How The Grinch Stole the White House... Again--.by Alan Waldman-- from *Online Journal* {click here}

This is an detailed update on what's being done right now
....behind the media scenes...regarding
voter fraud. Bev Harris leading the charge on
Volusia County, Florida possible recount.

Sin (A Cardinal Deposed)

is the title of a play by our friend Michael Murphy
now in its last few days at Theatre Row
(410 West 42nd Street, bet 9th & 10th Ave.-
tel: 212- 244-3380).

This play, excellently directed by Carl Forsman,
was based on transcripts of the trial
of Cardinal Law of Boston, who was accused
of neglecting to confront priests who were
sexual child abusers in his diocese. We were
amazed at how compelling this production was,
considering the dialog is completely based on
transcripts a la court tv. Cardinal Law failed
to confront a single child abuser in his diocese
although there were many proven cases, including
one priest who was a leader in Nambla.

The play was presented in a very comfortable
small theatre, part of a kind of multiplex
off-Broadway group of theatres. The staging
was effective, utilizing vignettes from complainants
in screens off to stage right and left, while the
main part of the play takes place completely
in center stage at a conference table. Due to
the finely focussed acting and presentation, this
play, not overly long, remains
a gripping, provocative and
suspenseful experience.

Thinking and talking about this play brought to
mind the tendency on the part of bureacratic
institutions to shield themselves from public
scrutiny and outrage. This play also brought
home the tendency, a la Nazi Germany, for
this country to breed cults that are openly
abusive-certain groups within the
Catholic Church being among
the core constituency of the far right wing
political/religious movement in this country.
Another issue, among many this play evokes,
has to do with a contagious paralysis,
on the part of so many people working
within any kind of hierarchy,
in the ability to think for themselves, or to
stand up for any ideal unless it embraces the
stated and unstated aims of
the given power structure.
The cast in this play included John Cullum
who was chillingly convincing at Cardinal
Bernard F. Law.

We were also excited to learn about
The New Group, a repertory group
that makes inexpensive memberships
available at this theater. Upcoming
plays include *Hurlyburly* by David
Rabe, directed by Scott Elliott, with a
star studded cast featur�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ing Wallace
Shawn, Parker Posey, Ethan Hawke
and others.
****************************************
Gary Sullivan's *New Life* cartoon
today focuses on the ongoing tragedy in
Fallujah
Elsewhere {click here}
****************************************

"Behold the Machine:
how it rolls and wreaks vengeance
and drains and deforms us."

from : *Sonnets to Orpheus*
Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Edward Snow
North Point Press, 2004

Before going into our usual diatribe (in this case a
quote from Anselm Jappe's absorbing *Guy
Debord* -University of California Press, 1999)
I can't resist telling you what a great and delicious
time we had last evening with Gary and Nada, their clever cats Nemo
and Dante, and the wonderful Marianne Shaneen.
I do not wish to provoke envy, yet I will mention that
the world at large should have so many more opportunities
to spend time with these immensely entertaining
poets; and, in particular, to experience directly their abundant
knowledge of certain hlarious, entrancing and stellar moments in Bollywood
film history. I will state unreservedly that such knowledge
should be made immediately available
to a broad, and hopelessly dismayed and bored
public, particularly in this bluest of blue states.

And Marianne's suggestion of Nada singing
flarf set to music- picture that! Is she not to
be enthuiastically encouraged in this most
hopefully entertaining of possiblities?
********
and, now, from Anselm Jappe:

"It will be evident by this time that the spectacle is the
heir of religion and it is significant that the first chapter
of *The Society of the Spectacle* has a quotation from
Feuerbach's *Essence of Christianity* as its epigraph.
The old religion projected man's own power into the heavens,
where it took on the appearance of a god oopposed to man,
a foreign entity. The spectacle performs the same operation
on earth. The greater the power that man attributed to gods
of his own creation, the more powerless he himself felt;
humanity behaves similarly with respect to powers that it
has created and allowed to escape and that now "reveal
themselves to us in their full force." (Society of the Spectacle).
The *contemplation* of these powers is in inverse propportion
to the individual's experience of real life, to the point where
his most ordinary gestures are lived by someone else
instead of by the subject himself. In this world, "the
spectabor feels at home nowhere" (Society of the Spectacle).
In the spectacle, as in religion, every moment of life,
every idea, and every gesture achieves meaning only from
without." (Debord and Conjuers, 1960 and *Situationist
International Anthology, 1983).

