Monthly Archives: April 2011

Sunday Afternoon sur Lac du Prospect

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Prospect Lake, Colorado Springs, circa 1970
I don’t know if this scene strikes me because it’s George Seurat’s idyllic park, or because I’m nostalgic for Colorado circa prosperity. Circa 2011, the privatization cronies are after our city’s public gem, Prospect Lake. Colorado Springs local John Moore made a video, which features this and other vintage memories. (See video below)

Moore’s video show a webpage on which City Councilman Tim Leigh outlines his proposal for Prospect Lake, a recurring theme among his “fresh ideas” for Colorado Springs, in which he targets now public resources for lease or sale to private for-profit enterprises.

Leigh’s text below:

RE-IMAGINE NEIGHBORHOODS AND REESTABLISH A SENSE OF COMMUNITY
Imagine that, instead of continuously developing the open prairie to Kansas, we took a 2nd look at existing neighborhoods, utilized existing utilities & roadway infrastructure and created a culture where existing, stable neighborhoods were prized and could be reasonably redeveloped and modernized.

RE-IMAGINE PROSPECT LAKE
Imagine that Prospect Lake is fully utilized as the prized asset that it is; where a private entrepreneur promoted the water venue with exciting events throughout the summer.  Imagine the boat house being re-deployed as a high-end restaurant or some similar use all acting as a catalyst for redevelopment of the entire neighborhood.  Imagine immediate benefits to the city – funding the operation of Memorial park, not from general collections, but from leasing fees and new found sales and property tax generated specifically from that venue.  Imagine playing to our vision as recreational Mecca and imagine a public/private partnership creating a community asset where we all win.

Banned books: the subversive dystopia

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Eugene Zamiatin, We; Jack London, The Iron Heel; Ambrose Bierce, Can Such Things Be?; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ayn Rand, Anthem; Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society; David Karp, One; Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Player Piano; Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.Banned Books, p.2–
I put a lot of faith in an internet resilient enough to remain an unrestricted archive of crowd-sourced human knowledge, even more I hope public data will eventually permeate the proprietary, but continued access to subversive literature I have little doubt will meet the full brunt of digital book burners. If there’s any text not to download unto your Kindle, as an easily vaporized or expurgate-able file, it’s one of these classic oft-censored, perpetually-offense-giving titles. These are the dystopian novels and science fictions which paint a bleak picture of the society we are engineering.

As pictured, here are some notoriously subversive dystopian novels, (as differentiated from commercial drivel which reinforces mainstream dogma, such as Lord of the Flies, or Hunger Games)

Atwood, Margaret, THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Bierce, Ambrose, CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
Bradbury, Ray, FAHRENHEIT 451
Burgess, Anthony, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Ellison, Harlan, THE GLASS TEAT
Huxley, Aldous, BRAVE NEW WORLD
Karp, David, ONE
Lewis, Sinclair, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE
London, Jack, THE IRON HEEL
Orwell, George, NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR
Pohl, Frederick, & C.M. Kornbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS
Rand, Ayn, ANTHEM
Vonnegut, Kurt, PLAYER PIANO
Wiener, Norbert, THE HUMAN USE OF OTHER BEINGS
Zamiatin, Eugene, WE

Haven’t heard of many of these? Curious, don’t you think?

Royal Wedding: time to tie the knot!

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Prince William weds stuck-up 'commoner' Kate MiddletonI LOVE IT! What role should monarchs play in an aspiring-to-egalitarian age? While public demonstrations across North Africa and the Middle East herald an Arab Spring, similar masses in Britain protest bank imposed austerity cuts, each met with repressive force fully sanctioned by their clueless rulers. Democracy is in the air, courtesy of not elections nor representative legislation, but anarchic uprisings. 2011 should commemorate the people’s now clear potential for self-determination, not a celebration of family privilege. It’s time the anti-democratic, unsympathetic, habitually ignoble “royals,” even if mere figureheads, buggered off.

