Your Sunday Poem

Here's a sly, wickedly savage, wonderful poem to share from a new (to me) poet, Erin Belieu.  Oh, bad king Louis XV,  you're sooo right.

Apres Moi 

is pest, is plague, is
global atrophy, desire
insipid, the single
Saltine in its crumpled
sleeve.  Future of
courtesy balance and
hysterical number,
markets depressed,
a bottomed-out
G.D.P.
       Oh yes,
it all goes up,
Kablooey!  Good luck
enjoying those bonfires
with no s'mores!
           Big, BIG
mistake, to make this
life without me.  So
when the horsemen
descend on your
address, ride jiggety-
clop to your
empty door,
            you
can exlain this mess.
I won't live here
anymore.  To you,
I bequeath
a world where cupboards
stick, with nothing left
to creak for.

Movie Time

Some Hollywood, some Art House, some Guilty Pleasures,  here's a few I've seen.

First up, "2 Guns" was over at the Bay and, having finished it's run in SLOTOWN, was  heading for HBO or SHOWTIME.  Starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg as  DEA and Naval Intelligence agent (both undercover thinking the other is a bad guy), "2 Guns" is one of those bromance, battling Bickersons, buddy movies, filled with Wahlbergian wise-guy pattter and Denzel's my-patience-has-just-run-out smoldering stares.  All Roadrunner bloody/funny cartoony violence and impossible battles where everybody gets killed but nobody actually gets hurt.  Or at least feels any real pain. 

It's all fast paced fun with Perils of Pauline twists and turns and features a suitably evil Drug Lord (James Edward Olmos) with more life in him than his sleep-walking "Miami Vice" turn. And in a surprise casting, Bill Paxton plays an astonishingly scary Texas-drawling corrupt CIA agent who's the real kingpin. Paxton is usually cast as wussy Everymen and it's good to see him stretching into something quietly dangerous and in so doing he commands the screen whenever he sidles in the door.

If you're looking for "Art," and have 17 hours, 27 minutes to spare, try "Ain't Them Saints Got Bones," (at the Palm.)  O.K. that's not fair.  It just seems like 17 hours.  But, I enjoyed this film.  You have to settle down and be wiling to let the story unfold like a lazy hot southern day and understand you're watching an homage to Terrance Malick's "Badlands" and his even more visually ravashing, "Days of Heaven."  Also, it may help to think of the film as an interesting visual representation of one of those timeless, mournful Irish ballads (the famous poem, "The Highwayman," set to music comes to mind); a simple tune unfurling a tale of  love and loss, actions and consequences, always, always consequences, and the unyielding sorrow of unredeemable time.  And fate, unstoppable, driving the song on to its end.

Rooney Mara (nearly unrecognizable from Dragon Tatoo fame) stars as the strangely listless pregnant girlfriend of Casey Affleck.  They are heedless criminals, their heads stuffed with romantic nonsense (referencing Malick's "Badlands," which was loosely based on the murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate.) Even though Mara shoots (but does not kill) the sheriff, Affleck does the gentlemanly thing and cops the plea and goes to jail.  You can fill in the rest; a child is born, the years go by, the recovered sheriff falls in shy, hopeless love with the girlfriend, life goes on.  Until Affleck escapes and, defying all warnings and dangers, returns to claim his family, thereby setting in motion everyone's tragic fate.

The movie got 4 tickets in "Ticket" and I'd agree.  It's a really good effort, but requires close attention and a willingness to slip into the "song" and let it run out its variations to the end.

And for Guilty Pleasures, who could resist "Riddick?" I mean, really.  Vin Deisel's got this shtick down to gleeful perfection and absolutely owns the franchise of all his double and triple X's and "Fast and Furious" enterprises. And this Riddick's down to the quintessential elements:  Minimalist snappy dialogue, huge arms, fierce, preternatural  competence, he's one major badass fighting all kinds of wonderfully nasty CGI alien creatures and a host of stereopypical badass Bounty Hunters, most of whom you just know are gonna go down like nine pins.  Indeed, in this film, I soon began to feel real sympathy for the Bounty Hunters.  They had no idea what they had gotten themselves in for, poor schnooks. And, in a fun twist, one of the hunters is a formidable woman (Katee Sackhoff from TV's "Longmire") who ends up fulfilling Riddick's predictions of what was to come when his chains came off, but not exactly in the way the audience thinks it will be fulfilled.     

And best of all, Riddick adopts and raises a canine-like companion, a lithe, fierce striped creature that looks like a cross between a hyena and my greyhound, Finn, with the most wonderful pop-out ears in the world.  I want one of those things! (Spoiler alert:  The baddies kill his pooch.  Boooo!  Booooo!  Which you just know is gonna seal their awful fate on the fangs of what's soon to hatch out of the ground when the rains come.  Take THAT you dog killers, you!.) It's also clear that the CGI guys had a wonderful time designing this hideous planet, a place that looks like a waterless Paso Robles unless it can get it's water issues under control. So, Mel Gibson, eat your heart out.  The faster and more furious road warrior is back and he's not gonna take any of it any more.

A hoot.

So, any of you see any good, bad, guilty pleasure movies? Do tell.  The comment section will stay open a few days.  (Still working on getting this (*&*%^%$ blogspot fixed.)    