Oooooh eeeee oooooh aaaah aaaah ting tang walla walla bing bang

Toni and I are going to
Nada and Gary's
place for
Thanksgiving
Dinner

- Marianne
is coming too-

and, dear readers,
Happy Thanksgiving to you!

Some samples of music by Eric Satie {click here}

Thanks to Laura Carter at Blue Revisions
for her kind words about *fait accompli*
and for including us on her Blog Crush List.

Blue Revisions (click here}

"The rest is history
The rest is literature
The rest is silence
The rest is history
The rest is literature
The rest is silence
The rest is literature
The rest is history
The rest is silence"




Frank Kuenstler

*FUGITIVES. ROUNDS*
EVENTORUM PRESS, N.Y.
1966
********************************
Peter Manson's Freebase Accordion new links page {click here}

A Universal Manifesto for Contemporary American Poetics, Aesthetics, Politics and Business

Manifesto {click here}

"Freedom of speech! It hath not entered into your
hearts to conceive what those words mean. It is not
leave given me by your sect to say this or that; it
is when leave is given to your sect to withdraw. The church,
the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal
and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. I ask only
that one fourth part of my honest thoughts be spoken
aloud. What is it you tolerate, you church to-day? Not
truth, but a lifelong hypocrisy. Let us have institutions
framed not out of our rottenness, but out of our soundness.
This factitious piety is like stale gingerbread. I would
like to suggest what a pack of fools and cowards we
mankind are.They want me to agree not to breathe too
hard in the neighborhood of their paper castles. If I should
draw a long breath in the neighborhood of these institutions,
their weak and flabby sides would fall out, for my own
inspiration would exhaust the air about them. The church!
it is eminently the timid institution, and the heads and
pillars of it are constitutionally and by principle the greatest
cowards in the community. The voice that goes up
from the monthly concerts is not so brave and so cheering
as that which rises from the frog-ponds of the land..."

Henry David Thoreau
Journals
November 16, 1858

You Can't Always Get What You Want

but you can dream about it by means of


Lucid Dreaming {click here}
*************************************

*fait accompli* called it *paranoia* (see the sidebar to your left)

-Counterpunch calls it *fear*- either way- a new approach is needed


the full essay available right now on
Counterpunch {click here}


put your fingers on the pulse of contemporary information-
via wood s lot {click here}
************************************************************

Truth In Blogging

Visiting in-laws today in Arlington, Mass, everyone out, so I had the time to
read through every blog listed on Brother Tom's finish your phrase {click here} linklist (my hypothesis is, that since the election was Bushwhacked,
most bloggers are going through a well-earned depression).
One, and only one, blogpost made me laugh out loud today. And the winner is...

Paula's House of Toast {click here}
***************************************************

Police, protesters clash in Chile {click here} via Transdada
****************************************************
Shanna Compton is working on Jerome Sala's new
book: *Look Slimmer Instantly*. This post includes
a photo of the cover plus a link to four of the poems
published on a webzine.
Brand New Insects-Jerome Sala's book {click here}
*************************************************

"in his work *The Information Age*, Castella has
demonstrated empirically how competition intensifies
in the global information economy (or *informational*
economy to be exact, because all economies are based
on information, but ours is based on the information-
technology paradigm...) Speedy technological changes
make it imperative to get new technology to consumers
quickly, before one's competitors do. The slow are left
holding obsolete products; even worse is a belated
response to fundamental shifts in technology."

*The Hacker Ethic* by Pekka Himanen
translated by Anselm Hollo and Pekka Himanen
Random House, 2001
*************************************************
Competition and Alienated Labor

Marx on Human Persons {click here}
Estranged Labor by Karl Marx {click here}