[My Talking Film]

Jan 10, 2008 - Paul MacLean, 94, Neuroscientist Who Devised ‘Triune Brain’ Theory, Dies

2008-01-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

“[…] the greatest language barrier,” he concluded, “lies between man and his animal brains; the neural machinery does not exist for intercommunication in verbal terms.”

white space, black box,
red room, skin mirror:
welcome to the zoo-dom of
the inner thigh, the rabid
froth of folds

animal brains, yes

but also animal hands,
animal skulls, animal artifice:
that is to say, we sidestep,
centaur-like, around
the question of edges

Evel Knievel, 69, Daredevil on a Motorcycle, Dies

2007-12-06T23:06:00.000-08:00

Mr. Knievel’s showmanship, skill and disdain for death were so admired that he became a folk hero....It seemed he could not think of things big enough to jump over.

My namesake, my lunch box—
You are the smell of rust and spit
On the blunted cardboard lip
Of milk I gave my morning quarter for.

You are the crush of bones
On asphalt pitch,
A Baltimore Colts trash bin,
The silver and blue and stars
Of your uniform, of my bedroom,
The hiss of fuzz on my record player needle
The saline metronome in your vein
Lying in contusion-colored coma
The day I was cut out of my mother.

You are tangled with my first memory:
The Bicentennial blur of tall ships and speed,
The frayed green canvas of my stroller pushed
Along July berths of the Inner Harbor,
Animated beside the Apollo of Fred
Who chased his nymph Daphne
The way you chased death over Caesar's Palace
in Las Vegas.

And, oh, look out! Past the screen door
Those shriveling leaves on
The backyard fig tree.
They are too decayed to shroud your withered shame
Flaccid on a hospital gurney
For the very last time.

Would that that last November day
Become endless—
The open gray parachute of sky
Floating, falling, unable to cover you.

Are you that mechanized speck spilling
Over the edge of the abyss?
Or is that just debris
Drifting on the surface of my eye?

Bill Hartack, 74, Champion Jockey, Dies

2007-12-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

By the mid-’50s, Hartack was widely acknowledged as one of the top riders in the sport. He rode his first Kentucky Derby winner in 1957 aboard Iron Liege, which is perhaps the most infamous Derby in racing history. Iron Liege may have won only because Bill Shoemaker, another major star of his era, aboard Gallant Man, misjudged the finish and eased his horse before the finish line.

He rode his first winner at that age when you’re still waking up
with that sad sliver glint of wanting with nowhere to put it,
an invasion of silverfish that, still wet with dreamsweat,
go consuming the flesh of the white space that runs
between sternum and pelvic bone, leaving that precise kind
of raggedness which belongs to being nineteen and winter.

And then the nightmare goes shimmering under the marrow,
all sterling and steel. Bloody hock, leafed black in wings;
Underbelly on the truckbed;
angular withers, an exquisite hoof;
And the supranatural curvature of outskirts and shorelines,
glittering above it all and in each dreamshadow.
Beneath 3:00 a.m. bernal heights and the swarming
airplanes and the arthritic lumbering ache of concrete:
merely shards.

Until one day, at the age by which most horses die,
we wake up, still nowhere,
sweat and bit.

We shop among competing options

2007-11-28T07:53:00.001-08:00

In short, belief becomes a culture-commodity. We shop among competing options for belief.

The hand trembles, the register rings.
The hand trembles, the register rings, a purchase is made.
The hand trembles, the register rings, a purchase is made,
a faint sigh is heard.
The hand trembles, the register rings, a purchase is made, a sigh is heard,
and a debt deepens.
The hand trembles, the register rings, a purchase is made, a sigh, so faint, is heard, a debt deepens, and a suicide's inevitability grows.
The hand trembles, the register rings, a purchase is made, a sigh is heard, a debt deepens, a suicide looms, and fear disolves desire.
The hand trembles, the register rings, a purchase is made, a sigh is heard, a debt deepens, a suicide looms, desire becomes fear, panic sets in.
The hand trembles, the register rings, a purchase is made, a sigh is heard, a debt deepens, a suicide looms, desire becomes fear, panic sets in, the hand trembles.

