Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

I saw their show May 20th at Staples in LA, I was surprised to see Mic Jagger so spry. He must be pushing seventy and he was dancing all over that stage. His singing was as good as ever. Keith Richards seemed to be letting Ron Wood and guest Mick Taylor do most of the heavy lifting in the guitar work, but then he is such a pro, he makes it look like he is just hanging out with his buddies in the garage jamming.

The core band now is Mic Jagger, Keith Richards the two original members remaining, Charlie Watts who joined in 1963, Ron Woods who replaced Mick Taylor in 1975, and Darryl Jones who replaced Bill Wyman in 1994. There were several additional musicians on board but Mick Taylor stood out with his exceptional guitar work.

RS SETLIST LOS ANGELES #2 May 20, 2013 - From their web site.

Get Off Of My Cloud - Vocals over modulated

It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It) - decent by the time this song was done sound better.

Paint It Black - Workmanlike performance

Gimme Shelter - Well Done crowd pleaser.

All Down The Line - Good song I am not as familiar with, from Exile on Main Street.

Faraway Eyes - One of my favorites, from Some Girls, Mic is a great country singer.

Sway (By Request – with Mick Taylor) - Great guitar work. Well done.

Doom And Gloom - Another I am not so familiar with. Decent, new from Greatest Hits.

One More Shot - Reasonably done, newer song, I am not familiar with, from Greatest Hits also.

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking (with Mick Taylor) - This was great. The guitars were excellent.

Honky Tonk Women - Another real crowd pleaser.

BAND INTRODUCTIONS

You Got The Silver (with Keith on lead vox) - Keith’s voice was cracking, I like this song.

Before They Make Me Run (with Keith on lead vox) - Keith sounded tired. From Some Girls.

Midnight Rambler (with Mick Taylor) - Oh yeah. Very good Mick guitar playing.

Miss You - Actually very good live, normally not my favorite song but this rendition worked.

Start Me Up - Actually stood up and danced. This was very well done. Mic danced great!

Tumbling Dice - Ok, seemed a little weak after Start Me Up. Should be stronger, its a good song.

Brown Sugar - This did not work as well as you would think. Needed stronger bottom.

Sympathy For The Devil - Another great tune, Mic came out in a big black cape. Fun.

ENCORE

You Can’t Always Get What You Want (with the University of Southern California Thornton Chamber Singers) - This started good, choir got lost, they should have been stronger. Kind of muddy performance for such a great song.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash - Very good song, Keith and Mic in great form on this. Keith even smiling.

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction - Excellent jam on this. Mick Taylor came out too. I really though it was a spectacular rendition.

My girlfriend and I left satisfied. There was no stomping of feet or long loud cheering or clapping for encores like in the old days. Maybe because the crowd was mixed, all ages, lots of gray hairs and young kids, not so much in between. Or perhaps it was simply because everyone knew they would come out and do an excellent encore, no matter what the audience did. The core of songs came from their classic period which even the author of their little band history on their site seems to agree that their best work was from 1968 - 1972. “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street,” the first three among my own personal favorites.

I wanted to hear “Factory Girl,” they played it at the May 3rd show, “Love in Vain” and “Dead Flowers” would have been nice additions, as would “Wild Horses,” and maybe some of their earlier stuff, not just big hits. “Lady Jane,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” and maybe “2000 Man,” from the underrated “Satanic Majesties Request.” Something from the mid-seventies like “Fool To Cry,” or “Angie,” would be fun. The show was over two hours as it was, and I left with ears like cotton balls but happy. They can still put on one hell of a show, tickets were way too high, but then I haven’t been to a big rock show in years. Last big time concert like this was the US festival back in the early eighties. Since then I have seen smaller bands in more intimate settings, this was my first Arena show since McCartney and Wings “Band on the Run” tour back in the mid seventies. This was my first Rolling Stones concert, and who knows if they will be around much longer, Mic Jagger looked like he could be on stage for another decade or more. Keith not so much but he is a survivor so who knows, they could be doing shows in 2020 and beyond.

http://www.rollingstones.com/2013/05/21/staples-center-los-angeles-may-20-2013-set-list/

These Poets, These Optimists

These poets of yore, optimists, they had earth, trees, flowers and
Bees
What have we, in our modules, like airport lounges
At best
We have screens, pixelated images of trees, flowers and
Bees
They exist as exotic imagery to be photoshopped into products
Ironic
You and I cannot eat these images of photons bombarding the optic nerves
At all
Hungry, like some shadow, a hard electric neon gas emanation that flickers only on its
Death
Like some sun long ago gone super nova, in the black reaches of the near zero kelvin space, no movement
At zero
No movement at all.

