Final Thoughts

I fell asleep during the second hour of last night's GOP debate. And it was a long day at work on Thursday. But I did want to post some final thoughts.

In the contest for who can be the biggest douchebag, I have to agree with my brother. Romney wins by a country mile. The greatest douchebag moment was when a black man listed a series of issues where most African Americans agree with conservative positions. Then he asked, "Why don't we vote for you?" Which is a really good question.

In response, Romney said the most important thing is to get back to "family values," which means every family should have a mother and a father. That's the way to address a lot of these concerns.

Amazing, isn't it, how Romney can manage to be completely condescending and racist without actully answering the question. Which manages to answer the brother perfectly. I mean, when you think about it, the only surprising thing is that the man asking the question wasn't currently in prison. Surely he has some sort of record. Not the kind 50 Cent puts out.

The second biggest douchebag moment, of course, was in a response to a question about how the rest of the world views America due to its attitudes towards Islam and Muslims. The question was asked by a young Muslim American woman wearing a head scarf who said she had spent time studying in the Middle East. While others took pains to point out that there are Muslims who are not terrorists, for Giuliani the most important point is that "we have to stay on offense." Apparently the War on Terror is like a college football game. Giuliani did not specify where this "offense" would take us -- do we need to invade some other country full of brown people to show we still got game? Hmm, maybe it starts with an I?

Finally, I have to say, I was bloody well impressed with Huckabee. He's just as smooth as a previous man who found a path from Hope to the White House. He impressed by not pandering to the audience (as all of them, even McCain and Ron Paul, did multiple times). He was cool and clever, using his wit to get out of some tricky questions. When asked about the death penalty -- "what would Jesus do?" -- he quipped that Jesus chose not to run for public office, which made nicely the point about rendering unto Caesar where others might have faltered.

And he was eloquent and compelling rationalizing how one can be "pro-life" on abortion and yet sign off on death warrants as governor. I didn't buy it, but he put on a good sell. And, most impressively, he was the only one not to cater at all to the anti-immigrant sentiment that was so strong in the audience. He actually gave a convincing and deeply felt (as far as it seemed) argument for why we should not punish the children of illegal immigrants who have been raised and educated in the U.S. for the sins of their parents. This was in defense of his support for a proposed Arkansas law that would have let children of illegal immigrants pay in-state tuition at state universities, and even be eligible for in-state scholarships.

To be clear: I think they're all atrocious on the substance. Huckabee included. But he is the only one who brings sufficient sugar along with the medicine. If he does well in Iowa, things could get very interesting. The problem for the GOP this time around is they're pitching immigrant-hate, abortion-hate, gun control-hate, Muslim-hate, gay-hate. Not a word about the looming crises with the environment, oil, the economy. . . . Theirs is entirely the wrong medicine. And even Huckabee won't be enough to help it go down.

Douchebag vs. Douchebag

Just to be clear: I don't belong to either political party. I've been voting only for Democrats though for state and federal office for the last several years, because the Republicans (in Ohio and nationally) have been so thoroughly corrupt, and have had such thorough contempt for the people and, most offensively, our Constitution.

I don't have much love for the Democrats, though. Where the Republicans hate our Constitution and destroy our values, the Democrats are all too content to stand around and do nothing. The Republicans are like the guys that get off on gay bashing some poor innocent soul in an alley. The Democrats are like the friends of the bashers who don't participate, but also don't do anything to stop it. Profiles in courage are few and far between.

That said -- I am watching the CNN/YouTube Republican presidential debate live on CNN international -- and it is a hoot! The first five minutes features Romney and Giuliani ripping into each other about who has been more lenient on illegal immigrants. Romney described NYC under Il Duce as a "sanctuary city," Giuliani then pointed out that Romney's state had "six sanctuary cities" AND Romney's own house was a "sanctuary mansion" because he had illegal Mexicans doing his yard work.

Romney responded with (the actually not that bad point) the question of whether you should be asking people to see their papers when you hire a company to fix your roof or mow your lawn and you hear "funny accents" -- however the debate is taking place in Florida, and clearly the audience thinks the answer is a resounding YES.

It's utterly brilliant. Douchebag vs. douchebag. The irony of course is that the red-meat base hates the Mexicans and wants all manner of fences built, and children deported. Gonna go a long way to electing our next Democratic president. And the GOP can begin its long sojourn in the wilderness.

