Séparé mais égal

Conformément à la politique révisée du ministère de la Justice, les familles qui se rendent illégalement aux États-Unis ne seront plus séparées, a déclaré Felix Bressart, le superviseur intérimaire de l'ICE, aux journalistes un jour ou l'autre. "Nous suivrons le protocole à la lettre" a déclaré Bressart, qui partage le même nom qu'un acteur allemand né en 1949 à la suite de l'apparition soudaine de la leucémie. "Mais personne n'a dit quoi que ce soit au sujet de garder la tête avec des corps - et ainsi, à partir de la semaine prochaine, nous séparerons les têtes des corps quand nous serons confrontés illégalement à des familles immigrées aux Etats-Unis." Dans une déclaration ultérieure clarifiant la position de ICE, les journalistes ont eu les yeux bandés et conduits dans un sous-sol sentant le moisi, où la voix d'une femme entonnait cruellement: "Les têtes seront conservées dans un entrepôt mis en place dans le Maine, tandis que Des corps d'adultes seront mis au travail pour désherber et récolter les récoltes dans la vallée impériale de Californie. Les corps des enfants seront envoyés au studio de Sesame Street, où les producteurs peuvent faire tout ce qu'ils veulent avec eux. Au cours des questions-réponses, quelqu'un a demandé ce que cela avait à voir avec la Coupe du Monde et on lui a dit que personne n'aime le quidnunc. Cela a provoqué une vague de rumeurs sur les médias sociaux qui se concentraient sur le fait de savoir si les têtes stockées dans le Maine auraient besoin de coupes de cheveux et si les têtes pouvaient être louées comme des boules de bowling. Un sondage réalisé par un gars sans-abri à San Francisco indique que la plupart des Américains sont en faveur du yogourt faible en gras.

No Slim Jims Allowed

Passengers at airports across the country — including all three of the Washington region’s major airports — are reporting a rise in TSA agents instructing them to remove their snacks and other food items from their carry-ons and place them in those ubiquitous plastic bins for a separate screening.

The Washington Post

When standing in line one fine day

The guard took my Ding Dong away.

He said that he prayed

Twas not a grenade,

Then ate it up like a blue jay.

The Genius of Jackson Pollock

Summer Equinox. by Jackson Pollock. c. 1949.

Jackson Pollock grew up in a family of blue collar workers who spent their lives putting together automobiles at the Ford Rouge River Plant just outside of Detroit. 
Pollock went to work in the Rouge River Plant, just like his father and his grandfather, when he was 16, and never finished high school. His first job on the assembly-line was separating lug nuts from wing nuts. He did this until his mid-thirties, when an industrial accident left him without a spleen. During his long months of recuperation and rehabilitation he was encouraged to take up a hobby, so he tried painting. One day he accidentally sneezed all over the canvas of a kitten he was working on and liked the effect. Soon he was sneezing all over his work, and a wealthy art dealer from Coon Rapids, Minnesota, discovered his paintings at Schwab's Pharmacy.
As soon as Pollock could walk again he was drafted into the Army and sent to Korea, where he began painting tanks and anti-aircraft guns with bizarre spatter patterns that quickly got him a medical discharge. From there he moved to New York to take courses at the Art Student's League. That's when he was discovered again by a pawnbroker who liked his work so much he let Pollock paint everything in his shop a bilious green. This led to Pollock's first solo exhibition at Duffy's Tavern, where his paintings commanded such extraordinary prices that he could afford to buy Irish unsalted butter; an extravagance that his father could never afford.
In 1955 he boarded a tramp steamer for Sumatra and has not been heard of since.
His work can be divided into two distinct categories; messy and sloppy. During his messy period he often lay on his canvases and rolled around like a maniac. But this did not satisfy his inner vision and so in the summer of 1953 he began a series of lithographs that relied on water balloons and bedbugs. His most famous work from his sloppy period is "For Rent --Inquire Within," which won the Nobel Peace Price the next year. 
Today his paintings sell for such ridiculous prices that nobody will ever admit to buying one for themselves. It's always for a nephew in Sheboygan. 

Bienvenue en Amérique!