By Gary
5/19/13
Long Beach Station

A friend was writing to me about the “Boethius” poem. He didn’t get the reference to “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in the title “The Insufferable Lucidity of Boethius” (see my previous posting) and like most people was unfamiliar with Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, a book he wrote while imprisoned awaiting trial. Boethius was one of the last generations of classically educated intellectuals as the Roman Empire collapsed in Italy. He served the Gothic King Theodoric. Theodoric wanted to maintain the Roman culture and traditions and encouraged the Roman elites to stay in governmental service. Boethius was one of the classical writers whose writings remained available in Europe in the so called Dark Ages, and was read by scholars and clergy all through the Medieval period. I pun on the title throughout the poem, throwing in the imagery of Justine, the innocent heroine of the De Sade novel of the same name who was defamed and deflowered constantly in De Sade’s condemnation of false virtue in a world of corruption, advocating libertine free love and women’s emancipation as the only appropriate response to the overturning of traditional values in the revolutionary Eighteenth Century. His La Philosophie dans le boudoir, thus becomes the new consolation for a new age. And thus his advocacy of the libertine life also represented by his character Juliette, is the response that will turn a ravaged innocent into a competent sexual navigator of the modern era. I have compressed this into a few stanzas in my rhyming romp, with a tip of the hat to Plato’s bat cave, Homer’s Odysseus and the Cyclops, turned into a phallic image in good De Sade tradition.

My friend was also curious about the term “traducer” which I told him was a word for a liar and deceiver, another name for the devil, which I had picked up from reading the Black Panther Newspaper as a youth when I distributed it in high school. My friend associated it with snitches. I hadn’t specifically been thinking of ‘traducer” as snitch, but when I was a kid involved with the Panthers in Connecticut, one of them was on trial in New Haven for killing a guy and the inside dope we were told* was that the guy the Panthers had killed, Alex Rackley was a snitch or a police agent/informer (see New Haven Independent link to tape recording of confession by Rackley to New Haven Panthers). We were supposed to basically just push the Panther line that the whole thing was a police frame up. It would be the best way to mount an effective defense for defendants Lonnie McLucas, Bobby Seal and Ericka Huggins, and to maintain support among white liberals who at that point did not understand the open war between the Panthers and the government. This was before the CONTEPRO files had been discovered by a radical group breaking into an FBI office in Pennsylvania (Panther Trials New Haven, Wikipedia).

Tom Wolfe wrote a book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers that describes some of this, but he was an outsider looking in, specifically critical of white liberal faddism, writing about a party at Leonard Bernstein’s place in Manhattan. The Panthers didn’t appreciate Wolfe’ s original article from which part of the book was based, and this is quoted from a Time magazine article in a Wikipedia entry “a minister of the Black Panthers…said of Wolfe: ‘You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine?” (qtd. in Radical Chic, Wikipedia).

Interesting reading these links. because they all have slightly different takes on what happened. Epstein’s original article is the closest to the actual cases, with the other two being written much later. There are obvious errors and I wonder which version is closest to the facts. I was there, but as a kid and part of a group, A.I.M. (American Independent Movement based in New Haven and Bridgeport, CT) that was supportive of the Panthers. I had copies of the Panther’s version in their paper which I sold in my high school. I was in and out of the day to day activities of AIM and the trials. Since I was ostensibly still just a high school student and lived in Monroe, CT, which was an hour away hitching from New Haven where the trials took place, less time if you had your own car, which I didn’t, but I organized car pools to go to the trials and often would have a couple of car loads of kids. We would demonstrate outside the courtroom and attend the trials and help organize fundraisers etc.

Another interesting aspect is the involvement of a young Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was a law student at Yale and organized a group to monitor the trials for the ACLU. I might have actually met her because we would sit in the courtroom and monitor the proceedings of the trials at the same time (Black Panthers and Hillary, Snopes.com).

Link to Epstein article on Panther trials

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/panthers2.htm

Wikipedia article on Panther Trials

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven_Black_Panther_trials

Yale teachers curriculum article about Panther Trials

http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1978/2/78.02.09.x.html

See volume #7 pdf articles on Connecticut Arrests in link below

http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/BPP_Newspapers/bpp_newspapers_index.html

Summary of an article about AIM in the context of Feminism in Connecticut.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/radical_history_review/v081/81.1kesselman.pdf

Wikipedia article on Tom Wolfe’s book

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Chic_%26_Mau-Mauing_the_Flak_Catchers

Original article by Wolfe in New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/

Supposed confession of the police informer recorded by New Haven Black Panthers

http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/rackley_trial_tape_surfaces/

Summary of Hillary Rodham Clinton involvement.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/panthers.asp

*’Told’ is a strong word, the rumor was around through the grapevine and at that point the Panthers were considered to be the leaders, they were taking the brunt of the heat from the cops. They were getting killed. Nobody knew who did what, we had no access to police records, the Black Panthers themselves certainly didn’t tell us. There was no official meeting in a secret hideaway. Somebody must have talked to somebody, or more likely since our group ran a print shop and we printed most of the alternative press in the region, someone had access to the police and got tipped off. We, at least those of us who were younger, teenagers, wanted to see things in black and white. Panthers good, cops bad. Anti-war movement good, Nixon and his minions bad. Mao good, Stalin bad, pot and acid good, heroin and speed bad and so forth.