Debunked, the birthers are still right

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Documents can be faked, witnesses coached, others disappeared, if it really is all important that a president prove he’s home-born enough to rule the land of immigrants. It’s trivial isn’t it? An old law, fashioned to exclude one particular 18th century foreign-born candidate; a mere technicality, but just the kind of rules-are-rules mechanism sacrosanct to courts, banks, insurers and creditors. What the birthers smell in Barack Obama is a phony president, elected on extraordinarily false, felonious pretenses. And what a pejorative term the corporate media is using to trivialize the may-be-unconstitutional-foreign-birth accusers: birthers. Yes the scent they’ve picked up is irrelevant, and likely false. It’s also incredibly racist. But most fundamentally, it’s true. They are tracking a fugitive of justice, a charlatan and fraud, and for certain, a murdering, torturing, technocrat. Let’s press the White House to conjure a Long Form to disprove that.

Pissing match with trickle-down theory

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Banner demonstrating majority of government spending goes to military
Oh dear, is this really the best antiwar argument we’ve got? The share of federal spending which goes to war-making IS astounding, and should give the common citizen pause, but how does it speak to the average weapons industrialist attending the 2011 Space Symposium? They’re trickle-down folks! The more money going to science and skilled labor the better. High tech would be happier if 100% of government spending went through them. Plus the only thing worse than antiwar arguments lamenting OUR OWN casualties, IMO worse too than NIMBY, is making it all about how we can’t AFFORD it.

The man-purse for behind enemy lines

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IDF Israeli Paratrooper bagA staple of army surplus stores since the days Banana Republic was the Starbucks of olive drab, the Israeli Paratrooper Bag was marketed as the Swiss Army Knife of handbags. Beside the ludicrous notion that an airborne assault fighter would shoulder a single-strapped man-purse, the red logo of a winged parachute raises another incongruity. For what pretext does a nation’s defensive force have “paratroopers?” I know the US/UK imperial powers label their entire military as being for defense, but they’ve got client states to dominate. Every nation’s special forces are now synonymous with SWAT, basically unconstitutional deployment of paramilitary forces against their own populations. Even if we grant governments this tool of repression, they don’t use parachutes. Paratroopers are the advance team for an invading army, dropped behind enemy lines to demolish another’s defenses against the main assault. And that’s why Israel is so unsuccessful in defending itself, it’s attacking.

Semper Fido Bitches

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Semper FidelisCOLO. SPRINGS– Tough crowd at this week’s antiwar bannering: the usual plentiful honks of support, but now intermittent servicemen heckling in crew-cutted indignation. And we haven’t yet inaugurated our WARMONGERS GO TO HELL banner. The best the driver of a white van-load of them could muster was “Semper Fi” so they must have been Marines because they shout it like it means “America! Fuck Yeah!” Are they taught it’s abbreviated Latin for Always Faithful? I believe Fidelis is the root of Fido.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Man’s faithful companion, the original boot-licker.

Faithful to what honestly? Not the Constitution, or law, liberty or the will of the American People. The US military boot-licking dogs pledge an oath to big oil and the rest of the corporate monied interests. Semper Bitches.

Another soldier-driver asked me with smug arrogance, where was my sign that read “Support the Troops?” Huh? I don’t support the troops. Does he support baby killers, rapists, torturers, drone-pilot-cowards and snipers? WTF. We parted calling each other names. Hippie. Blimp-neck enabler. Dirty hippie. Moron.

Do the other branches of the Defense Department resent the Marines because they don’t have their own pithy Latin je-ne-sais-quoi –literally– to represent their own mistaken-self identity? The Navy and Air Force already have a Native American name, he-who-shoots-from-cover. US Army GIs can modify the USM slogan: Semper Fuckers.