But, in the meantime, I'm going to deserve some well-earned douchebaggery.

View of My Garden

Nearly done with the snaps for now . . . just a final bit to make you especially jealous. Here is the view of our garden.



And in the back, hidden partly by the tree, is our summer house.



I am really looking forward to summer!

More Views

This is the view from the skylight on the landing between the floors of our flat. It's a maisonette which means it's a flat over multiple levels. I live on the 2nd floor, where the kitchen and bath are, and my flatmates live on the 3rd floor. The landing in between has the washer and dryer. And this skylight from which I'm fairly certain you can see the O2 dome. Or is that something else?



This shot was taken by opening the kitchen window and leaning out a ways. Gives you an idea of how close the rail station is. It's down below though, so you don't really hear it. And, yes, that building says Jewson.

View from My Kitchen

Yes, that is the London Eye, seen straight on from the side. Each night I like to go and see what color it is. Tonight it's white. The other night it was blue. I like it best when it's blue.

View from My Window

Here is the newsagent's across the road.



And here is the view looking up and out. Hard to catch it here, but you can basically see all the way up to the north edge of London.

Yankee Doodle #2: Open Containers

Time (past time) for another of my observations on life in the UK.

If you come here from the U.S., sooner or later (likely sooner) you will be riding on the Tube or walking along the street, and notice to your surprise that a man next to you or sitting opposite you will suddenly be chugging down a gigantic can of lager (aka beer). Often he will be carrying a carrier bag (aka plastic grocery bag) full of similarly large yet unopened giant cans of beer. But there he is, sipping away on his open can without seeming to give a shit that anyone can see it's not Coke going down his gob (aka throat).

So here's the kicker: they don't have open container laws in the UK. You can walk down the street, ride on the train, and booze it up to your heart's content. There do seem to be laws about taking open containers in cars (what with concerns about 'drink-driving'). But if you're a pedestrian, you can imbibe to your liver's content, without an ounce of shame.

This seems very odd to most Americans, until you live here for a while and get used to it. Once you do, then you get to see how brilliant it is. It's always cheaper to buy beer at the newsagent's across from my flat, and I can get through one of those big cans on the way into town. So I'm already riding a good buzz before I get to the bar! And it is nice to have a respite from the Puritanism back in the homeland.

Now there is a separate matter of the culture of public intoxication here in England -- but that is another topic for another day. Bottoms up!

Take Two and Don't Call Me

So I'm not dead.

I got really sick last week. Fever, headache, cough, congestion, etc. I'd had one of those awful English colds you can never get rid of for a couple of weeks. And it seemed to turn into full-blown flu.

I went to see my GP, always a treat. Sure, it's "free" thanks to the $400 deducted from my pay cheque every month. My GP is actually good about letting you get a same day appointment. Normally that means you come at the appointed time, see one of the on-call docs, and then they send you on your way.

However, this time, I had an "extra" slot which meant I didn't have a set appointment. I had to wait an hour, and then I only got a few minutes with the doc. She did manage to look in my mouth, and told me that the back of my throat was very red. "You seem to have an infection in your throat," she said.

Hmm, I wonder what might have caused that?

"Do you want to do a swab?" I said.

"Oh, no," she said. "Just take some paracetamol (which is basically Tylenol) and gargle with warm salt water."

"Do you want to give me drugs?" I said. I was hoping for a Z-pack. Z-packs are brilliant. By the second day, you are ready to invade Czechoslovakia.

"Oh, no," she said. "Just paracetamol every four hours. Gargle. That's all you need."

What I needed were drugs. Strong drugs. Instead I've been living in the 19th century here. My throat doesn't really hurt, but still not back to normal. And my chesty cough has moved up into my head.

I spent five days more or less locked in my flat. Which is a sweet place to be. But I was crawling the walls by day three. Started writing a new play on day four (that's been boiling up for a while). Back to work on Monday. And this has been a long week.

A few things will pop up though, so stay tuned . . .

That Van Gogh

So I took another shot at writing the poem about the Van Gogh mentioned earlier.

Guess I've been inspired this week. So far, I've written poems at lunch two out of three days.