What I knew about from real research when I was fifteen, well, not much, I listened to a lot of rock, got my hands on drugs when I could, read scifi, drug literature like Leary, a rather academic tome The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, written by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, Huxley’s Doors of Perception, his fiction, Orwell, Catcher in the Rye, the beat poets, the underground press, and lots of underground comics, I loved R. Crumb. I had an interest in education theory so I read books like A.S. Neil’s Summerhill, and George Leonard’s Education and Ecstacy, as well as the popular psychology of the day. I read some spiritual literature like The Tibetan Book of the Dead and I had from fifth grade until seventh grade kept a very full scrapbook of all the articles I could get my hands on about the war in Vietnam. It started as a school project and I just kept at it. It was how I started reading the New York Times.

I had a copy of Chairman Mao’s Quotations from Chairman Mao, popularly called “The Little Red Book,” but I mostly skimmed through it. I had carried a copy of Plato’s Republic around all year in eight grade but never finished it. Mostly we got our information through the grapevine, personal communication with the older members of the group who had been to college, they led classes on feminism, Marxism, as well as partying with us where we would get stoned and rap. They also made sure those of us who were younger could not get our hands on the ‘good acid.’ It was a constant source of irritation, I in particular would nag them and they would give me some weaker drug like THC, which really was probably just ground up tranquilizers. But we could smoke all the pot and drink wine as long as we didn’t get to drunk. My high school buddies always wanted to tag along just for the free drugs, but I screened most of them out. Only potential recruits could enter the hallowed halls.

Teachers in school for the most part were divided into two camps, the pro-war and the anti-war, just like the rest of society circa 1970. Sometimes I wonder why we accepted the idea of killing an informer so complacently. But we felt we were in a war. Kent State simply confirmed our expectations, the system was brutal and would grind up any resistance. I experienced almost daily police harassment so it just seemed like the order of things. You took a side and hoped your side would prevail.

Once the war ended, the whole movement collapsed, we no longer had a concrete visible enemy, the threat of the draft and a miserable death in Vietnam had vanished and so did the movement. What was left was a scraggly counter-culture that quickly lost its idealism and became the druggie scene. The remnants of the left fragmented, a lot of people like myself moved to the country, in my case to live on a spiritual commune and finish school. Something I never did because of the newest wave of counter-culture punk…for that I was something of a trend setter, I was an elder of the movement by then, in my mid twenties, and did my best to steer it in a radical political direction, by then an Anarchist one. Still a dreamer. It wasn’t until the second Reagan administration, that I gave up and got a steady job at age thirty, I guess there is an irony in there somewhere.

The Insufferable Lucidity of Boethius

She had not read this Boethius
Not even his consolation of philosophy
Yet it pains for the reader to think her facetious
As she googled his fame blundering into anomaly

Missing philosophies salacious good patrimony
Innocence seduced by the traducer’s chatter box
Shying away like a petrified pony
Into the shadowy cavernous maw of the flickering giant blind Cyclops

A shimmering philosophy’s true gold
Small consolation dangled before a school girl
Enticed by the baubles gleam into dubious fold
Then buggered by the goat footed churl

What howling was heard monotonously
As she bled from the barbed shaft
Consoled by De Sade’s bedroom philosophy
She gobbled it up with due craft

By Gary
18 May 2013
Long Beach

The Word
We are flesh made daemons
Sun kin’s fire starters, pyromaniacs
Loose firmament breaking Tiffany fractal fighters
Lotus eaters, gobblers of chicken, Olympian lunch meats
Rosebuds dreaming elephant men, millipedes crawling in and out lactating
Skulls, dusty castle clerks recording for Youtube Joan de Arc’s smoldering extra crispy
Secret inquisitors, agents in rebus, red handed haberdasher’s button holed for president
Maggot food, crunchy glow worm littered
Home of the Infinite Watusi Dancing Inflamed Intestinal Club and the big book of blow up dolls
Membership has its privileges…

Vegan incense burning acolytes of great mother Gaya
Murderesses, vagabond thieves of sanctimony with big eye puppy porn
More agents, more diva killers, great white tornado hunters
Dread locked zombie flesh eaters of carrot and long suffering soy
Hold high the image of God’s son mocked by bread and rejected by flesh
For we the living, are the dead enclosed sepulchers, cyphers bearing Drachmas and
Candle tongues frothy with epileptic notation
“Hear me oh lord
I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Gone are the night watches calling out the hours
Sleepy are the bundled beggar children on Bogata balmy boardwalks
Remorseless are bug zappers and
Solitary masters on Mount Meru
Fighting the oncoming Kali Yuga with pitchforks and
Chakra encrusted fingers tasting of shit, sending
Bile and acrid smoke signals to the bodhisattvas below, chanting
“Where were you when the darkness coiled like serpents devouring Laocoon and sons?”