Your Sunday Poem

This charmer was sent to me by a friend.  She noted, "I was going through some papers, found this poem which was read at my Mom's funeral.  She loved her cats."  It's by A.S. J. Tessimond, who I will have to Google, and is really wonderful.  Set out the saucer of milk and enjoy.

Cats

Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned
To rules or routed for journeys; counter
Attack with non-resistance; twist
Enticing through the curving fingers
And leave an angered empty fist.
They wait, obsequious as darkness,
Quick to retire, quick to return;
Admit no aim or ethics; flatter
With reservations; will not learn
To answer their names;
Are seldom truly owned.
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,
Offer no angles to the wind.

Cynic's Delight

Calhoun's Cannons for Sept 3, 2013

 . . . the best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.  . . .

                                        W.B. Yeats

                                        The Second Coming.

It's sure a great time to be a cynic.  Halcyon days, really.

Syria's Assad slaughters an estimated 1,400 civilians, including hundreds of children, with chemical weapons, in clear violation of international laws in place since the Great War.  President Obama goes on TV to declare that the world has "watched in horror." 

No, it didn't.  A good deal of disgust, perhaps, but not horror.  Horror requires outrage.  Horror requires action, intervention, the stopping of the horror, the holding to account the perpetrators.  But the world is having none of that, thank you.  With the collapse of the "Arab Spring," I suspect that the world has come to the conclusion that the middle east is now in the throws of a Muslim version of the Thirty Years War: a savage mixture of God-driven blood soaked religious struggle combined with hard-eyed, heavily armed state politics. In that world, brazen killers fare very well indeed.

And it's a world made for a cynic's delight.  Consider Assad.  Yes, he's a weird, sub-set sort of Muslim, but a Muslim nonetheless.  And killing innocents, especially women and children, is considered an appalling violation of one of the deepest held tenants of Islam.  Anathema.  A terrifying breach of  God's holy word.  Yet when a Christian president (Obama) called upon the civilized nations to intervene, to form a coalition of the willing to bring the world's wrath down upon Assad's murderous head, The (Muslim) Arab League suddenly discovered a forgotten urgent appointment and sidled out the door.  And the mullah's, who lost no time issuing a fatwa on an author who wrote fiction, had other things to do when it came to real murdered children. Sorry, we must away, As-salam Alaikum.

Russia, too.  Of course, they're "godless," so I'm sure religious wars are just another useful dialectic to them.  Plus they've had a long, long history of  "horror." Plenty of experience in accepting "moral obscenities." Not to mention their skill in dealing with brutal realpolitik.  Which translates into Russia never allowing mass murder to interfere with the art of the deal.. 

The U.N., too, has perfected the art of  appearing to be fully present while not actually being there.  It's the cynic's highest art form performed on the world's stage.  Viewing with alarm, pointing with dismay, hand-wringing sorrow expressed, then suddenly, the remembered appointment, the hurried rush out the door.

And for sheer pleasure, a cynic cannot ask for anything better that the rhetoric that is now flowing.  "Moral outrage" is always tricky coming from a country with a faulty memory and a sad history of using chemical warfare itself.  I mean, what is Agent Orange, if not a chemical weapon that was used by the U.S. against innocents, including women and children.  Not to mention our own veterans who, 30 years later, are now reaping the cancers and other maladies Agent Orange bequeathed to them by their own government.

Well, what can you do?  Moral outrage has to be a shared feeling if it's to have any effect.  No good leading a battle charge of one. That turns into mere hectoring.  So we now have the cynic's snarky delight of watching the president suddenly switching gears and forcing a dysfunctional Congress to step up and let the world see just what "moral outrage" is worth in today's market.  Nothing?  A few lobbed missiles?  A gridlocked non-coalition of the unwilling?  World-bestriding Pax Americana suddenly hiding next to timid, isolationist little Britain while France (France!) declares for intervention? Awwww, Gawwwwd.

Well, who can blame Congress for their annoyed fury.  Obama has now trapped himself and them all in their own glib rhetoric and too-facile political and moral posturing.  Lines in the sand and now -- Sweet Jesus! --  they'll all have to go on record and vote.  A vote that will surely show up on their record during the next election.  And no good pretending they just remembered they had to leave for their kid's soccer game before the vote can be taken. There will be no quarter given in this mess.  

So here we are, trapped in the sticky web of a part of the world that's in the throws of No Good Options, and few choices except to cynically wash one's hands and declare that Syria, indeed, the whole middle east, has now passed the tipping point and has become a place of senseless fury, a new blood-soaked Thirty Years religious war that should be left alone to play out its blood-letting destiny.  

And if that's the case, then surely we have come to the heart of darkness, a place where the only furious reaction left may be a cynical, savage Kurtzian snarl, "Exterminate all the brutes." Followed by a shrug. And a remembered appointment.  And a  quick slip out the door.

 The horror!  The horror!  

     

Your Sunday Poem

The world has lost another voice.  Nobel Prize winner, Irish poet Seamus Heany died a few days ago at age 74.  It's a tremendous loss but there remains his lovely work.  In remembrance, from his collection, "Open Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996."

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly.  You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.