Irredeemable Deplorability

  Around the time big tobacco introduced its first youth-access programs, anti-tobacco advocates had given up trying to beat the industry at the state and federal levels. These higher levels of government were too tightly controlled by the industry and were no longer very responsive to activists. So anti-tobacco proponents had begun approaching their city council members, who were more responsive and less likely to be swayed by corporate influence. Smoking bans had started to appear in local jurisdictions around the country, and progress had been made in getting smoking out of restaurants and workplaces.
  Alarmed by the shift, the tobacco industry realized it was vulnerable. Because it had no similar grassroots networks to oppose these local efforts, it started retailer programs like It's the Law, We Card to defeat them.
  Youth programs served the industry on several levels. They gave it cover against the charge that it targeted kids, and they generated goodwill among legislators. But these retailer programs also served another function: They gave the industry an opening to have company representatives conduct personal visits with retailers all over the country. Under the guise of instructing retailers to check for IDs as part of a youth-access program, industry representatives asked retailers to monitor political activity in their towns and paid them to report back to the Tobacco Institute at the first appearance of any problems (like citizens pushing for a smoking ban) so the institute could mobilize.
  An institute document made public years later stated, "For monitoring purposes, we fund our allies in the convenience store groups to regularly report on ordinance introductions and assist in campaigns to stop unreasonable measures... Promotion of the Institute's It's the Law program and other industry programs play a helpful role."
  Retailers as well as restaurant and bar owners across the country started phoning the Tobacco Institute to let it know about "trouble" in their area, and the industry responded by flying representatives to those towns to generate and coordinate strident opposition- or at least the appearance of strident opposition- to the anti-smoking efforts.
  In addition to using youth programs to help fight smoking bans, the industry used them to help fight cigarette taxes and marketing restrictions. The programs also generated goodwill with the governments of some foreign countries and even allowed Philip Morris to partner with foreign health ministries. In 2001 the company announced that it was "actively involved in more than 130 [youth-smoking prevention] programs in more than 70 countries."  -from "Deadly Spin" by Wendell Potter

CS I Love You

Coorporate Hypoxia

  Colorado Chiller didn't taste as good as the other leading coolers, Bartles and Jaymes and California Cooler. In fact, after just a few minutes in bright light the product turned, in technical brewing terms, "skunky". One Coors executive served the skunky drink at an outdoor barbecue, much to his embarrassment. As he later put it, "The penguins in the ad should say, 'Less Chilling...Tastes like Shit.'"
  According to research, wine cooler drinkers in 1985 were young upscale women who were searching for an alternative to drinking beer. Yet when they tried Colorado Chiller they tasted beer not wine. As one Chiller drinker said, "It's as if a beer company tried to pull one over on us, calling it a cooler and then serving beer." Now why would a beer company do something like that?
  The company's next foray into the new products arena was another "me too" counterattack product. The ignominious Herman Joseph's was a "super premium", or higher-priced beer, that was supposed to compete with the established and popular Michelob and Lowenbrau, and never did turn a profit.

  Contributing to the product's malaise was the odd brand name, which had been chosen to pay homage to a deceased Coors family member. In truth "Herman Joseph's" sounded more like a brand of men's designer clothing...The product's drab bottle, which lacked the distinctiveness and class of Michelob's (a patented tear-drop shape) and Lowenbrau's (which featured gold and silver foil wraps) didn't help either...One final effort was made in 1987 to resuscitate the brand. Attempting to cash in simultaneously on all of the crazes in beer marketing, the company renamed the product "Herman Joseph's Original Draft Light" and expanded distribution to twenty states...