In the Vatican Museum
Lapping up the ages drinking from roadside ditches
Sated with quick sniffs of butt bitches,
Behold the God king as he mounts
Behold as he digs spurs into fat sow flesh
Queen wench of Babylon
“Whoore,” Archie Bunker relishes, lingering longingly on the cock sucking sound

We are all Jesus on the cross
Demeter weeping for her Persephone
Laughing Romulus hefting Sabine virgins
Hanuman greeting Sita’s tears with monkey solicitude
Stealing baubles for bananas in the Seva Kunj while
Thor’s hammer sits cobwebbed and closeted

Only once does the sight of Leptis Magna
Give pause to the Christmas gift from B-52’s over Hanoi, “the pride and
Spiritual strength of the good-willed and wise Vietnamese people….”* insignificant, nothing to
Santa’s justifiable and homicidal rage, Dresden… Nagasaki… mere boneless chicken breasts,
They had been naughty, not nice.

And we, the hungry ghosts, wear our crowns proudly,
Sitting meditation on bony bottoms chanting secret words
Crying crocodile tears for sad eyed children needing Apple apps
Caring little but for our own aching knees

These are the things that make Jesus weep
Angels flagellate imagined flesh
Mary Magdalene laundry orphans wring reddened writs and knobby legal briefs

For damned wasted lives
For singing superlative gospels

We stand at attention and salute those who are about to die.

By Gary
18 May 2013
Long Beach

*Mitchel, Marshall. “The Christmas Bombing.” Air and Space Smithsonian. Jan. 2001. Web. 18 May 2013.

I cut my teeth on poetry watching Ginsberg and company perform at the “Jack Keroac School of Disembodied Poetics” in Boulder as a kid. We had three warring poetry communities back in the late seventies, one the University poets at U of Colorado, two the NAROPA poets mostly the older beat poets, and third the street poets who were mostly more intellectually oriented hippies, punks and Villon followers. I had my radio show in the middle of the night and liked to be an ambassador to all of the factions, egging them on when things got boring.

I missed the famous party where W.S. Merwin was put upon by Rimpoche’s thugs at a drunken orgy as described by Ed Sanders of the Fugs fame. Good luck finding this anywhere. It has become something of a non event…
Sanders, Ed (ed.). The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary. 1977.
Copies are available through Amazon but links for a free copy seem to have disappeared from the internet.

-Note: Trungpa Rimpoche was Tibetan Buddhist Crazy Wisdom lineage leader, rather a drunkard, but smart, who ended up in Boulder started the NAROPA Institute and some of his more famous followers from the beat scene formed the Jack Keroac poetry school.
it was a place for middle aged beat poets to rest their weary bones and teach neophyte escapees from the upper and middle classes how to be bohemian without the risk of endangering their trust funds…or getting cut off from parental support systems…(my own observations), I was a cynic and an anarchist even then. Allen gave me a burnt out stick of incense from his reading one time. I was not impressed. I was impressed with Bill Burroughs and shook his hand. That handshake must have contaminated me, I spent years under the influence.

This is an over the top version of “The Junkie’s Christmas.” Coppola was probably swept up in the eighties’ heroin chic’ thing. Ever see the movie “High Art”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6kHN92Yv48

A more typical Burroughs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qDP4M2WYAk

My favorite Burroughs “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” but there is a longer version that I remember him reading at NAROPA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBTkk3b7Ofo

This is a youtube with both Allen Ginsberg and Trungpa Rimpoche.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYTEskqkGkg

Another one about a film about Trungpa and his approach, romanticized by his followers a bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80jGSadccmY

This is Trungpa himself lecturing on Tantra in 1974, not long before the party. My girlfriend circa 1976 had been one of his lovers, or so she claimed. I stole her away to my cult at the time and lost her to my best friend… Live goes on…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW7MWq7v7mQ&NR=1&feature=fvwp

I remember sitting in the back of Left Hand Books also in Boulder, where I ran a poetry series, getting drunk with Anslem Hollo and making fun of our friend Joe Shakarchi who was reading something of his. My girlfriend (new one circa 1980), who was co-host of the reading series, was getting pissed at me for being so rude and ending up taking a slug of the cheap red wine too. That was typical of the times. We partied hard and created like we were godlings…

Robert Bly said of my girlfriend and I that we were the future, this was when we met him at a Denny’s in Denver with my GF and the aforementioned Joe Shakarchi. Joe was writing his PHD thesis on Bly, it was rejected. Yet Joe got the last laugh, after a successful career teaching English and as a poet, he has retired in Thailand and lives the good life. So it goes…