This was my third shot at this poem, in a completely different version from the earlier attempts (which each went through a few drafts before being discarded).

I'm not too embarrassed to show it round, so see what you think. The other one (from Monday) will have to wait till I've hacked away at it some more.

Amandelbloesem

Imagine the fullness he must
have felt on hearing the news:
Theo’s son, newborn, another
Vincent! A nephew close enough
to be his own. Imagine, too,
the sadness in the hope, hearing
an end to his own struggles
approaching on distant tracks.

So he made a sky whose turquoise
washes over winter whites. Still,
you can see the patches blurred
through with cold, like clouds of salt
in a Japanese pond. The branches
confuse, reaching up and yet also
across, down from the top; give yourself
a moment to see you’re looking
up from below. And the blossoms!
Tiny petals cluster here and there,
drawing your eye, white with delight.
Some branches bloom full, and early;
others, the highest, bear only buds,
held tight, yet to open themselves
and be revealed. There’s so much
to see, so much you could overlook
so easily against a winter sky,
a bright, cold morning. Some things
go by unnoticed. Some things, once seen,
change perspective. Sometimes you find
you don’t want to stop looking up.

Long Way Round

Tonight there was some bad news: both the Piccadilly line and the Victoria line had severe delays. These are my two quick routes from town up to Finsbury Park, from which it's just minutes by train to my new place.

Why do people have to put themselves under trains at rush hour? How rude!

The quickest route I could sort had me taking the Northern line (Charing Cross branch) from Leicester Square up to Euston, where I could change to the Northern line (Bank branch), heading south (i.e., the wrong direction) down to Old Street. My train starts at Moorgate and goes through Old Street and Highbury & Islington before Finsbury Park, so I just had to pick it up early.

All in all, it took me 36 minutes to get home. Normally it takes around 20.

Once I got into the flat and unpacked my groceries, I remembered my old commute. When I lived in Walthamstow, the Tube ride home by itself took 30 minutes. Plus the 12 minute walk. And if there were delays -- and I had to go through Liverpool Street -- it could take 45 minutes or longer.

So I really have nothing to complain about.

"A Certain Souvenir"

Back from a friend's -- he has a new house, and I was delighted to see a massive Van Gogh print on the wall. I thought I'd seen it at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam earlier this year, but looking at their website now, I don't see it on there. I'll have to look it up elsewhere. Based on the colors and the composition, I'm fairly sure it's from his time at the asylum in Saint-Remy, or else the late period in Auvers. (I tend to think the latter -- it reminds me very much of Landscape with Twilight and Wheatfield with Crows.)

Anyway, my friend told me of seeing some Van Goghs at a museum in Zurich (where he must have seen this one, come to think of it). He talked about it being such an emotional experience, that he found it quite overwhelming. The prints don't really capture it -- you have to see them up close. The canvases are so big, the colors so vivid, and the brushstrokes so thick they have a texture all their own. You can't get all those dimensions from a print.

I totally understood what my friend was saying, as I was surprisingly and profoundly moved by a number of the paintings at the Van Gogh Museum. It's a bit hard to explain this if you've never experienced yourself -- I've had similar experiences with certain pieces of music, certain films, and especially in poetry and in the theater -- where a moment is so aesthetically together and revelatory of some deep truth of human experience, and that truth -- and the beauty of it, represented in art -- overwhelms you. It's not about melodrama -- melodrama indeed runs counter to it, dealing mainly in surfaces -- but when these moments come, rare as they can be, they are really something. I usually have to catch my breath, and then I might tear up a bit.

I had the most powerful of such moments with a painting I'd never heard of: Amandelbloesem (Almond Blossom), painted in February 1890 at the asylum in Saint-Remy. Van Gogh had just heard that his brother Theo's son had been born, and named Vincent. On hearing the news, Van Gogh started the painting, which features branches of small white almond blossoms against a blue sky.

Describing it as such hardly does it justice, because the canvas is so tall and wide, and the sky has such a richly varied texture, in places barely blue-white, in others a deep turquoise. The branches stretch up and across in such an odd fashion you realize at last that you are looking up at them from underneath. And the branches are at once barren -- indeed, most of the branch space is bare -- but abundant, as the budding blossoms begin to take shape. The work is so large, and so hopeful, and yet so grounded in its perspective and its time -- the winter of the year. And you get where Van Gogh is coming from, as the joy and hope of his nephew's birth is undergirded by the sadness of knowing he won't have a son of his own, and indeed of understanding he wouldn't be able to sustain his own struggles long enough to get to know his namesake.