Local cyclists shred Garden of the Gods

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Jason MemmelgnarGARDEN OF THE GODS, COLORADO SPRINGS– Mountain bike X-tremists and thrillcraft eco-vandals Jason Memmelaar and Chris Heath weren’t apprehended by the El Paso County Sheriff or the CSPD, but interrupted by off-duty park ranger Stephanie Stover, who saw them cutting tree limbs to expand an illegal downhill run. When she scattered the limbs across the trail to ameliorate erosion, she later found a note which warned:
“Why would you do that? You will hurt my friends. If I see you do this I will hurt you and no one will hear you scream.”KHS rider Chris Heath
Reached by the Gazette via Facebook, Heath denied he left the note, or that he’d built the mile-long trail across protected park land, though he did brag about using the trail “a bunch.” So there it is, CSPD, let the citations fly. Trail repairs won’t begin until May, so there’s still time if you want to make their downhill track a surprise obstacle course. Will screams go unheard? We can test that hypothesis.

I don’t really recommend leaving malicious booby traps like tire spikes, barbed-wire, or a chest high bailing wire strung with tensioners because that could injure others, for example children on bikes however errant, and then too, wildlife. Branches across the path are enough to interrupt the course and can be seen and avoided by hikers. Best of course to safeguard the vicinity by hiking nearby with a camera and cellphone and report the offenders directly to park authorities. Curious to see what the bikers would do if they came upon YOU scattering branches, if you’re not a woman alone on that stretch of the Garden of the Gods.

In the case of Messrs. Memmelaar and Heath, they’re not just asshole despoilers of nature, they’re pro-racers for some kind of circuit for environment-scarring sports. Probably the exposure in Barry Noreen’s column is the last thing their sponsors want. It will be interesting to see how much they care about a public outcry.

I should think they might want to orchestrate a public apology for their “rogue” bikers. Maybe the white Dodge Spirit van with New York plates mentioned in the Gazette is already ferrying friends to the site where they are volunteering to repair the damage before official efforts begin.

If not, keep a lookout for the two elsewhere around town. Perhaps with the heat on Rampart Range Road, they’ll now be looking to foul fresh topsoil of other open spaces, like that of Red Rock canyon.

Have a look at this photographic confession offered at Memmelaar‘s website:
Jason Memmelaar rides in Garden of the Gods

Ugh Bruce, but imperturbable

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Campaign sign for Colorado Springs 2011 municipal election
COLORADO SPRINGS– It was Doug Bruce himself, the anti-tax man most responsible for the region’s decaying services and infrastructure, polishing his own campaign sign, on land belonging to Griffis/Blessing. The fit was not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but I made a second pass, conspicuously taking photos that he might worry could inform a landlord. To his credit, instead of ignoring me he kept trying to wave me over, as if despite my direct attacks on him in city council sessions, he could win me over out there on the corner. He left with the sign.

For people who hate opera

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I LOVE LUCY featuring THE MOST HAPPY FELLA
The trouble with introductory collections like “Opera for People Who Hate Opera” is of course that it’s still OPERA. I’m inclined to believe the gateway acquired-taste for American pop music ears is –why not– American Musical Theater. But before I get to the particular show I have in mind THE MOST HAPPY FELLA, for a teaser, get thee to Tevye’s dream of Fiddler On The Roof. Find the original Broadway stage recording (These girls found it: The Dream) where Zero Mostel pretends to be visited by two ghosts, blending three melodies –with dances– to a whirlwind intensity. Discordant, shrill, phenomenal, pure opera.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF: THE DREAM
Really, you cannot but love the energy and drama of that piece. And it meets the lower brow halfway: it’s in English, mostly, it’s sung in the registers to which we are more accustomed today, and the cacophony is corralled at a driving dervish pace, also most contemporary.

A Broadway convention of the golden age of musicals was the Dream Ballet scene. In Fiddler it was an opera and a ballet, but instead of a dream or a character’s hallucination, this was Tevye’s pretense of a nightmare, conjured to convince his wife to assent to let their oldest daughter marry the boy she loved, instead of the old man to whom she was promised.

The Dream features three motifs: Grandma Tzeitel represented by the Mazel Tov refrain, with the rejoinder of Tevye and his wife Golde, overtaken by the crescendo of the butcher’s deceased wife Fruma-Sarah, clearly borrowing the menace of the Wicked Witch of Oz.