Robert Bly from the way I remember him, pre-Iron John.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9LlA-Cl4NA

This is a reading of “The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge.” Read by Tom O’Bedlam. Great name but he reading is a bit too upper crusty for the material. I think a drunken Gregory Corso reading would be better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQbyDGU4bgg

Corso “Marriage”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp2eyC2oaQ

I found this performance by Dennis Hopper on the old Johnny Cash show back in the early seventies of the Kipling poem “If.” Rather sentimental, but something I would not associate with Dennis Hopper. I always liked Cash and Hopper. This doesn’t really relate to anything except my dad took me to see “Easy Rider” as a warning against the evil ways of seeking to live free, when it first came out. Had the opposite effect on my impressionable mind, I couldn’t wait to go on my own easy rides, except I was afraid to go to Mississippi and Alabama for years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlfnm9gV52w

Much of this material is in my novel, but when I tried it out before the creative writing class at LBCC, (Long Beach City College) nobody seemed to like it, except the teacher and a couple of students my age, in fact most of them didn’t even know who Allen Ginsberg was…. I gave up on the book at that point. The common opinion of my drug infused youthful creativity was incomprehension at its unhealthiness…as if personal hygiene was the point. That is what frustrates. Where is the fire, the seeking after the Byronic heights, flaming of the candle at both ends…. I am getting grumpy in my senility.

I really wanted to leave my spelling of Trungpa Rimpoche as Trumpa, sort of a Buddhist Donald Trump, but for accuracies sake, I fixed it 5/12/2013. Also as the same friend pointed out, they were not really poetry wars, more like poetry rivalries…my poetic license I guess. I also modified my Joe section, he really is a good poet and we were being idiotic to tease him… Anslem is now a respected poet, and I am a reformed degenerate, so it goes… to give Vonnegut his due for the phrase. Now Karass mates, we shall perform ritual Bokononism.

Joe reading one of his poems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21DGSHQQwrw

There is no other explanation. Sunday, I went to a church to see a performance of ‘The Rite Of Spring” the Stravinsky score to the ballet that was first performed in 1913, depicting Russian pagan festivals and a woman sacrificing to her gods by dancing to death. But when I discovered that what I though was a free concert was being charged for, I walked away with my girlfriend in tow. Instead after some misgivings on my part we drove across LA from Inglewood to Anaheim Hills with a stop off in Long Beach so I could change from my Sunday go to Church or job interview, or classical concert clothes, into my homie street gear. Like the Snoop song says “Crazy rolling down these avenues, crazy.”

We then went to a movie at the Starlight Theaters, which on Sunday before six pm are only $5.00 per person. She wanted to see “Iron Man 3″ and I was hoping for something artier. But I was willing to go along with her. The lines were huge for her movie, and all the performances were sold out. We were going to leave but then we noticed that “Oblivion” the Tom Cruise movie was playing. So we went to see it. It was a rather run of the mill sci-fi movie, Cruse looked old, but it was ok, stealing bits from several sci-fi movies. I came out not particularly impressed but it wasn’t a rip off.

A short synopsis, Cruise is part of a two person team, in charge of maintaining attack drones which are guarding factory ships that suck water out of the ocean to create hydrogen fuel or something. They are survivors of a war in which humanity had to make the planet virtually uninhabitable to destroy an alien attack that destroyed the moon. Humanity has evacuated to Titan, the moon of Saturn. After the Moon is destroyed which causes environmental havoc, how is never explained, but apparently is related to the lunar gravitational effect of the tides, we are supposed to simply assume that part. Cruise and his partner have had memory wipes supposedly to make them incapable of giving information to the enemy if they are captured, who still resist in small pockets on the devastated Earth.

Cruise is tricked by the unseen enemy who had captured one of his drones in a ruined library, and bait Cruise with a copy of “Lays of Ancient Rome” by Macaulay which opens to the page with the lines:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
the Captain of the Gate
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his father
And the temples of his Gods.”

