A guy just walked by me and loudly belched LOL I can’t make this up.
People come to the library not to read it seems but to cough and noisily drag chairs around.
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We sit outside and argue all night long
About a god we've never seen
But never fails to side with me
Sunday comes and all the papers say
Ma Teresa's joined the mob
And happy with her full time job
Am I alive or thoughts that drift away?
Does summer come for everyone?
Can humans do as prophets say?
And if I die before I learn to speak
Can money pay for all the days I lived awake
But half asleep?
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BORDERLANDS
by Gloria Anzaldua
To live in the borderlands means you
are neither hispana india negra espanola
ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from;
To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
the mexicanas call you rajetas, that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;
Cuando vives en la frontera
people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,
you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,
forerunner of a new race,
half and half-both woman and man, neither-a new gender;
To live in the Borderlands means to
put chile in the borscht,
eat whole wheat tortillas,
speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;
be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;
Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to
resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,
the pull of the gun barrel,
the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;
In the Borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other;
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have scattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back;
To live in the Borderlands means
the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off
your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart
pound you pinch you roll you out
smelling like white bread but dead;
To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads.
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Prayer
by Itzik Manger
I will take off my shoes and my sorrow
and will return to you in my plight
now that I know I’m a loser –
I will stand before you in your sight.
My God, my Lord and Creator
purify me in your light
Here I lie on a cloud before you
Rock me and lull me to sleep.
And speak to me words of kindness
and tell me that I am your child
and kiss away from my forehead
all the signs of my sins.
I have faithfully carried the message
of your sacred songs throughout time
so is it my fault that in Yiddish
Song and Jew happen to rhyme?
And is it a fault I must own
that beauty rhymes with tears
and that longing with sorrowful wings
and wanders alone with her pain.
So is it my fault you’ve allowed me
to be downhearted and tired so long
and to come before you to lay at your feet
this very dispirited song?
My God, my Lord and Creator
purify me in your light
Here I lie on a cloud before you
Rock me and lull me to sleep.
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Richard Serra — East-West/West-East (monumental steel plates, Qatari desert, 2014)
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There is a book called The Keep by F. Paul Wilson. Was that your starting point?
No. The starting point really preceded the book. I'd just done a street movie, Thief. A very stylized street movie but nevertheless stylized realism. You can make it wet, you can make it dry, but you're still on "street." And I had a need, a big desire, to do something almost similar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, where I could deal with something that was non-realistic and create the reality. There is an effect in the film whereby Molasar accrues to himself particles of matter from living organisms. Now what is the logic of that? What does it look like? How does it happen? What's the sound of it? I mean, that's a real turn-on, to fantasize what these things are going to be like. So you're way out there. And you have to be consistent. You're not rendering objective reality, you're making up reality.
But in this fairy tale we find the Nazi Wehrmacht – men dressed in totemic black uniforms with swastikas – things we can recognize and which set up a response.
Actually only about one-fifth of the film is involved with the Wehrmacht and the character of the Captain played by Jurgen Prochnow. The film revolves around a character called Glaeken Trismegistus, who wakes up after a deep sleep in a transient, merchant-marine setting some place in Greece in 1941. The movie revolves around him and his conflict, which seems to be fated, with a character called Roderick Molasar. The end of the conflict seems to fate him toward destruction. He may destroy Molasar or Molasar may destroy him, but in either case Glaeken Trismegistus must go to the keep.
And in the course of coming to the keep to confront Molasar, he has a romance with Eva, whose father is a Mediaeval historian named Dr. Cuza, very quick, very smart. At a moment in history when he is powerless – a Socialist Jew in Fascist Romania – Cuza is offered the potential to ally himself with immense power. For him it's a deliverance. And as a bonus he also gets rejuvenated. So he's seduced into attaching himself to this power in the keep.
And Molasar comes to life by taking the power, the souls, of the Wehrmacht Nazis.
What happens is that after the second time you've seen him, Molasar changes. And he seems to change after people are killed. After he kills things. It's almost as if he accrues to himself their matter. Not their souls; he doesn't suck their blood. It's a thing unexplained, his transformation is seen visually. He evolves through three different stages in the movie. He gets more and more complete. He starts as a cloud of imploding particles, then he evolves a nervous system, then he evolves a skeleton and musculature, and at the third state he's complete. And then it's a bit ironic when he's complete, because there's a great resemblance to Glaeken Trismegistus.
Is he evil personified?
No. Well, yes he is. Yes, Evil Personified. But what is evil?
Try Satan? Or Lucifer?
Yes, but think about that. Satan in Paradise Lost is the most exciting character in the book. He's rebellious, he's independent, he doesn't like authority. If you think about it, Satan could almost be played by John Wayne. I mean the Reaganire, independent, individualist spirit. It's all bullshit, but that's the cultural myth that the appeal taps into.
Is Glaeken Trismegistus the alter ego of Molasar? Is he the good side?
No, he's not. I tried to find a more surreal logic to the characters; so that there's nothing Satanic about Molasar. He's just sheer power, and the appeal of power, and the worship of power, a belief in power, a seduction of power. And Molasar is very, very deceptive. When we first meet him, we too believe that he is absolute salvation. And it's all a con. Now when Glaeken shows up, the first thing he does is seduce Eva Cuza. So my intent in designing those characters was to make then not black-and-white. I put in things that are not normally considered to be good into Glaeken and qualities that are not evil into Molasar.
Why did you choose these names? You wrote the script.
The script was taken from a book, which we've talked about; but I did give Glaeken his last name, which he didn't have in the book. And I couldn't find a better name than Trismegistus.
There's something about Trismegistus that rings a bell.
It's the Greek for "harvest."
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I could recognize her by discourse alone, by typing style; I would know her blind, by the way her bad takes came and her fingers struck the keyboard. I would know her under any username. i would know her irl, at the end of the world
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This scene is so much fun for me. It’s like if one of the standoffs in Miami Vice 2006 was just that scene in Annie Hall where Alvy meets Annie’s parents. Only this time Alvy’s a hunky blond dude and Annie’s family members are all these forbidding Hasidim. Reminds me of when I brought Adam along for his first seder and my dad was practically blue-screening over his ability to recite the haMotzi verbatim. Boomer New Haven Jew encounters Westchester Goyische Millennial.
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This photo and headline really tickled me.
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