Just Out of Ice

Smoking pot on a cot with a lot of hot spotted lillypad babies
Pass pass puff
Methods and subjects go hand in hand do they not

What some might call
Too soon
For me to catch the patch
I need to walk a hundred miles
And shoot myself in the head
Then I'll get up and find the woman
I'm legally obligated to tell you that I
Have no intention of carrying out anything
That I tell you

In other words, fly with me.

a silent weeping willow
gazes neath
its windswept leaves

Barbarians

I think the hurly-burly's done
The homo sapien's lost his fun
The spirit father's son of man
Can walk above, maintain his tan
There is no greater fish to fry
The fish beneath our feet do fly
But this man walks where we cannot
We must assure that he will rot
His magic does not understand
The limitations of a man
Look at him bleed
Look at him bleed
No other corpse is cause to feed

Song for the Girl

One look
One time
One form
Two blinks
Get thee to a nunnery
I'll meet you there
Underneath the barriers and headaches
Down in the pew
And your vagina light
Will sing, 'matter of fact

I think she's on fire

Slammed Flat

Slowly you told me, I was beautiful and not you
I wanted to punch you in the face
Instead I jumped straight into your lap
Like some pussy. Never mind

One day music can rock this sad shit
Into a white sock. Hurl it at neighbors
Knowing in the hovering raisins
Of flying musical turds every which way
I will stick my nose in majestic and arrogant

I'm Sick of the Kill

It's Cold These Days
And Nothing Pays
So Sit and Wait
For Purple Haze
Fool Me Once
Fool Me Again
Fool Me Again
Fool Me Again
fool me again
and again
and again

Something has been lost, a poem.

Knowing Knotseams

You're the Shakespeare
You have to say what you mean
I meant you mean what you say
You have to mean what you say
I meant I have to
Mean
What you say
But I would have been saying
Not all snippets have a whole
Not all bliss will open doors
Not all burgers have a bun
Not all planets have a sun
Not all readers can digest
Not all ladies can protest
Not all sausages are mean
Not all meal is cooked so clean
Not all dancer's Balanchine
Or comparable to Ben Vereen
Not all thought can be controlled and
Every mountain is a mole

Until its got into his head
When asked to be or not to be
He boasts the pleasant answer, "Read."

The Coffee One

The cup of coffee we share
Is two
One in my hand, one in yours
Sip, until the probable gulp
I never watch you take
Bars us from talk of elections
Our mouths turn and twist
From eyes to chairs and television
Clapping and aging alone
Acorns raining from the sky
Tormenting our dreams
Thinking twice

Casual Friday, Naked Tuesday

Wind instruments from the curb
Paint the picture that I see
Of the church and how
They gather people to praise
And to compel, the worse of them.
There shall be no compulsion.
When all is said and done
Who shall and shall not place
A hand upon your shoulder
Makes life worth living
And fuck is a breakfast pastry

Egg and Peacock Revision and Preface

Before you read what is probably close to what I would have liked to print on www.Bwog.net if the privilege were mine to have limitless time in editing, I must apologize to Jonah Block-Johnson. Your play wasn't sexual. I've mended my review to more closely represent my thoughts on the word-play and its context. Also I fail to mention in all my review the wonderful band that introduced each play. They bellowed out a balls-out rendition of Strauss' Also Spracht Zarathustra and brought down the house. Jonah was the conductor of the band. They stole the show in between every play, though they of course peaked early with the Strauss.
-Thomas Anawalt

------------------

A night of student plays by any other name might not smell as sweet. Shall I compare thee to a Latenite anthology? Thou art more zany and more whimsical. A tad longer, too. The playwrights of KCST’s Egg and Peacock Festival were given starting lines for their works, and had to hand off a line for the next writer to take it and run with it. The imposition of the start/end lines offered playwrights the opportunity to dictate the silliness of what followed.