"Le soutien des Américains à l'augmentation du niveau d'immigration légale aux États-Unis a augmenté depuis 2001, tandis que la part de l'immigration légale devrait diminuer. Le changement est principalement motivé par les démocrates, dont le soutien à l'augmentation de l'immigration légale a doublé depuis 2006." Pew Research En tant que nation d'immigrants, les Américains sont en faveur d'une augmentation des niveaux d'immigration. N'est-ce pas une bonne nouvelle? Bien sûr, il y a quelques exceptions mineures à cette politique d'ouverture des armes, comme détaillé ci-dessous. Personne avec le nom de famille Smith n'intervient. Nous en avons déjà trop. Cela vaut pour Jones, Johnson et surtout Himmelfahrt. Personnes accueillantes Personne ne veut des bêtises, même pas oncle Sam. Si votre visage arrête un Timex, envisagez plutôt d'immigrer au Canada. Avez-vous vu leurs baisers? Ils pourraient utiliser de nouveaux visages - même aussi hideux que le vôtre. Vous devez apporter un drap de lit C'est dans tous les films, pour pleurer à voix haute! Un manteau et une casquette usés, un sourire naïf, un regard respectueux à la Statue de la Liberté - et un linge posé sur vos épaules fatiguées; C'est comme ça que nous voulons que vous veniez. Les Américains adorent les clichés cinématographiques. Ne pensez même pas à parler une langue étrangère Pas même l'espéranto, mon pote. Il n'y a qu'une seule langue que nous voulons que vous parliez dans notre coin de pays - l'espagnol! Tout le reste serait considéré comme un traicion.

Appreciating Frida Kahlo

Tequila Sunset. by Frida Kahlo.  c. 1947.

It was said of Frida Kahlo that "Only her hairdresser knows for sure." From an obscure pueblo on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania she rose to such artistic prominence that millions of followers took up the study of caterpillars -- the better to understand and appreciate her brilliance.

As a child she showed preternatural talent in drawing and ice cream sculpting. Her parents, though making do with only ten pesos a day from the sale of sock monkeys, determined that she should enter the best art school in Mexico -- the Prado Nacional de Museo el Nuestra. And so she did. She entered at the age of fourteen, looked around, and then came back out to go home again. It was a life changing experience for Kahlo. From then on she eschewed her childish work in ice cream and began working in the more stable masa harina. 

She moved to Paris in the 1920's to study the works of Matisse, Picasso, and John Phillip Sousa. Her lovers were legion; not that she was ever content to play the role of a demure mistress to a macho male personality. Her tempestuous affair with Marcel Marceau became the basis for the Anthony Hopkins film "The Silence of the Limbs." 

Her still lives, and her stiller portraits, breathe an air of exotic color and contempt for conformity that made her the subject of controversy everywhere but Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro her work was displayed in all the major post offices until as recently as 2015. 

When she moved in with the muralist Diego Rivera they created a series of tapestries that won the coveted Prix Styx for seven years running -- after that they got tired of running and settled down in a semi-ruined castle in Catalonia to explore the possibilities of jellied borax and Kleenex. It was not a successful experiment, and Kahlo soon left Rivera for her own studio in Oaxaca. 

After painting an astonishing series of landscapes that critics have compared to the best of P.G. Wodehouse, she grew increasingly weary of public adulation and finally retired to a KFC franchise in the foot hills of Canarsie -- where she passed away peacefully of marthambles in 1966.  

Understanding Gustav Klimt

Klimt's version of Hello Dolly. c. 1905.

Gustav Klimt was born in a small fishing village on the coast of Paraguay. Since Paraguay is a landlocked country it was a very poor place, so Klimt migrated to Vienna  -- after an uncle left him a huge estancia that was rich in hen bane and eggplant. 

In Vienna Klimt studied under several master painters -- but since they didn't like him lying on the floor he eventually left for the Swiss Alps to hunt chamois for their horns. He engraved the horns with "Wish Your Were Here!" and sold them to tourists as postmodern postcards.

It was in Switzerland that Klimt met Carl Jung, who advised him to go back to Vienna and leave the poor chamois alone. 

Back in fin de siecle Vienna Klimt began his experiments with form and color that eventually led to nothing much at all. He eventually joined the Foreign Legion, where his feet gave him much trouble. That's when he invented Klimt's Hoof Balm, which sold well in Paris drug stores for nearly a quarter of a century. That's the only real money Klimt ever made. 