That’s it — you can like opera! Don’t think yourself less sophisticated because lyrics in a foreign language bore you, or because sopranos or tenors strain your ears. You probably wouldn’t favor centuries-ago gruel either.

THE MOST HAPPY FELLA
Just as maturing musical taste builds inevitably toward Jazz, I have a theory that Broadway fans eventually seek for melodies a little less pat. After not so long, the tunes you can easily whistle up the aisle begin to sound the same. Fresh ones don’t solve anything. Trust me, the unsung Broadway shows which didn’t recoup their production costs don’t sound any better now. Great as were all the Rogers & Hammerstein hits, you have heard only half their shows and yet you’ve heard them all. Ironically, R&H tried their hand at an opera-like show, called ALLEGRO, I don’t favor it, and neither did anyone else.

What I do know is that I love THE MOST HAPPY FELLA, a comparatively obscure musical which had the misfortune of opening in the shadow of MY FAIR LADY, you remember that one in your sleep. TMHF is the acknowledged masterpiece of Frank Loesser, who had no need to prove himself after composing GUYS AND DOLLS. Great as it is, how many times can you listen to Luck Be a Lady?

Being labeled an opera has meant ruin for Broadway musicals which stray from the basic musical review format. Musical Theater traditionally meant catchy tunes strung together with comedy. Wartime brought OKLAHOMA and CAROUSEL which introduced more complicated drama, but librettos entirely sung, weaving the collected songs together, didn’t catch on until the pop operas of the seventies, commercial formulas like PHANTOM OF THE– that were neither operatic, nor terribly musical either.

Out-and-out American operas such as PORGY AND BESS have always lost money in production. Like the argument I make here, to entice American audiences, you have to pretend opera is not opera. Even liner notes written today about 1956’s THE MOST HAPPY FELLA have to avoid coming down one way or another on whether it’s an opera. Yes much of the dialog is sung, but critics reassure us that parts are spoken too. There are numbers too popular to be highbrow, you know one of them, Standing on the Corner [Watching All the Girls Go By].

A 1957 episode of I LOVE LUCY featured a visit to a Broadway performance, in probably an early example of the entertainment industry giving itself a lift. Lucy and company are shown watching from a box seat, but we hear only the more palatable popular ballads Don’t Cry and the Texas dance number Big “D”.

To settle the opera matter, I look at a couple obvious giveaways. One, the leading character Tony was sung by the opera star Robert Weebe, a colleague of Maria Callas. And two, the matinee show traditional of Broadway, was sung by Weebe’s understudy, because two shows a day is neither traditional nor possible for opera.

There’s also the comfortable coincidence that the plot centers around an Italian immigrant, thus much of the dialog is Italian-accented. And he runs a farm in Napa Valley manned by other Italians, who sing in outright Italian, the lingua franca of opera. So the Happy Fella Broadway disguise was never very earnest.

What marks Happy Fella most distinctly are the depth and height of emotional expression. Plenty of musicals have plumbed despair, but in contrast I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a happier fella than Tony Esposito. Witness tenors trumpet Abbondanza! (Abundance), then Benvenuta! (Welcome), and then Spozalizio! (Wedding), which are actually in English, punctuated with self-translatable Italian. Another high-spirited refrain is about “Coming Home” with the proceeds of the strawberry harvest, titled Fresno Beauties.

And then where honestly have you heard a love song more overwhelmed with feeling than My Heart is So Full of You? It begins with exclamation, answers as duet, then envelopes the inner reflections of two peripheral characters.

There’s also the deliriously contented duet which begins “Lunedi, Martedi” (How Beautiful the Days).

The peerless Soliloquy from Carousel gets a run for its money in Mamma, Mamma [Up in Heav’n, How you lika my sweet girl?], as near an operatic aria as you can get.

And while I’m inventorying the happy overload, I don’t want to leave out the beautiful Somebody, Somewhere and Warm all over. The charmer Happy to Make Your Acquaintance is also a standard Broadway showstopper with reprise.