Dick Wilson, Squeezer of Tissue Rolls on Television, Dies at 91

2007-11-20T22:14:00.000-08:00

In hundreds of maligned but effective television commercials, running from 1964 to 1985, the punch line was that Mr. Whipple himself secretly squeezed the product, seduced by what was billed as its squeezable softness.

O sea, with languid velvet you beguile
and you dream me into slumber, soft and sure.
But when faced with sudden option, I deplore
Even the choices in the grocery aisle.

Signposts serve to mark each senescent mile,
yet the roads decline into a drunken blur.
And when asked drive on one side or the other,
I’m judged unfit at the moment of the trial.

To true conviction I hopelessly aspire,
But the toothsome bruises in the fleshworn snow
only wake me to mere remnants of the fire.

While seduced by such softness, I also know
too well the limpid flickers of desire,
the embering death-throes of the afterglow.

Carrie Rozelle, 69, Child Advocate, Dies; Started a Center for Learning Disabilities

2007-11-12T14:47:00.000-08:00

'I felt every day was going to be a hurricane,' Mrs. Rozelle told The New York Times in 1984, recalling the days when 8-year-old Jack’s severe dyslexia and sense of failure turned him violent. 'Because he couldn’t read he developed emotional problems,' she said. 'He had difficulties with his brothers. He took toys. He broke them. He would steal. His books were torn up. There were lots of tears, lots of shouting, lots of anger.'
'I feel sorriest for mothers who have to deal with their hyperactive children, then deal with their children’s teachers if the school does not have a support system,' she said. 'Before I knew what I was dealing with, the disorder drove me wild.'

Whereas other children’s nightmare forests
were rustled with tigers,
his were inhabited by plastic letters of
monstrous proportions.

The letters hid beneath the eucalyptus.
They advanced upon him with plasticine efficiency.
Their feet made no sound in the underbrush.
Yet they glowed red in the dark, blindingly luminous.

A lovers’ fight gone wrong,
years later, interrupts plans for a trip to Australia.
He takes an aseptic sea-voyage in his hospital gown,
his one remaining eye trained on a white and longitudinal horizon.

I, too, am feeling more and more sorry;
This ordered symmetry creates a wildness in me.

Barbara Dainton, 96, Among Last From Titanic, Is Dead

2007-11-10T17:15:00.001-08:00

Ms. Dainton, born in southern England, in 1911, was too young to remember the night when the huge liner hit an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic on April 14 and 15.

In April, ice. Chilblain and weather poled
By cornerless, uncured
Ocean’s suzerain on ships, but neither cold
Nor rime; an aperture
Split through the liner’s chamber-hold and hood.
The doubtful portraiture,
Men distanced from it by a wind-docked rood.
We log the cold, the cure.
And far from England’s proper making-good,
And New York’s pot of gold
Spilt to its alleys and ghost-white mirrors,

A child rappelled to safety boats would whimper,
Writhe, believe the warning stories she was told
And be survived by one’s own childhood.

Nov. 10, 2007- Rev. Chad Varah, Anglican Priest Who Helped the Suicidal, Dies at 95

2007-11-10T16:31:00.000-08:00

Father Varah’s vision began in 1935, when, as a 23-year-old deacon, he brooded bitterly after the first burial service he conducted for a girl, who, by varying accounts, was 13 or 14. She had killed herself because she wrongly feared that the onset of menstruation meant she had a venereal disease.

As he moved from parish to parish, Father Varah found that many people he helped with sexual problems, his emerging interest, were suicidal. He began to dream of an emergency telephone line where those in despair might ‘get some love from a stranger.’

Misshaped synapses on twinning lines,
the hollowed spore a channel of
rusted wires, delinquent signs,
the consonants of mumbled love

We chart each ebb, divine disease
in floating platelets, misread blood
we read the future in the sodden leaves,
in the singular petal of the copper bud

Shadowed eyes in canine masks,
the stormswept path of the atomic dove,
blown west to east, on a fragile axis
we compose night-murmurs to a distant god

Magnetic repulsion, black and red
we swallow the muddled remnants of
mute desire, things left unsaid,
nightmares coil around the copper rod

Twinning lines that misfire lies,
delinquent signs that offer blood
in languid symbols, wolfen eyes
that lidded hunger disguised as love

November 7, 2007 - Frank Viola, Leader in Sport of Racing Pigeons, Dies at 87

2007-11-08T13:46:00.000-08:00

Mr. Viola was best known for sponsoring what was considered one of the most prestigious races of the year, the Frank Viola Invitational, a 400-mile contest in which the birds are released in Ohio and fly back to New York.

