The Heads of Laocoön's Sons
“Do not complain beneath the stars about the lack of bright spots in your life.” ―Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
I grew up five blocks away from The Thinker. Sitting there thinkin’ outside the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Rodin’s most famous statue was to me a childhood familiarity. When I was learning to count, I would count the large, defined toes on his shoeless feet. My kids did the same. For some reason, The Thinker is a spellbinding work for children…for practically anyone…who walks by it. Maybe it is the idea of us looking at ourselves deep in thought…a physical key into our most precious asset: our imagination.
There used to be no gate around the entrance to the Legion of Honor’s courtyard where the statue resides and in High School we would occasionally congregate at The Thinker when the stars were out…maybe before a round of ice blocking on the golf course…maybe just to ponder our lives, in conversation with the one who has been thinking for a century.
I always wondered why they had to put up a gate around the beloved bronze statue. As William Blake meditates in his brilliant poem The Garden Of Love: why must humankind always fence away the beauty we want to commune with?
A few weekends ago, my childhood friend Matt Hollis, his family and my family met for a picnic under Anna Hyatt Huntington’s statue of Joan of Arc that majestically stands beyond the reaches of the Legion’s gates, in the front lawn. This morning, I woke up with a e-mail from Matt relaying the news that late last week another statue, “The Laocoön Group,” had been vandalized. The statue “depicts the Greek God Laocoön and his two sons in a tussle with a horde of serpents sent by Athena and Poseidon for attempting to warn the Trojans about the wooden horse trick that led to the fall of Troy1.” The vandals had removed the sons’ heads from the statue…which must have been an incredibly difficult task…and a tragedy right out of Greek lore. Now Laocoön’s tortured countenance has taken on a whole new meaning.
Which brings us to the answer regarding the fence around The Thinker; thus the probability of more fences in the Legion’s future…as well as more fences around other beautiful things in the city. Blake pondered why we must fence off the beauty that surrounds us, and the answer is unfortunately an obvious one.
Top 30 Most Expensive Items Sold on Discogs in October 2021
Who wants an Albert Ayler LP… for $4500? I mean…I do….but no way. The music is killer (check out the opening track, I’ll Remember April) as is much of the music from this list…
‘Grandpa Was An Emperor’ Clip: First Look At Doc On Family of Haile Selassie & Ethiopian Revolution
For anyone who follows reggae music or Jamaican culture, the shadow of Haile Selassie looms so very large. And for all I knew about him, I had no idea of what happened to his family after the Ethiopian Revolution and much of the backstory. This looks to be an illuminating documentary (thanks for the tip, Josh Rosenthal).
A fascinating deep dive into the life of Wells and his contemporaries and lovers: “George Orwell (wrote): ‘Wells is too sane to understand the modern world.’ It is a remarkably obtuse judgement: it would be truer to say that Wells was possessed by the madness of his times. His early fictions and the utopias he later promoted are two sides of the same divided mind. If anything, Wells’s schemes of world-transformation are more horrifying than his nightmares of human decline and extinction.”
Exclusive: Read Andy Summers' Short Story 'Come Together' from His New Book Fretted and Moaning
OK…the guitarist of the Police is writing short stories. I would give this story a B- (at best). He is just not a developed writer . Autobiographical: probably? Aging musician trying to figure things out and making wrong decisions…the story he tells seems fitting.
And since Summers told a story, I will follow it up: I was in the recording studio with Trevor Horn in the mid-90s throwing down a mix for a Shane MacGowan/Sinéad O'Connor duet called Haunted, which was going to be on the US version of Shane’s debut solo record, The Snake (this was before Sinéad [Happy Birthday, by the way] decided to talk badly about Shane to the press). There was already a tad bit of bad tidings between Horn and myself because I had changed the record cover and the track listing for The Snake’s US release without telling him…and it was a record we had licensed from his record company ZTT. Shane hated the UK version (hated the photo the company had used, hated that they had kicked off many of the traditional Irish numbers) and I was more than happy to help him make a record he wanted. But fair enough, Horn was irked. So we were sitting there…at the mixing board…making awkward small talk when Horn started boasting about Frankie Goes To Hollywood…and how he had taken the hit recordings of theirs (that he produced), constantly reused them on different releases with different cover art and sequencing….so people were buying the same thing over again thinking it was a new item…with all those on the business side making money hand over fist. I really had no idea how to respond to his peacock lechery. Changing the subject, I started talking about punk rock…about The Damned…about how Shane’s voice epitomized the punk rock ethos…which was this gruff, dark scrawl, vastly different to Sinéad’s angelic one, that we had just made even softer with tons of reverb (we were trying to get a good mix of the two). Horn abruptly cut me off, saying: “Punk rock??? Nothing good came from punk rock. The only good band that came out of punk rock was The Police.”
And that was really the end of our dialogue. He might enjoy Summers’ new book!
Michael Steinhardt, Billionaire, Surrenders $70 Million in Stolen Relics
ALREADY disgraced Steinhardt, who got properly #metoo’ed a few years ago when it came out that, believe it or not (ha! #BELIEVE) he used his money and power to treat women horribly, now has this horrid atrocity to add more stain to his permanent life record. What a despicable schmuck. The big question: what else lurks in the guy’s closet? One could only imagine…or maybe the unknown darkness here is unimaginable. Great article on the guy who busted Steingardt in the Atlantic recently…thank you Shane Hankins for sending it over.
DREAM ON
By: James Tate
Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinary people who don't hesitate
to cut somebody's heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease.
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church
as if that were a natural part of life.
Investing money is second nature to them.
They contribute to political campaigns
that have absolutely no poetry in them
and promise none for the future.
They sit around the dinner table at night
and pretend as though nothing is missing.
Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall
and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing.
The family dog howls all night,
lonely and starving for more poetry in his life.
Why is it so difficult for them to see
that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial.
Sure, they have their banquets, their celebrations,
croquet, fox hunts, their sea shores and sunsets,
their cocktails on the balcony, dog races,
and all that kissing and hugging, and don't
forget the good deeds, the charity work,
nursing the baby squirrels all through the night,
filling the birdfeeders all winter,
helping the stranger change her tire.
Still, there's that disagreeable exhalation
from decaying matter, subtle but everpresent.
They walk around erect like champions.
They are smooth-spoken and witty.
When alone, rare occasion, they stare
into the mirror for hours, bewildered.
There was something they meant to say, but didn't:
"And if we put the statue of the rhinoceros
next to the tweezers, and walk around the room three times,
learn to yodel, shave our heads, call
our ancestors back from the dead--"
poetrywise it's still a bust, bankrupt.
You haven't scribbled a syllable of it.
You're a nowhere man misfiring
the very essence of your life, flustering
nothing from nothing and back again.
The hereafter may not last all that long.
Radiant childhood sweetheart,
secret code of everlasting joy and sorrow,
fanciful pen strokes beneath the eyelids:
all day, all night meditation, knot of hope,
kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life
seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day's extravagant labor.
And yet it's cruel to expect too much.
It's a rare species of bird
that refuses to be categorized.
Its song is barely audible.
It is like a dragonfly in a dream--
here, then there, then here again,
low-flying amber-wing darting upward
then out of sight.
And the dream has a pain in its heart
the wonders of which are manifold,
or so the story is told.
taken from an article in SF Gate by Nico Madrigal-Yankowski