The night opened with "Demographics," (written by Chas Carey, directed by Will Scheussler) a more or less uninteresting power play between women. Enter highlight number one, Gabe Miner in frump-drag. "The Rise and Fall of Big Bank Films" (written by Andrew Martin, directed by Kate Stahl) came next and a funny little play it was. It involved prophesies of the upcoming election and drinking and clever dialogue. And I can't say for the life of me who or what the play was about. The third play, "The Abolition of Compassion" (written by Matt Herzfield, directed by Ameneh Bordi) contained the funniest scenario of the evening. An Islamic terrorist, played by David Iscoe, waltzes into a ladies room with thundering heavy metal, ready to kill, but refuses to gaze upon a breast. The fourth play, "Happiness in General," (written by Gabe Miner, directed by David Gerson) proved that opening the door from the hallway to light the darkened stage doesn't work dramatically and that dialog should always be audible. Mike Molina's play, "The Merit Badge" ended the first act. The direction by Dan Blank came together very well with the actors like a nightmare sitcom. Lakshmi Sundaram and Catherine Atwill played convincing boyscouts in the unlikely situation of cutting off murderers' dicks and deciding to ingest the evidence. With and without words, the two boyscouts received the biggest laughs of the 2 and a half hour marathon.

The second act was not for quitters. "Two Sausages" (written by Jonah Block-Johnson, directed by Mark Holden) was a mystery about sausages, dictated from the line at the end of Molina’s play, “Last time you said that, I was holding two sausages!” A change of subject at the start of Act II, while arguably impossible, could have been refreshing. "Old Lady Gets the Sack" (written by Josh Syzmanowski, directed by Beck Pryor) tickled me, I will admit. Sadly this was at the portion of the performance where the length of the individual plays started to become apparent. Jeff Julian wrote a play in which he played a writer who wrote poeticism into porn-scripts to the effect that nobody ever screws. This piece, "Esmerelda Does Edinburgh," (directed by Morgan Hardy) had its moments and was fairly convincing as a low-budget porn shoot set. Trying to find a tasteful way of calling it a period piece is not possible. The elaborate if not rather linear "Ruses are Red" (written by Abby Rosebrock, directed by Jake Green) contained several sex twists that repeated and repeated. Last but not least is "President Ricky Writes a Story" (written by Tyson Brody, directed by Jesse Horowitz). The play imagined a book series dedicated to a first Gay President, President Ricky. The series of novels was wrapped in a play about the peculiarities of artistic freedom, its imposed and natural boundaries as concerns profitability.

Fresh out of the 24 hour writing process, I can't badmouth one play for slapping the art of theater in the face. If anything they all slapped the face collectively together, and made merriment of it. Even the worst of the plays had its merit. If it wasn't the acting making up for the lack of apparent story (or vice versa), count on the sometimes beautiful and shocking moments that happen after a time-warped creative process like Egg and Peacock (one of the plays projected Obama as the Dem Nom and future prez). Though it looked like the writers had a good time, the rules seemed to limit rather than inspire dialog. A lot of the plays could have been sliced in half or maybe knocked off a third and still gotten the point across, if the play happened to have a point.