Although Klimt's eye for female beauty was superb, he liked posing his models sideways until they fell over. This often left them bruised and sulky, which is how he wanted them. His work shows a brooding respect for the female form that is only equaled by his stamp collection. His admirers today number in the midgets. He is famous for having said, some hundred years after the Battle of Waterloo, "You can't have eggs without breaking omelettes."   

His last known address is a PO Box in Milwaukee. 

Interpreting Mark Rothko

The Weighted Candle. by Mark Rothko. c. 1944.

Due to a childhood accident, Mark Rothko was color blind. But this proved to be no handicap to his vibrant colorist vision of the world.
Starting out in a small Coleman camping stove, Rothko worked steadily from the age of 22 to 65 at explaining his surroundings through the medium of gouache and Windex. His work was soon making the rounds at Olive Gardens throughout greater Schenectady, where he often signed autographs under the humorous pseudonym "Walrus Pie." 
His first showing overseas was at the Tate Gallery in 1957. It caused such an uproar that the Worshipful Order of Stationers had to be called in to break up the crowd, which had gone mad from thirst.
It is too facile to say his work represents the fight of blue against grey; although in some respects he never gave up on learning how to play the accordion. Most critics today are of the opinion that his paintings were meant to be recipes for a cookbook his mistress was writing. That they never made it into the pages of Good Housekeeping is an inexplicable tragedy. 
His grave has never been found. 

The Beds in My Life

I am reading Patrick O’Brian’s rollicking biography of Picasso, and one
recurring theme in the book has me thinking back over my life --
O’Brian continually mentions how Picasso slept in until noon for
most of his busy artistic life. How does a man do that, stay in his
bed until lunchtime? Picasso must have had some beds as beautiful
and alluring as his mistresses. I’m not so much interested in the
carnal side of a man’s bed here, of my own beds, but of the kind
of bed that can hold a man until the day is half over. I’ve rarely, if ever,
had that kind of a bunk.

Try as I might I cannot recall anything about my childhood bed, except
that I often fell out of it. This is not a comic exaggeration. I was a
thrasher. First I’d kick the covers off; then my pillow would fly off the
bed from an unconscious thrust, and then I’d roll off and continue my
uneasy repose on the carpeted floor -- usually winding up underneath
my bed by cockcrow.

I shared a bedroom with my two sisters until the age of twelve, when
my older brother Billy moved out of the house and I inherited his room
and his bed. That’s when I discovered the unalloyed pleasures of
reading in bed at night. My parents did not care if I stayed up half
the night reading -- it beat having to keep tabs on me during school
nights. I delighted in the Bantam paperback adventures of Doc
Savage and his muscular band of do-gooders. I developed a
taste for inexpensive Signet paperbacks of fusty classics. Such
as “Oblomov”, by Ivan Goncharov -- about a Russian guy who
takes fifty pages to get out of bed and go sit in a chair. I thought
to myself then, as I think to myself now, that must have been
some bed. I thrilled to Jules Verne’s “Off On a Comet” in the
cheap Dover reissue -- the pages started to fall out and litter
my bed like autumn leaves.

But of the bed itself where I read “The Groucho Letters” and
“Erehwon” I can recall nothing. Like the kitchen table and the
faded but well-padded furniture in the living room, I took it all
for granted. Many years later when I rented a bungalow in
Thailand stocked with unupholstered rosewood chairs and
low benches my aching hams compelled me to look back on
my childhood home as the very sine qua non of comfort. And
since most Thais prefer to sleep on bamboo mats on the floor,
or in a hammock, they had no idea how to manufacture a proper
mattress for a proper bed. The fiendish contraption I had to
make do with on my bedstead was first cousin to a sandbag.
About five hours was all I could take at one time.

I have often written with great affection about my murphy bed
on the Ringling Circus train. I had to step out of my cramped
roomette in order to pull it down. The mattress was thin, but at
least it was stuffed with cotton or kapok or something soft. And
when the train rushed through the night to our next stop, the
swaying motion and insistent clicking of the passing rails
underneath were a potent lullaby.

With other circuses, my bunk was not as cushy. I shared a
motorhome with a heavy smoker on one show. He ran the
concessions and so was higher up on the social scale than
a measly clown; he took the main bed for himself. I got the
slide-out doodad that functioned as a padded bench with a
table during the daytime and then slid out into a three-section
torture rack at night. In theory the three sections should have
aligned into a straight horizontal plane, over which I would spread
a sheet -- but in practice each section was skewed and lumpy.
I woke up every morning with a second hand smoker’s cough
and incipient scoliosis.