While I’m digressing, I’d like to credit the Big “D” number, where two Texans supposedly recognize each other by their drawl, while neither in actuality has a drawl. The drawl is sung, the notes slurred to create a most beguiling familiarity. It’s a duet to prick your ears at just the phrasing, my own introduction to the incomparable Susan Johnson.

If I’ve touched on any clarity here, it’s what you already know: The amplified modulation of opera is not about librettos all sung, or voices in full shriek. Singing out expresses emotional intensity, and in Happy Fella you’ll never meet happier.

You read banned books, but by whom?

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The Ginger Man, J P Donleavy; Howl, Allen Ginsberg; Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov; Ulysses, James Joyce; Lady Chatterley's Lover, D H Lawrence, Fanny Hill, John Cleland; The Arabian Nights, Richard Burton; Candide, Voltaire; Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman; Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe; The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio; The Canterbury Tales, Chancer; Lysistrata, AristophanesBy which I mean: BANNED by whom? Looking online for a definitive listing of most-often banned or censored books yields a panoply of titles not necessarily candidates for a pantheon. At right I’ve stacked the heavyweights most often resisted for being obscene, here a quality strangely inseparable from being subversive. Many of these titles have been intercepted through the ages by the US Post Office for being indecent under the Comstock Law, but how does that really inform readers of today?

These days the issue of censorship conjures images of Nazi bonfires, and petty bureaucrats like Sarah Palin calling her public library to inquire about pulling objectionable material from public circulation. The ACLU helps celebrate an annual Banned Books Week, and there’s even a t-shirt popular in elementary school circles which declaims “I read banned book.”

Sexual themes aside, isn’t good literature by definition subversive? “Banned books” of note show themselves by who’s trying to limit their circulation. Solzhenitsyn for example, was silenced by the USSR, not by authorities fretting over you. On the other hand, what the Nazis burned shared themes the US has sought to censor before and since, but the big whoop we make about banned books instead obsesses on lascivious or politically incorrect vocabulary. While literary publicists revel in the notoriety of inconsequential attacks on the ilk of Harry Potters, the digital and mass media age has meant sophisticated advancements in real book burning. I’d like to present an illustrated series about literary works which have threatened authoritarian rule in the past, your access to which is quietly receding.

As per usual, Colorado Springs monied class is unrepentant, gaga for GW Bush

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Bush is a criminal, you moronsYep, they turned up in their orange tans, diamonds, black gowns and shiny SUVs, to support Christian charter schools and honor “God Bless Him” George Dubya Bush. This was my favorite sign from the protest.

Jesus Springs welcomes fugitive Bush

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After seeing Colorado College gush over a whitewashed CIA murderer, I’m not in any mood to watch local Christian groupies applaud George War-criminal Bush. The plan for Saturday at the Broadmoor is to pummel the arrogant creep with shoes, ceremoniously of course, and probably in effigy. We’ll have a Bush impersonator, a little monkey in a suit strutting about with impunity. And it appeals to me more that we not land any hits, so we’ll have Junior ducking this shoe and that, taunting us with his sick hehehe. And won’t that reflect reality? Justice frustrated by a snickering good ol’ boy. Except, is there outrage left for Bush? I know I hardly feel it anymore. It’s Obama dissembling about torture and dropping the bombs now.

Here’s the list of embarrassing local businesses and idiotri welcoming George Bush to Colorado Springs, they’re even giving him an award, apparently he’s an inspiration to charter school students:

Colorado Springs Christian Schools
Steve Schuck
Dick Saunders, Saunders Construction
El Pomar Foundation
Pete & Jackie Kuyper
Sonya Camarco, LPL Financial
Dewhirst & Dolven, Attorneys
Bob & Kelly McGrath
Dr. Ron & Renee Rains
Interim Healthcare
Clear Ink Foundation
Colorado Custom Decks
Dr. Mike & Kathy Hall
Mateos Salon & Day Spa
Dar Howard
Envision Investment Group
Dave & Lynda Bjorklund
First Western Trust Bank
Scott & Beth Bugosh
Richard King Brown
Freedom Financial Services
The Milestone Group
Clear View Properties
The Sonchar Family
Joseph & Melissa Hornsey
Ken & Rae Driscoll
Rick & Margaret Brown
David & Gloria Neuder
Todd Pickle
Lee & Mickey Bolin
Seelye Group Ltd.
Liberty Toyota
Matrix Design Group
DWG & Associates
Blazer Electric Supply
ACSI
Joe Woodford
Thor Iverson Consulting
Rothgerber Johnson Lyons LLP
Kathryn Emrick
American Iron & Metal
Stephanie Brock Design
Integrity First Financial
Phil & Mary Kiemel
Weavers Online
Rocky Mountain Custom Trim