Scandinavian Filmcourse 4

The line drawn between Alexander and Hamlet could be easily dismissed were Igmar Bergman's genius not comparable to that of William Shakespeare. Alexander, the young boy in Bergman's somewhat autobiographical film, "Fanny och Alexander," is haunted by the ghost of his father, a man of the theater who valued the little world inside of the theater's four walls. The value of the theatrical realm comes across from his father almost as an attack on the outside world. The film, from that moment forth, is an attempt by Bergman and by Alexander to ameliorate the father's grievances about the world outside the walls of the theater. In real life, Bergman's father was a clergyman, not an actor or director, but Bergman sees fit to haunt his cinematic alter-ego with the paternal ghost of the theater, as Hamlet's father famously haunts Shakespeare's Danish Prince.
If the Ghost in Shakepeare's "Hamlet" saught bloody vengeance and restoration of the crown, the vengeance which young Alexander takes up has a more subtly contrived artistic bent than an overt political one. Bergman always confronts the question of religion and punishment, but in "Fanny och Alexander" he breaks from the methods of his father and takes up a punishing force all his own. The step-father in the film enacts a ritual lifted from a practice of Bergman's real father, a clergyman. In his autobiography, "The Magic Lantern," Igmar Bergman describes the beating he'd receive from his father as well as his delight at his older brother receiving the brunt of the punishment. He continues, "After the strokes had been administered, you had to kiss Father's hand, at which forgiveness was declared and the burden of sin fell away, deliverance and grace ensued." Without any supper and without a bedtime story he would be sent to bed, relieved that the punishment had done its job. Pain was not the difficulty for Bergman so much as the humiliation. No doubt, he grew to resent his father's administration of this punishment, evidenced by the replacement of his biological father with the man of the theater in "Fanny och Alexander."
Whatever his artistic drives and wherever they were born, in no way could their origin be said to derive from any kind of certainty. Haunted by the ghost, like Hamlet, Alexander does not share with the Dane the clarity of a task. He can only look upon the ghost and remind himself, no, I am not Hamlet. As he is not the heir to a throne, let alone someone with a clear incentive to achieve that throne, Alexander's purpose becomes lost in mystery. Bergman enacts the mystery through Alexander's participation in witchcraft, the ultimate subversion of the Protestant church.
Bergman shares with Carl Theodor Dreyer a sympathy for the categorical sinner and persecuted enemy of popular religion. Where Dreyer seems to embrace witchcraft along with any of the evil power associated with it, Bergman can't help but explore the problems therein. No clear answer exists against the church, for even the union between Alexander and dark forces are born out of an emotional rebellion rather than ideological alignment against the tenets of faith. The sorcery which results in the fiery death of Alexander's gluttonous bed-ridden aunt is an expression of the boy's power over those who look down upon him, but it cannot be appreciated unless the artistic voice has expression here as well. Just as Bergman is able to usurp the his biological father with a ghost of the theater, he set fire to a figure of pomp, laziness, and superiority. He can use Charles Dickens, as well as witchcraft, to envelope the oppression and hypocrisy of his childhood in a conflagration. The importance of the action is artistic.
The massive aunt never deals directly with Alexander and as such the fire which consumes her must be symbolic. She is the representative of inertia and indifference facing the treatment of children within Sweden's religious household. Worse than the Step-father, this woman (played by a man) has no feelings of a higher calling to justify her slothful acceptance of the world around her, but has to be cared for as a sinless, joyless, inhuman blob. Witchcraft provides a haven for Alexander to destroy the aunt without being judged. Essentially it doesn't matter where his feelings can find expression so long as they can be expressed without the necessary retaliation of corporal punishment. He turns to another world, a system without a pretense of righteousness.
At the conclusion, Bergman does not retreat into the beautiful little world of the theater revered by Alexander's father, though one could certainly argue for the inclusion of the theatrical world at the film's conclusion based simply upon the nature of film. This story of Alexander's escape from the old religious household exists as a part of a fictional cinematic world. As Alexander is able to do once his rebellion finds expression, the darkness associated with the witchcraft elements has to be set aside as a means to artistic expression for Bergman and an emotional expression for Alexander. What occurs at the end of the film is a retreat into a newly conceived household, and a repetition of the ghost-father's reverence for the little world of the theater. The new world is that of the family, in which a man's sins are not the burden of the world so much as they are the burden of his wife, who will bear them, if she is wise, with a certain amount of forgiveness. It is by such forgiveness that Bergman imagines a happy household, regardless of moral imperfections.

Sweltering Freeze

Hear, my nothing
The laughing ghost
As cries for blood
Spilled like more rain
On a warm winter's day

Suspected of Suspense

Were you Alfred Hitchcock raised from the dead
Were you. Drizzling will... won't shut up and leave me.
It will only cramp my style. How depressing.
Quit telling me that less is more because I am
Smart enough to know; less is less and
More is to be gotten from "less" than from something
Which is "more," - too much or too little -
Never and anywhere
Between the middle

Jingle of Gingle

Can the Heavens never cease
To admit a something
In making themselves
Somewhat better than Earth
And yet can the Earth
In its infinite worth
Make some claims to the birth
Of the concept of heaven

1020

Corpunctual longing and hard woven tweed
Thirsty small girls knowing and not how to get a drink
Fifty-four pieces of silt and filth
Gums of madmen and current Presidents
Jasper and Halloway joking around
The 27th time
Jew ducks from El Nazarino
Jolted jingles and 1 jester
In jacketless humiliation
Dancing a waltz by himself
And cope is a word you just learned

The Gutter Body

You can think there's a girl
Just over the highway you cross
Before the fields of wild berries
Underneath the orange peel
Found caught between
The smallest of the middle toes
Hey. That's where she is.