  Chuck Yeager had been hired because someone at Coors thought he could provide the inspiration to back Herman Joseph's new advertising theme: Take off with Herman Joseph's Original Draft Light."
The legendary pilot had an unenviable task. To begin with, Yeager, as Big Tim correctly observed, "didn't know a fucking thing about beer". Additionally, aviation heroes, whose piloting of multi-billion dollar planes required excellent hand-eye coordination and split second decision making, weren't exactly the most credible advocates for drinking beer.
  Yeager deviated signifigantly from the script on his teleprompter. Most of his speech centered on the difficulty of flying jets, especially when pilots "urinated and defecated in their flight suits when they lost consciousness," or how jet pilots had to "urinate in their flight suits because there was no way to tailor the flight suits to urinating in the cockpit." Finally after a rambling twenty-five minutes, Yeager brought his talk back to beer by concluding, "And I'm sure that you're all going to make Herman Joseph's soar next year"...The cosmetic change to the brand name didn't fool consumers...After almost a decade of testing, the company finally stopped brewing Herman Joseph's in 1989.

-from "Silver Bullets: A Soldiers Story of How Coors Bombed in the Beer Wars" by Robert J. Burgess

Woody Guthrie Poem

Voice

I don't know how far I'm going to have to go
To see my own self or to hear my own voice
I tuned in on the radio and for hours never heard it
And then I went to the moving pictures show
And never heard it there
I put handsful of coins into machines and watched records turn
But the voice there was no voice of mine
I mean it was not my voice
The words not my words that I hear in my own ears
When I walk along and look at your faces
I set here in a Jewish delicattassen, I order a hot pastrami
Sandwitch on rye bread and I hear the lady ask me
Would you like to have a portion of cole slaw on the side
And I knew when I heard her speak that
She spoke my voice
And I told her I would take my slaw on a side dish
And would like to have a glass of tea with lemon
And she knew that I was speaking her words
And a fellow sat across at a table near my wall
And spoke while he ate his salami and drank his beer
And somehow I had the feeling
As I heard him speak, and he spoke a long time,
But not one word was in my personal language,
And I could tell by the deep sound, by the full tone
Of his voice that he spoke my language
I suppose you may wonder just how he could speak
In a dialect that I could not savvy nor understand
And yet understand every sound that he made

Thomas Bernhard Interview

You're always presented as a kind of loner in the mountains, the man from the farm...


What can you do. You get a name, you're called "Thomas Bernhard", and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.

Sparkling Septet

Holy Ghostbusting

Spanish Bootlicking

"When performers make a slip of some kind, clearly exhibiting a discrepancy between the fostered impression and a disclosed reality, the audience may tactfully 'not see' the slip or readily accept the excuse that is offered for it. And at moments of crisis for the performers, the whole audience may come into tacit collusion with them in order to help them out...and with much delicacy help sustain the quite false impression that they have not  absorbed the meaning of what has happened." -Erving Goffman

http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-dylan-thefts.html

http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2010/06/bob-dylan-carl-sandburg-and-problem.html

I Fidget With the Digit Dots

I Never Told Anybody

In 1976 Kenneth Koch taught poetry writing at the American Nursing Home located at Avenue B and Fifth Street in New York City: "The students were all incapacitated in some way, by illness or old age. Most were in their seventies, eighties, and nineties.  They had worked as dry cleaners, messengers, short-order cooks, and domestic servants. A few had worked in offices and one had been an actress."
Here are a few of their poems:


The quietest time I ever remember in my life
  was when they took off my leg.

Another quiet time is when you're with someone
  you like
And you're making love.

And when I hit the number and won eight hundred
  dollars
That was quiet, very quiet.

                                                      -Sam Rainey


Stenography is like a revelation.
Personal appearance is like a runner-up.
Because unless a stenographer looks as well
As the dictation she's taking
Her stenography is soon forgotten.

                                                      -Elsie Dikeman

I was always quiet

And my mother always had to send my sisters into the

  room

To see what made me so quiet.

                                                        -Fred Richardson

I like green; I used to see so many greens
  on the farm.
I used to wear green, and sometimes my mother
  couldn't find me
Because I was green in the green.

                                                      -Mary Tkalec


I never told anybody that I drove away in a buggy
I never told anybody that I fell all the way downstairs-
  I'm still crippled today
I never told anybody that I made a lot of pickles
I never told anybody that I sent a letter to the President
I never told anybody that I was in an airplane just flying
  around the field
  
                                                      -Mary L. Jackson

When I was a little boy 

  and got beaten

It was quiet afterwards.