Colo. College guest Donald Gregg: the man who hired the man who killed Che

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He administered OPERATION PHOENIX during the Vietnam War, the CIA counterinsurgency operation which sought to pacify Vietnam with the targeted assassination of thousands of potential insurgents. For Vice President George H. W. Bush’s office, he coordinated the funding of the illegal US covert war against Central America, aka, the IRAN-CONTRA scandal. Yes, he supervised both Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, each of CIA-state-sponsored-terrorism fame. But Colorado College introduced Donald P. Gregg only as former national security adviser and ambassador to Korea. And CC gave Gregg an honorary degree — with not a peep from the know-nothings they laud as their exemplary students.

I attended because I was insulted by the lecture’s title: “What do Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jung Il have in common?” the speaker further slandered the father of modern Vietnam by indulging to associate another villain to the list, that of Muammar al-Gaddafi. But gracefully Gregg acquitted himself by explaining that Ho Chi Minh had been misjudged, and thus perhaps there is call to engage even our most despicable adversaries in dialog, lest we repeat our mistaken policies, as Gregg believes we are doing in Afghanistan.

Not much objectionable with that. Actually, you can read Gregg’s address, it’s virtually word for word the introduction he wrote for a 2009 study of the CIA’s unheralded successes in Vietnam. To his credit, Gregg does not echo the ongoing theme that Vietnam was winnable.

Relating his more recent expertise about Korea, Gregg offers that Kim Jong Il is more than your common loon. Rather, Il is of unusually high intelligence, underrated by the US, driven despotic by his isolation.

Or driven mad by our offense, I’d add. I’m surprised Kim Jong Il tolerates that we name our ambassador in Seoul as the Ambassador to Korea, rather than to South Korea. How dare US-occupied Korea assert to represent the national identity of Korea? As in Vietnam, it’s the north doing the heavy lifting toward inevitable unification.

Gregg nearly had me convinced he was reformed until he added a forth bogeyman for comparison, Iran.

Iran mustn’t get nukes, etc, etc, Ahmadinejad unpredictable, can’t be trusted, etc.

Ho Chi Minh had been demonized Gregg said, based on a wrong-headed anti-Communist domino-theory mindset, yet Gregg is perfectly willing to be stuck to Capitalism’s current mindset against Islam.

Gregg made such winning arguments for tolerance, respect, diplomacy, and the integrity of the best intelligence officers, but isn’t that precisely the neo-liberal spiel? The CC audience lapped it up.

Here was the closest most of us will ever get to someone connected to the murder of Che Fucking Guevara, icon of the world struggle against Western oppression. That’s explaining the obvious, but I’d add, Che’s heroic stature is no more diminished even if only known as a t-shirt image to this crowd.

School-of-the-Americas-trained Rodriguez knew the stature of the hero he was cutting down, to this day he brags about wearing Che’s watch as a keepsake. Rodriguez returned from this assignment with a piece of notebook paper wrapped around the tobacco left in Guevara’s pipe.

Donald Gregg didn’t kill Guevara, but we might have asked him how many youthful Viet Cong he killed or had tortured, etc, how many aspiring Nicaraguan freedom fighters, or Burmese victims, or boys and girls of yet to be named regions, of the CIA’s yet unrevealed adventures in extrajudicial preemptive death-dealings.

All of this may be blood under the bridge, except that the undercurrent of this elder statesman’s lecture tour is beating the drum for confrontation with Iran.