This prompted some subconscious memories, leaking through the mind wipe were dreams about a woman from the past, who just happens to crash land shortly there after. Cruise finds the woman played by Olga Kurylenko and her crew in stasis pods. Drones come and destroy all the crew members except the woman, who he takes to his home base where she is treated by his partner/lover played by Andrea Riseborough. Cruise goes out again with Olga who wants her ship flight recorder and they are captured by the alien enemy who happen to be humans led by Morgan Freeman. They tell Cruise he is fighting for the wrong side, Cruise doesn’t believe them, so they release him and Olga, tell them to go to the bad lands which are supposed to be a radioactive zone and find out the truth. They find the old Empire State building, a wreckage, and Cruise remembers the woman is his wife. He had proposed to her there. There are some more twists and turns, his partner is killed by drones, he gets in a fight with a clone of himself and realizes that he too might be a clone, returns to the Freeman group convinced they were right, and ends up going into space to attack the alien seemingly robotic, mother ship, a giant upside down pyramid, that makes clones of the Cruise character who are used to conquer Earth and suck its oceans dry for their own nefarious purposes. Cruise listens to the flight recorder on the way to this attack, and remembers that he was captain of a ship sent to investigate Titan in 2017, and instead was diverted to investigate a space object which happened to be the aliens who capture Cruise and his co-pilot, Risenborough. His wife Olga was in a suspension pod in the back part of the ship which is released into space before Cruise is captured. Evidently he is cloned, memory suppressed and sent to attack earth, then after it is mostly subdued he is sent to maintain the drones while their factory ships proceed to suck the water out of the oceans. Cruise and Freeman, now act the part of Horatio at the bridge and destroy the alien ship with a nuke they smuggled on board saving the Earth. Meanwhile Olga has his daughter and three years later the other clone Cruise shows up at Olga’s hideaway in some Rocky Mountain paradise, and picks up where the other Cruise left off.

Lots of illogical and improbable sequences. But it is mildly entertaining. The aliens seem to be the modern industrial world, sucking the life out of the planet, with the only way to save the world seemingly being to destroy the brains behind this planet destruction, i.e. destroy Wall Street, and its ilk. Or it could just be a sci-fi tale with no particular significance, but I tend to think my analysis is correct, the environment being a big concern now and frustration at the lack of action being widespread among the thinking classes of the world. Nice bypassing of Christianity using an ancient Roman symbolism. I don’t know if the writer of this is apparently it was based on a unpublished graphic novel from director Joseph Kosinski and Arvid Nelson, rewritten several times, and then made into a movie.

I had meant to write something completely different, but now I am out of time, have to get ready to go to school and deal with the day on about two hours sleep. I had been thinking about the concept of the scape goat, how some of us, in fact most of us are loaded down like mules with the burdens of the world, think all those slaves or free workers, building pyramids. Some elites somehow are able to dominate and force or entice others to do their wills. We all are for the most part sheep being sheered or slaughtered for the machine of this elite, for ultimate unknown reasons. I mean why does this god need suffering and sacrifice? It only makes sense as part of some kind of power grab. Thus we are all lied to and act as clones going to work, doing our duty, sacrificed like lambs going to the slaughter to what end? Shades of anarchy or some Scientology fantasy. Who or what are the puppet masters? I was thinking about the fact that in India yogis thousands of years ago tried to find ways out of the web of karma that these gods used to keep us under their thumbs, meting out so called karmic justice over generations of lives. So the Yogis theorized that by stopping Karmic activity they could break the wheel. But how? But if this is simply a set up to control, then all these efforts are in vain. The only escape is refusal to participate, walking away or rebellion on a mass scale. But can sheep wake up and rule themselves successfully? Anthropology indicates man did fine for eons until the sudden development of sedentary man about 5-10 thousand years ago. We might really be part of some alien prison planet, or did humanity simply decide to break into elites and masses with the invention of agriculture? The theoretical basis is still pretty shaky, leaving room for doubt. And in the middle of the night I am full of doubts.

Recently I saw the latest Robert Redford film, The Company You Keep. It was recommended by a friend and because it was about the Weather Underground, and revolved around a scene that I was at least peripherally involved in back in the early 1970’s, I was intrigued enough to cough up the $22 bucks it cost for my girlfriend and I to go. I usually only go to the $4.00 movies at the Starlight Cinemas, but they often don’t have the more interesting arty films like The Place Beyond the Pines, which I thought was excellent.

Back to the Redford film and the Weather Underground. Briefly the story is about a group of former members of the Weather Underground and their supporters who are still underground. They have families who for the most part don’t seem to know about their pasts and they have a communications system to stay in touch in emergencies, including alternate sets of identification. Redford plays a lawyer in upstate New York who does public interest cases, reminds me of Abbie Hoffman, the Yippie, who was an environmental activist when underground in Upstate New York. One of the group who was involved in a bank robbery where a guard is killed, reminding me of the Brinks Robbery in the early eighties, is arrested by the FBI and a young Albany, NY reporter out to make a name for himself digs around to find where the other missing robbers are, leading him to Redford who goes on the lam looking for his former lover who can clear him of involvement.

There is a chase scene, the FBI is on his case. Redford’s character leaves his eleven year old daughter with his brother who reluctantly helps. This leads to a journey meeting the former members and supporters, all now established in their own lives, one runs a lumberyard, played by Nick Nolte, who helps out giving Redford a safe place to stay, a clean car, talks about old Weatherman politics in a convincing insiders manner and in general is true to his past, a ‘bro’ who has found a way to accommodate beliefs and the modern world. Another character played by Richard Jenkins is a college professor in Chicago, who had not agreed with the bank robberies and was not happy to see Redford, but helped out anyway.