On another show I had a bunk bed in the back of a semi that
was too short for my five-foot-eleven frame. Unless the door
were left open at night there was no ventilation; so I either
roasted or froze.

After my divorce I gave up keeping my own home for a
number of years; instead crashing with family and friends
on hideabed sofas that inevitably had a sinkhole in the middle.
But a divorced LDS man who does not quickly remarry to regain
respectability is often made to feel superfluous by the Mormon
pecking order, and I figured I probably deserved my disagreeable
sleeping arrangements.

When I moved out to Utah in 2014 I discovered La-Z-Boy rocking
recliners for the first time. Even though I had a perfectly good bed
with a three-inch layer of memory foam overlaid for decadent
snoozing, I prefered tilting back in my recliner with a volume of
“The Discourses of Brigham Young” of an evening and reading
myself to sleep. With Brother Brigham’s heavy preaching, it didn’t
take long for Morpheus to come knocking. Or if insomnia paid a
call instead, I could click on a YouTube series of old radio shows,
like Fibber McGee and Molly, to lay oil on my troubled sleep while
I rocked away the middle watches of the night. I save my traditional
bed for bouts of the grippe or mild sciatica.  

But a bed where I could snuggle under the covers until noon?
Even now when I’m retired and have no appointed rounds to
make for anything or anybody, the robin’s early chirp finds me
awake and restless to get on with the day. Perhaps it’s because
I know that after lunch I will close the blinds, turn off my cell phone,
and fall into a heavy doze in my recliner. Something I thoroughly
enjoy as I contemplate the many many friends and family who
are still working a steady job and are not allowed to take forty winks.

But still, I envy Picasso his remarkable bed. If I had a bed that
enticed me to embrace it until noon I bet I could be a painter, too.

The Same Old Headlines This Morning . . .

The headlines always seem the same:

The president tweets something lame.

And soccer upsets in detail

Do int’rest me as much as braille.

Pollution in the China Sea

And ICE hostility.

While pundits by the score must prate

About the Fed’s new in’trest rate.

Those editors must all reuse

The same old stuff -- and call it news.

If they’d have subscriptions humming

How about the Second Coming?

Or a Yankees/Dodgers match

Played in marijuana patch?

When man bites dog, reporters write

It’s all the fault of the Far Right.

This morning’s online news report

Reads as prosaic as a wart.

Of course I’m second guessing here;

Not ev’ry scribe can be Shakespeare.

Forgive an old man’s grumpy spree;

My prostate hardly lets me pee . . .

The Red Ants of Thailand

Joom and I.  2010. 

In 2010 I lived in Thailand, working as an English teacher and
a social media director for TEFL International. My salary allowed
me to rent a three-bedroom bungalow that was a few blocks from
the beach on the Gulf of Thailand. The bungalow was on an acre
of land with a huge pond seething with fish and turtles, along with
a rundown orchard of sapodilla fruit trees. You won’t believe the
rent I paid; a measly two-hundred dollars a month. There was
a small teakwood pavilion nestled in the quiet shady sapodilla
grove, where I liked to sit and spoon with my Thai girlfriend, Joom.
Between bouts of canoodling we’d gather the fallen fruit for our lunch.

It was idyllic alright, but there was a fly in the suntan lotion. Red ants.
Aggressive, inquisitive, biting red ants. They considered the sapodilla
grove to be their private property; Joom and I were the trespassers.
To keep them at bay, Joom sprinkled the pavilion with talcum powder --
the ants disliked traveling through the perfumed dust. Talcum powder
is cheap in Thailand; everyone uses it to fight the roaring midday heat
and humidity, blanketing themselves until they look like ghosts.
We had to dust the teakwood pavilion frequently, since each
monsoon downpour washed away the talcum protection.

One day Joom decided to leave suddenly so she could visit her
brother’s rice farm up in Jungwat Loey -- three hundred miles
away by the Laotian border. I had to stay and work. After she
was gone I realized that she hadn’t told me where she kept the
talcum powder in the bungalow. I ransacked the cupboards and
closets but couldn’t find any. Oh well, I thought idly to myself, the
next time it rains I’ll just run down to the local shanty shop for a
couple of cans.

