No More Light Outside of Recollection

Have you ever looked way back in your life and wondered where everyone went and why? Listen to this song. Don't download it, buy it. It's by Nanci Griffith.

http://home.comcast.net/~steventrish/Nanci GriffithThere'sALightBeyondTheseWoods.mp3

Hard to recover anything.


click on the song, then the image

Funnies Day

It seems that graphic artists of the 19th century could produce material as sick as anything that oozed from the pens of R Crumb (e.g. Nuts Boy) or S. Clay Wilson (e.g. Captain Pissgums and His Pevert Pirates). As exhibit A, we shall consider the work of Wilhelm Busch. Wikipaedia tells us his dates were 1832-1908. He was a German painter and poet who is known for his satirical picture stories. After studying first mechanical engineering and later art, he turned to drawing. If he had lived another 20 years, All Quiet on the Western Front may have been a graphic novel. Consider "The Virtuoso" of the 1860s (click image for full size)

Sick.

Light from a Distant Shore

This post refers back to my April 9 post. I have been in love with lighthouses since being read The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by H. H. Swift, as is common for many people of my generation. (This book contains most of the knowledge required to get through life without becoming bitter and isolated.) I have been to the top of every lighthouse on the Outer Banks, NC as well as the lighthouses at Barnegat and Cape May, NJ. I can no longer climb, but have visited nearly every lighthouse from Maine to Key West. Lighthouses represent to me a human endeavor that I consider quasi-sacred. People come together to plan and create something real, of "bricks and mortar", that says with an unequivocal beam of light, "Stay away from here, it's dangerous!", or "Almost there!", or "Good evening!", or "Right on course!", or "This way home!" So often, in real life, we have to create our own lighthouses to keep from becoming despondent while attempting to navigate a featureless ocean of time and distance. Frost's words "...and miles to go before I sleep" never provided any comfort for me, but at least I can see the shore. To the north.

Hiatus

Let's try to get up and running again. Posts start tomorrow.

Thinnngssszzz...

I think that the human species is hard-wired to produce things. Not just for economic gain, or pleasure, or necessity, or from boredom alleviation, but by a perverse uncontrollable urge to throw stuff together regardless of its desirability, morality, or even comprehensibility. All things designed as weapons are of questionable utility, as well as plastic artificial vomit, jumping toys shaped like genitals, wristwatches, national flags, anti-immigration fences, and the following monstrosity: (click image for full size)

apparently an anti-masturbation device.

I have often wondered what I would display at my exhibit table if I were to be invited to the Intergalactic STUFFCON, and had to buck the common knowledge of "no intelligent life down there".

Here are four things of which the human race can be proud:

THE FRETLESS BANJO



THE MODERN 16 SPEED BICYCLE




BRIDGES AND LIGHTHOUSES



More on this tomorrow.

Funnies Day

For today's funnies, we will go right back to the Genesis of the underground comix movement. Namely, we will present some Mr. Block cartoons distributed by the Industrial Workers of the World between 1912 and 1914.

As the Wikipaedia tells us: Mr. Block, who has no first name, was born 7 November 1912 to Ernest Riebe, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Block appeared that day in the Spokane newspaper Industrial Worker, smoking a cigar and wearing a checkered suit with top hat. Subsequently, Mr. Block lost the fancy clothes but always kept a hat, ten sizes too small, perched on one corner of his wooden blockhead. "Mr. Block is legion," wrote Walker C. Smith in 1913. "He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw .. [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him .. the personification of all that a worker should not be."

Unfortunately, these cartoons are still very topical almost 100 years later! Perhaps even more than they were in their native environment of lumberjacks and miners in Spokane, Washington. These radicalized, class-conscious workers wanted to destroy the capitalist system ("wage slavery") and replace it with a type of community-based anarchy that has nothing to do with anarchism as we know it today. They wanted to form one big industrial union, as opposed to craft-based unionism, and use the general strike as a weapon to bring society to its knees. Admirable sentiment! (click for full size image)

Flower Day

Sorry...I was in the hospital all week. Second picture could be a flower...