Us, fools

Did it or didn't it find some way of realizing what it was? The simple question that you can't answer. Forget about that anyway. You want to know what brought me here. Sorry. You want to know why I brought you here. I brought you here because of Love and Theft. That's right, the whole fucking album. Because it cuts. It has many songs, separated and riddled with cuts. Spaces made. Spaces that already exist are half the site of a cut. Who did the cutting at the Grand Canyon but the river? Certainly not mules. That's a river running long before we got there. And when I say we, I don't mean settlers. I mean the settled. The Television City Kids, numbed by the false horrors that they enjoy them. The ones who thought they knew less than old warrior folks until September 11, 2001. After that point it became increasingly apparent to them that they knew more. By the time 2008 came around we had dethroned a dictator in another country. That's worked out for us in the past so we gave it another shot, but it wasn't just some shot. It was a shot of his hanging and inspection and of a war. The war we fight thrives upon our fear of the people who come in and out of our building. What have they done to us? Fools. Fools... fools... fools.

Please please America, whoa yeah, like America pleases you.

SC3

Tried to watch Dreyer's early films and felt compelled to cut that journey a little short. Of what I watched, Day of Wrath and The Passion of Joan of Arc were my favorites. The treatment of witchcraft and his continual focus upon satanic elements make Dreyer somewhat unbearable. The Passion of Joan of Arc deals in questions that have a more impressive bearing upon the church than Day of Wrath. Although the question of killing witches has its place, it seems out-dated compared with Joan's dilemma of a military tribunal manipulating her comments upon faith to justify condemnation beyond a status as military enemies. The hypocritical church would overlook its role in the military dialog of punishment.

Stuckness Minus St.

Some king
Listening to Bob Dylan
Like really listening
Fourtimes
Killed fifty mean tuesday type gentlemen
Hadtogetsomewheredeciding
On the hopethat itresolves
Fascists can suck my boot
Iwould notsuffer ahomelesspersontodothat
Iwould try to treat themasthough we wereequal people
But at thecrossroadsIcould still not give up my room
How I love the spacewhere Ihangmy draws
Kill therest of those bobs in their shelterclosets
If I can only hold dearly to my head and buttocks this chair, these keys
Do not even skip along the same grass as these six walls
Shelter from the cane
Now I'm not even close
To have a roof means to have a ground
For your children
Forbidden afternoon shaves
Busted flats on the way to Disneyland
Itallputsforththejourney and says
"If I were a movie how fun it all looks
And even in the confines of the room."
Something in that camera makes it all worthwhile I suppose

Its a trick!

Story of his life.

This is the story. A ranger stepped onto the ground. Now this wasn't any old kind of ground like we're used to stepping on because this ground had thick, bulbous weeds growing like uprooted grass that's pulled from the ground like laid wire. But these big things pulled their own roots from the ground to churn the soil, so that their smaller roots could take further hold of the ground and move deeper to assure the home of this plant and its seed. Only nobody particularly wanted this plant around. Many of its kind choke flowers and other decoratives, who tend to have a more delicate speed of living.
The ranger had stepped on this kind of ground, in fact, for most of his life. When he was just newborn, he was only allowed to walk on sand. He was an adept baby and walked on sand quite well, even for a ranger. But to get bogged down in his history for now would only bore you, because at the very moment I speak, he steps. Once more.

And again. Stops. The ground squiggles under his feet. It tries to grow on him. No such luck. Something in the ranger thought of processed meat. The strange foot had calloused, like any good ranger's foot. The foot's strange to an average person, and it's strange to the grass. Waiting, is he, the grass might have begun to think. Taking him long enough. But if the grass knew the mind of a ranger, it would not be grass. The ranger darts, ditches, dares, stares, and kills.