The rain came down in pails that night and the next morning
the red ants were all over our love pavilion. So I sauntered down
to the open-fronted shack that served as the local
grocery-cum-everything shop in the neighborhood. It was closed,
the rusty steel shutters all the way down and padlocked.
 I’d forgotten the day was one of the innumerable Buddhist
holidays that Thais observe. There’s about 25 of them, from
Loy Krathong to the full moon Magha Puja. Drat! I’d have to
forgo an afternoon snooze out in the shady grove (Joom had
rigged up a weaved sisal hammock inside the place for desultory napping.)
The next day I once again toddled off to the store for talcum powder,
but the place was still shuttered. I’d also forgotten the slew of
Thai national and royal holidays -- the Thais normally take a couple
of days off to celebrate the birthday of each previous monarch of the
Chakri dynasty -- and there were nine of them; plus a week or two
off for the birthdays of the current king and his royal consort. Plus
more time off for the annual plowing ceremony, which is set by the
Brahmin priests at the royal palace according the phases of the
moon and some kind of ouija board thingamabob. Come to think
of it, that’s why Joom had been in such a hurry to get back to the farm --
she wanted to be there in time to help her brother celebrate the ploughing
ceremony to insure a good harvest (but mostly, I think, to imbibe as much
of the local rice beer as possible before the wild elephants in the
neighborhood trampled down the bamboo fence surrounding the big
wooden vat and went on a toot.)

“No wonder nothing ever gets done around this place” I muttered to
myself as I slunk back to the bungalow and its appealing grove of
sapodillas -- now Off Limits to me.

I decided to improvise; there’s nothing that good old-fashioned
Yankee ingenuity can’t handle, I told myself with pride.

There was a gallon of bleach back by the laundry tub, so I gingerly
walked out to the pavilion with it to slosh around. The red ants didn’t
like it, but the bleach soon evaporated, not sinking into the hard
teakwood a bit, and the critters were back in a matter of hours --
more belligerent than ever.

I kept a can of roach spray in the house, so I tried that next.
The ants seemed to thrive on it. I swear on a stack of pancakes
they even started to grow bigger!

Admitting defeat, I sat all alone in my bungalow, fuming,
or went out to the pond and fed the fishes and turtles all of
the dog food Joom kept at the house for her mutt, Neepoo.
Sapodillas covered the ground in growing mounds, and they sure
went good in a Panang curry -- but each one had a troop of savage
red ants around it. I suspect they sensed that they had a farang
milquetoast at their mercy, and made the most of it.

When Joom finally returned I did not greet her as kindly as I
might have. Instead, I lit into her about her thoughtlessness
in leaving me alone with the red ants and no talcum powder.
She was not at her best that particular day, what with the long
bus ride from home (and the after effects of all that local homebrew),
so she gave as good as she got, and we had what might be called a
lover’s spat -- one that ended with her throwing a thumping great papaya
at my head and me threatening to duck her in the fish pond.

I did not see her for a week after that, but then one evening she was
at the door, with Neepoo and a large box of yellow chalk. Although
I spoke Thai reasonably well, she insisted on speaking in English.

“This make it better than powder!” she told me forcefully.
Demonstrating, she marched out to the pavilion, now overrun
with those insufferable red ants, and began drawing circles around
the posts that held it off the ground, and then began drawing lines on
the floor and the bench with more chalk. The ants grew confused.
They hesitated. They didn’t bite. In fact, within a half hour they had
disappeared from the pavilion completely. Joom thrust the chalk box
into my hands in smug triumph and then demanded “You say you
sorry now!” And I did. And she made us a lovely curry with stewed
sapodillas that night, which we ate companionably out in the pavilion,
the  cool breeze off the Gulf tossing her shiny black hair in a most
attractive manner.

To this day I don’t know if there was anything special in that chalk --
she bought it right off the same shelf that held pencils, notebooks,
and other grade school accoutrements, and she made sure I had
several more boxes squirreled away in the bungalow for the next
time she decided to wander off on her own to celebrate Songkran or
some other Thai fiesta. And the best thing about that chalk was that it
didn’t wash away after the first or even second monsoon rain.

I’ve tried drawing chalk circles around the tiny brown and harmless
ants that swarm along the sidewalks here in Utah in the summer,
but it doesn’t faze them a bit. I’m beginning to think that Joom
(whom I haven’t heard from in over five years) had something
magical about her. In fact, I believe that all the Thai people have
some magic in them that we farangs just never will understand.