                                                       -George Johnson

Caitlin Rose Song

Edmond Jabes Poem

Mirror and Scarf

"We will gather images and images of images up till the
last, which is blank. This one we will agree on." - Reb Carasso

   Mardohai Simhon claimed the silk scarf he wore around his neck was a mirror. 
    "Look," he said, "my head is separated from my body by a scarf. Who dares give me the life if I say I walk with a knotted mirror under my chin? 
    "The scarf reflects a face, and you think it is of flesh. 
    "Night is the mirror. Day the scarf. Moon and sun reflected features. But my true face, brothers, where did I lose it?" 
    At his death, a large scar was discovered on his neck. 
    The meaning of this anecdote was discussed by the rabbis. 
    Reb Alphandery, in his authority as the oldest, spoke first. 
    "A double mirror," he said, "separates us from the Lord so that God sees Himself when trying to see us, and we, when trying to see Him, see only our own face." 
    "Is appearance no more than the reflections thrown back and forth by a set of mirrors?" asked Reb Ephraim. "You are no doubt alluding to the soul, Reb Alphandery, in which we see ourselves mirrored. But the body is the place of the soul, just as the mountain is the bed of the brook. The body has broken the mirror." 
    "The brook," continued Reb Alphandery, "sleeps on the summit. The brook's dream is of water, as is the brook. It flows for us. Our dreams extend us. 
   "Do you not remember this phrase of Reb Alsem's: 'We live out the dream of creation, which is God's dream. In the evening our own dreams snuggle down into it like sparrows in their nests.' 
    "And did not Reb Hames write: 'Birds of night, my dreams explore the immense dream of the sleeping universe.'" 
    "Are dreams the limpid discourse between the facets of a crystal block?" continued Reb Ephraim. "The world is of glass. You know it by its brilliance, night or day." 
    "The earth turns in a mirror. The earth turns in a scarf," replied Reb Alphandery. 
    "The scarf of a dandy with a nasty scar," said Reb Ephraim. 

                     ("Words are inside breath, as the earth is inside time." 
                                                                           - Reb Mares) 

 And Yukel said: 

    "The bundle of the Wandering Jew contains the earth and more than one star." 

    "Whatever contains is itself contained," said Reb Mawas. 

    The story I told you, as well as the commentaries it inspired, will be recorded in the book of the eye. The ladder urges us beyond ourselves. Hence its importance. But in a void, where do we place it?  


                                                ("God is sculpted." 
                                                            - Reb Moyal)

LGCF.3

Thomas de Zengotita Essay

"...What all media, all representations—from street signs to photographs to emoticons—have in common is this: they pay attention to you, they address you. Sometimes generically, as with street signs, sometimes precisely, as with person-specific ring tones. And all that attention is flattering—indeed, it is a form of flattery so pervasive, and so essential to the nature of representation, that it has escaped notice as such, though it ultimately accounts for the oft-remarked narcissism of our time.3 The very process by which reality and representation become fused in the age of the simulacrum is delivered to our psyches by the flattery of representation. We have been consigned by it to a new plane of being, a new kind of life-world, an environment of representations of fabulous quality and inescapable ubiquity, a place where everything is addressed to us, everything is for us, and nothing is beyond us anymore.

During the mass-media age (roughly co-extensive with the modernist period), the hidden blandishments of representational flattery were already at work. Broadcast representations were implanting in anonymous spectators a desire for public significance commensurate with their unconscious sense of centrality—for it was, after all, to them that all performances were addressed. But celebrities were monopolizing public attention, gorging on it. The most basic of specifically human needs—the need for acknowledgment, for significance, for a place in the world—was left unsatisfied. Spectators were craving, however inchoately, their fair share of that attention. All that was lacking were the means. Until recently...

http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2011_Spring_zengotita.php"

Psychedelic Summits