[lbo-talk] Re: Riverbend

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sat May 8 02:44:26 PDT 2004


``...It's all over but the looting.''

You forgot the heroin. Ian

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I watched the news tonight. Fascinating. The American people are shocked and can hardly assimilate it all... The President regrets... Senator Duh said... while the crisis continues...

Let's see. Where were we last week or so? Condi Rice testified...then P and VP met the 9/11 committee behind closed doors---we were told with unprecedented candor. And the week before? Forthright something I think. US Marines were raking Falluja with heavy automatic weapons. And the week before that? Iraq something riots, I forgot. And all the time those dead just keep rolling into Dover.

It all has that blusey afterglow of regret like a slow jazz refrain blocked in minor fifths descending in silken cascades of dark and bitter sweetness.

I confess I am enjoying this.

I know it may not end badly enough for my taste, but I am savoring it anyway. It's like a pantomime montage: officials stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down, blah, blah, blah---walking jerky back and forth---more up down, up down, blah, blah, blah, before smeared digital memories of Abu Ghraib.

The mp3 track runs Jim Hall, Concierto de Aranjuez on loopback, while the faux black and white film flickers Chaplinesque in the darkness. The relaxed and absent gaze of the mind catches brief glimpses of the futile, desperate, and the dammed. Their frenzied figures are frozen in time, stills on celluloid that bubble, turn brown and then suddenly peel open like used condoms, one after another.

How dark does it need to get? Darker, darker still.

Yes. I am celebrating the feeling that almost startles when happiness falls. It's like watching India ink poured slowly into a crystal glass of water: heavy fluid coils opening into graceful serpentine arabesques.

It's magic.

CG



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