The FBI and the reporter are on his trail, he meets his former lover played by Julie Christie, who has remained radical and underground. This takes place in a cabin in back woods of Michigan where they relive their past, talk about the daughter they abandoned to another family years before, who has become interestingly enough the love interest of the young ambitious reporter. Ultimately Redford is arrested, Christie who was going to escape had a change of heart, turns herself in tells the authorities Redford was innocent, he gets to go home to his eleven year old daughter. We don’t know what happens to Redford’s older daughter who is now studying law in Ann Arbor, but presumably her step -father. The reporter, who had been ruthlessly exposing people for the sake of the story, now decided to quash what he had found out about her, love conquers his reporter’s instincts.

Like a good thriller, some twists and turns, lots of political grandstanding with some characters still trying to live the radical dream, others attempting to accommodate to the modern world, with varying degrees of acceptance, all seemingly comfortable members of the middle or upper middle class. It is reasonably fast paced for a Redford film, not as didactic as some, but with a Hollywood ending that is not particularly satisfying although my girlfriend seemed to like it.

There are several key perspectives presented, that as Susan Sarandon’s says “if it weren’t for my kids I would still be in the struggle” or words to that effect. Secondly as Redford’s character says “I didn’t get tired, I grew up.” The third option offered by the character played by Julie Christie to keep on with the struggle, as an unrepentant pot smuggler in California. But even this hardened radical has a soft spot and ultimately turns herself in to save Redford’s persona from going to jail. Nolte, the loyal friend of old who gives jobs to ex-cons and helps as he can is my favorite character. The Marxist college professor who enjoys teaching but doesn’t believe in the path taken by the Weathermen, the cynical reporter who doesn’t take sides, only cares to promote his career, and the FBI who seem to be single minded, although not particularly successful in tracking the enemies of the state.
Redford got his friends in trouble as the FBI followed him and busted at least the Nolte character for aiding and abetting a fugitive. The Christie persona ends up locked up for participating in the bank robbery as does the Sarandon character. Redford’s character seems to only care about exonerating his name and being reunited with his eleven year old, not exactly an exemplary model of a revolutionary or a human being, but in the movie this is downplayed, and his return to normalcy and legitimacy, redemption so to speak seems to be its point.

I wish Christie’s character had simply kept on flying the flag of resistance. What was missing was any link to some present day movements such as Occupy which seemed to be a natural fit for her or some sort of third world activism besides delivering boat loads of pot from Latin America. She seems sort of like the elder Yippie, Dana Beal, who is serving time for a pot bust currently in the real world. Redford seems hell bent on reconciliation, and his Bill Ayers like character seems to be a stand up for Obama’s old school liberalism, sort of a paternalistic view of the responsible elites taking care of the country and keeping the world safe for the established order. The FBI is simply doing its job, the harpies of a Greek tragedy. The American continuation of war mongering, Vietnam all over again in Iraq, Iran and god knows where else, which has never stopped is not brought up in the context of the movie, except as an unstated rationale for the continued resistance of the Christie character and the uncompromising view of the Sarandon persona. Redford seems to want us all to get along, and not continue to make too much trouble, at least not so much trouble that it would cause him to lose sleep at night. For me the ending was intellectually troubling as it seemed to promote the view that all we need is some reconciliation, to smooth out the wrinkles in our collective pasts, facile and ingenuous in my view.

Note on being underground, that is living under assumed identities and contacting others only as needed through a fairly elaborate system of codes and safe houses, that seem to mirror the CIA if not in technology, at least in its sophisticated understanding of surveillance and how to avoid detection, which I remember boning up on back in the early eighties reading books like Without A Trace and self-help books on changing identities. Some of the techniques showing up in the movie, such as using the birth certificate of a dead person who would be about your age since birth records and death records are rarely kept by the same agencies or in the same cities given our propensity for movement.

Interesting I could not find a link to the original book Without A Trace. It might be a banned book in the USA. Or the underground publisher may never have copyrighted it back in the seventies.

Weather Underground links

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/movement.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

A relatively good and comprehensive analysis of the movie and the real persons being represented at this link

http://seesdifferent.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/the-company-you-keep/

Jewish American liberal perspective comparing book and movie at this link

http://www.juf.org/news/blog.aspx?id=420482

Downloadable version of movie

http://kat.ph/the-company-you-keep-2012-dvdrip-xvid-ac3-by-zinkslane-t7325560.html

Lately I have been on a weight loss kick. I have a kidney transplant, blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol problems also. I want to keep my weight within the normal BMI, that is Body Mass Index. My optimum weight at least when I was a kid was around 150lb. Recently, that is after my kidney transplant my weight has been around 185-190lb. That is over the recommended normal weight for my height, which is 5′ 11 1/2″ or at least it used to be, I feel like I may have shrunk a little due to the effects of gravity on age, so I am probably more like 5′ 10 1/2″, but whatever it is to get to be within the range of normal weight, I would have to lose weight.