You can see the painting here. They even let you zoom in!

I've tried writing a poem about what seeing that painting was like twice, but nothing seems adequate to the experience. So I thought I'd try it in straight prose.

What makes it all the more remarkable is this bit from the wall of the museum. The museum is brilliantly laid out, as it takes you through Van Gogh's life chronologically. Where you start the tour, there's a bit about his early life. And this:

At the age of twenty-six, unemployed and at a complete loss, he decided to become an artist, following the advice of his younger brother Theo, who had also gone to work for Goupil. His earlier need to serve people, arising from his religious calling, now became -- as he himself wrote -- a strong desire to leave "a certain souvenir" to humankind "in the form of drawings or paintings, not made to comply with this or that school but to express genuine human feeling."

Which he did. And more than the stuff I bought at the museum shop -- 'cause you know I stocked up there -- those moments in front of Amandelbloesem are what I took with me.

Where Can I Put That J?

So I have a new addiction: playing Scrabulous.

If you're on Facebook, you know what I mean. If not, you should get on Facebook as everyone's on it these days. And add the app. Basically, it's Scrabble but in a "fabulous" web-based app (and thus named to avoid copyright infringement issues).

I have been a fierce player, thanks to my immense vocabulary and strategic board analysis. I try to play a bonus square on every turn. And I love forming multiple words.

Also, turns out if you play all your tiles on a single turn, you get a 50-point bonus. Brilliant!

So far, I am 9-1. Nick is the only one to beat me so far. And he's about to do it again, dammit.

If you want a fun variation: play the 4-letter game. All you do is agree with your fellow player(s) to limit yourself to 4-letter words. Only exception is that you may add tiles to an existing tile or word to create words up to 5 letters long. Lasts longer, and creates interesting shapes on the board!

My record score so far is 468. I played all my tiles three different times in that game. We'll see if I can break 500!

The Week That Was

I worked six days straight this week - Sunday to Friday. Man, I have to try not to do that again.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day, as was today. I have been feeling wiped out though. Part of that is having had a little too much fun on Friday night. But even so.

We had loads of sun yesterday and today -- it wasn't too hot though. I managed to take some pics, will take some more this week as we'll have nice sunny days.

Yesterday I took a bus ride over through Crouch End and up to Archway. Wow, the area I live is really nice. I thought it was, but boy oh boy. Stuart, you will have to come over sometime and we'll go for a walk. It gets even better than we thought.

Tomorrow is Guy Fawkes' night, and the fireworks have been going the last couple nights. Just started again now (as it's pitch black out). Amazing last night, as I could walk around the flat and look out windows on both sides (north and south views) seeing the fireworks all across London.

Coolest view by far was seeing them over the South Bank, near the Eye. We'll see how tonight holds up.

Whose Agenda?

I'm watching Tim Russert question Fred Thompson on today's ep of Meet the Press right now. They are 40 minutes in and have spent half the time talking about gun control, abortion, and now gay marriage.

Fred Thompson seems to think that more people on college campuses should be able to carry handguns (because of Va Tech). He's very federalist on abortion and gay marriage -- "states should be allowed to decide" etc.

They did talk about the situation in Pakistan and Iraq for the first half, to be fair. And obviously the talking points on guns, gays, and abortion are to burnish Thompson's "conservative" bona fides.

Even so: Are these the most pressing issues facing the U.S.? And, really, what is "conservative" about wanting to amend the U.S. constitution to undo a Supreme Court decision (about abortion) and to stop states from recognizing legal marriages from other states (because the spouses are of the same gender)?

Not a word yet about the damage done to our Constitution (by torture and the Bush-Cheney protectorate regime), to our economy (by outrageous federal spending and the ever-weakening dollar) and to our military (by endless wars and, again, the infamy of torture) in the past seven years. Or any mention of what to do about oil or the environment.

But then this is a Republican candidate, running in a Republican primary. Let's hope whoever wins the nomination runs on the same issues in the general. And watch how many states turn blue.