "jailhouse"... And in any event, they are both white. Better form to have a black guy, Lil Wayne,the other half of Emminem to rock out from that incredible rap piece, heard just about everywhere by now, "No Love."
It was certainly Socko Boffo on SNL. Emminem and Lil Wayne.
After that, it's afta suppa, muddafukka, as Emminem and Lil Wayne practically slay the audience and whoever was watching...Emminem was the best part of SNL last Saturday night, making host Jeff Bridges (Jeff Bridges?!) seem like a tame has-been.

I don't know what it is about Emminem, but singlehandedly, that white angel hipster, even after a five-year absence has knocked regular rapppers practically out of the park.

It's gotta be the poetry, recognized today as a legitimate art form by any number of PhD's from Little Richard (yes!) to Dr. Richard, of Oxford.

Yet sittting over here, looking at the lyrics, I could well be listening to something read by The Walking Man, out of Detroit...He's that good, but definitely not a rapper.

Sample from Mark's new book of poems, THE LINE BETWEEN:

it might have been a wonderful life
If your mother hadn't been so drunk,
she microwaved you to death
She mistook you for the bottle
she was going to feed you
to shut you up with
so she could go
pass out again

Dang. If those Detroit coffee house poets had bass drums!

Seem to me they sometimes get close to even Emminem and Lil Wayne.

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Generation of Weasels?

It seems to me that when the Holidays come up, Big Brother moves to the top. RIDE patrols here in Canada, arbitrarily stopping motorists, whether guilty of imparied driving or not. You must be caught! Police parked in Beer and liquor parking lots, behind bars--the drinking bars. Mothers against Imparied Driving, certainly with legitimate sorrows and complaints seem to want us all to stop just short of prohibition...Or maybe go all the way with it. they know it can get past the Constitution. I mean, smoking is virtually illegal nowadays, is it not.
And yet the streets are full of gunfire and that underlying malaise is hardly ever addressed. My Region has at least two Mafia families operating in it, but they are molested not.
White collar gangbangers are tolerated, and even the gangstas unless they do something especially heinous... like in Vancouver, where police are forced to actually do something.

If you drink, don't drive. But if you shoot somebody, well, that might just be gangsta crime.
Go after John Q. Public, who goodnaturedly goes along with all suspensions of freedom, trying to do his best.
We live in such a false sense of security, the kind of security you once felt when you drove your powerful car though a hot summer night, the windows open, the wind in your hair, the CD up, singing along with the music,imagining yourself to be free. Uh-oh. They can stop you now for nothing. Especially during the Holidays.
And God help you if you had a glass of wine with your last meal.
It seems to the authorities that it is the middle class and not all the lunks, punks and drunks that are causing the problem. Go after the guy with the two last names. Snooty bastard and his minivan.
I have been planning a book for some time now, whose working title is Generation of Weasels.
Bullied by our politicians, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms vetted by something called the Constitution Committee. We don't know what our rights really are. And where, really, is the Canadian Constitution?
It is locked up in Ottawa.
As I remember the same condition was there in the United States in the Fifties.
They even arrested Harry Belafonte for being un-American.

And now all the false flag operations to keep us all in line.

Zim-boat Taliban, tally me banana.

Ivan and his computer are kaput today.

Computer is in the shop today.
Needs to be rewired.

Ivan is in the jigsaw puzzle assembly plant today.
Also needs to be rewired.

Hitachi and Caterpillar chomping my brain

Mentally blocked.

Can't set word to screen.

And all his while, they are blockbusting my neighbourhood.
Just next door, where the venerable and much-used hockey arena had been, there is now a huge hole, and all around, the edges of the pit, there is a tall Tyrannosaurus Rex of a Hitachi backhoe, nodding and nodding on its treads, scooping out the once- rich earth and loading onto a truck, itself squat, low-slung and dinosaur-like. Stegasaurus on wheels. Or steroids.
Who cares if two hundred years of history are being scooped up, a pioneer grave or two, the coffins of the once richest among them still encased in concrete, the poorer just brown bones...To Toronto for those ancient cadavers, to the forensic unit. We must build, baby, build!

The same story pretty well all though North America, and certainly England and Europe.

Blockbusting and block scooping. HITACHI and CATERPILLAR lumbering around like Tiger tanks in a trap. No more Irish ditchdiggers. Backhoes and front-end loaders, Italians like grenadiers following the machines, as the cement truck pours out new sidewalks, whether they are need or not.The white-hatted straw boss is impatient, the "grunts" egged on... get those freshly-poured abutments cut to size as soon as dry. They dry super-fast, because of the calcium carbide.
Soon the screech of concrete-cutting diamond saws.
"You did it wrong, Giuseppe! Got to get some sealer!"

And while they are blockbusting, I am mentally blocked.

No longer the boy wonder at university, where I imagined myself as a craftsman, very much a builder of edifices in words, but the words have come tumblind down, and I now work in clacking electronics, into a machine, and where the words go, nobody knows.

And yet with all those servos, I am mentally blocked.

Somehow screwed in the head, like an idiot...Or maybe idiot-savant.One-note artist. Good at one thing only, and as for the rest, an idiot.
One smart cynic at the Toronto Star telling me, "Artists? Look around at the mental hospital, at the patients' art...Exactly like Van Gogh. He was a crazy bastard too."

And yet crazy man can't put a blog together today.

Post Modern times. A policeman with no whistle. A fireman with no hose. All implement replaced.

All that has gone before is shit. Build, baby, build!

They are excavating my neighbourhood. Two hundred years of history. They have taken away my wonderful arena to put in a Wal Mart.

They are mining my brain.
I swear I hear things.

Perhaps the cry of a dinosaur.

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