I saw a show on one of the PBS channels about this British guy who is concerned about death and longevity. He did some research and discovered that fasting, i.e. not eating as much, as we do in a normal American diet, is a key. There was a 3 day fast with nothing but Miso soup and black tea, an every other day fast, with one day eating one meal of 400 to 600 calories, and then the next day eating normally and then a third fast twice a week with normal eating five days a week. I chose alternate day fasting which seemed to be a reasonable compromise, my experiences with three day fasts in the past have not been pleasant and I thought the five and two method might be too lax.

After a few weeks, I noticed a real decrease in weight, on the days when I fasted my blood sugar was down and I didn’t need to take insulin or as many of the pills I had been taking. Blood pressure did not seem to be as much affected, and I don’t know about cholesterol, but the article below suggests that cholesterol and blood sugar would be modified in a beneficial manner. They suggested blood pressure would not be affected as much and that is what I experienced. Blood pressure, was better but not as much as I had hoped. I did find that blood pressure was reduced by exercise, walking specifically.

My body weight in the morning now is about 175lb when I get up, and goes up to about 179Lb after two meals in a day, less with one meal, and a half hour walk or more every day. Where as previously it had been at about 185lb upon waking and went up to 190lb. The fast worked rapidly and effectively. One side effect I noticed was that on the non fasting days my blood sugar shot up higher than normal, and I am not sure if that is because of decreased use of medication or because my body had not adapted to the diet. I noticed also an increase in energy levels. At first I became tired sooner at night but after a week or so I adjusted to the pattern.

After three weeks or so I became a bit concerned about the speed of the weight loss and decided to switch to an every third day fast. This did not work as my body could not adjust back to fasting after two days of meals as easily as the ever other day, so I dropped the idea and now I am simply eating less. A good sized breakfast, and a light dinner, with perhaps a snack of a handful of no salt sunflower seeds, or a piece of fruit in between, or if my blood sugar drops too low, which is now a concern, a piece of a protein bar if it drops to the point where I feel woozy.

I am hoping that eating less overall will keep me from gaining weight back. A big part of the solution I think is avoiding prepared and fast foods, which tend to be laced with salt, fats, and sugar, all things to avoid in the diet. I keep salt to a minimum, just what is in the salsa and hot sauce I like, buying Turkey bacon or Soy Bacon and sausages for breakfast which tend to be low fat and low sodium. Eating only one or perhaps two eggs a day, and I am thinking of switching to egg whites, using salsa and other low fat alternatives to butter or jam on toast, eating whole grain bread and keeping that to a minimum or using corn tortillas instead of bread. I use a lot of veges in my meals, keep the grains lower than before, only eat chicken with the fat removed, usually by baking the cuts in tinfoil, then refrigerating and throwing away the fat that accumulates before I heat the meat to eat. I tend to saute a lot, so I use extra virgin Olive oil and tend to keep the heat medium to low so that I don’t overcook, because I tend to like to throw in lots of fresh ingredients, so most of my cooking time is spent pealing and chopping vegetables, then sauteing them or steaming them. I like to prepare potatoes in batches by baking several days worth in the oven wrapped in tin foil, I do the same with chicken, salmon, etc. the trick is to under cook, then put them in the fridge so that you can just grab and throw them in the skillet at the last minute with your sauteed veges. Also use lemon wedges instead of salt and fruit instead of sugar, although I have to admit occasionally I drop some chocolate into my morning coffee.

As a result my BMI is now just within the normal range at about 24%-25% over ideal. I am in the 25th percentile for persons my age, meaning that 75% of men in their 50’s weigh more than me. I don’t know if it is controlled for height as well in that statistic, at least according to the BMI calculator I used.

After I get used to this new weight I plan to fast again to drop down to my goal of 165lb as morning weight, but I don’t want to drop precipitously as that may cause a boomarang effect or have deleterious health effects. The “people’s choice” ideal weight for my age and height seems to be 170lb. which will probably be my top weight after meals if I hit the 165lb for morning weight.

BMI calculator with some nice features, includes sex, age, and tells you where you fall in the percentile of your peers. It has links to ideal weights and is pretty nifty.
http://www.halls.md/body-mass-index/bmi.htm

Alternate Day Fasting versus Calorie Restriction is examined in this article from “The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition”
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/86/1/7.full

The only data I could find on fasting and kidney transplants was for Muslims fasting for Ramadan, which means fast all day and eat at night for a month.

http://www.sjkdt.org/article.asp?issn=1319-2442;year=2010;volume=21;issue=3;spage=417;epage=420;aulast=Khedmat