Ohio’s river, grave tobacco brown,
Reflects a sacred flock
That gnaws the orange berry of the rowan,
Defies our auguries.

The natives idle, packed into canoes.
Some ply a shibboleth
To cross, then plead ‘I do not read the news,’
‘I’m not obsessed with death’.

Even as dovecots empty, pigeons rut,
Seek out spirited doves.
One hundred Violas weep from the gut.
Pylons shudder Aves.

Like some, our language needs a single word
For peace and war. Street curb. Deaf bird.

November 8, 2007 -- Fred W. McDarrah, Photographer, Dies at 81

2007-11-08T10:27:00.000-08:00

“…Fred W. McDarrah, a self-described square who as a longtime photographer for The Village Voice documented the unwashed exploits of the Beat generation, and as an enterprising freelance talent agent rented out members of that generation (washed or unwashed) to wide-eyed suburban society gatherings…”

I am a culture slave.
I am fabulously filthy with marketability
And I am shaped by the two-dimensionality of
My demographic.
I dress up like myself on TV
And cock my head back and forth,
Looking serious.

I am a culture slave
And it suits me.
I look good on paper
Washed in the magical fluid
Of developing ideas.

I am a slave of culture.

Thank you very much.
You’re a great audience.

November 8, 2007 - Paul Soloway, 66, World Bridge Champion, Dies

2007-11-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

Only 28 days after a quadruple heart bypass in December 1999, he traveled to Bermuda for the 2000 Bermuda Bowl and won.

4♥Hearts

Counting the points in my hand
I thought of you.
Your face, the face of a queen
Or a figure from an Arthurian romance
Or just a club, maybe a spade.

I dreamed:
I was playing Go Fish and
You were there.
I asked if you had any...
You said here is the last of my hearts

And with your full dance cards
Your remaining calling cards
Report cards and credit cards
I built a house that stood
Until you shut the door.

November 7, 2007 - Frank Viola, Leader in Sport of Racing Pigeons, Dies at 87

2007-11-07T16:35:00.000-08:00

Then, it was impossible to walk down the street in certain New York neighborhoods (among them Bensonhurst and Bath Beach) without one’s eyes being drawn upward by wheeling flocks of birds, which exploded into the air like fistfuls of thrown confetti. These were no ordinary street birds, but racers — homing pigeons whose care, feeding and lively under-the-table handicapping were the consuming pastime of a generation of New York men.

Bath Beach Birds

If there’s an afterlife for pigeon sport,
it must be the in the hands of old men
feeding bird seed to rock doves in the boroughs.

In these games birdflesh is a premium,
homecoming is sport, and one
by one
the pigeon racers
from the old country
die out, while the homing pigeons
head for the hills.

November 7, 2007 - George Osmond, 90, Singers’ Patriarch, Dies

2007-11-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

George Osmond served missions for the Mormon Church in Hawaii and Britain. In his professional life, he worked in real estate, insurance sales and was once the postmaster for Ogden, Utah. He gave up his work to manage the singing careers of his children.

Rock of Ages

When Joseph Smith looked into his hat
Where the Golden Stones lay
He never could have envisioned a sight
More stunning than a band of children
Their voices resounding from a glowing box
Brighter than the one that he found
On that Sinai of upstate New York.

And like a photographic negative
Of the Brothers Jackson
Standing on the gilded tips
Of their marble temple
By the Golden Spike that brought
The people of the new Zion together,
They sang a new song unto the lord:

A hymn: a little bit country
A little bit rock of my soul.

November 5, 2007 - Khun Sa, Golden Triangle Drug King, Dies at 73

2007-11-07T10:36:00.000-08:00

The cause was not known, but he was thought to have suffered from high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes.

Thought you'd go out like Tony
Your face planted in a pile of blow
What? No police raid? No guns blazing?

King indeed
Those ashes of yours,
Elvis would have snorted them for breakfast

November 5, 2007 - Khun Sa, Golden Triangle Drug King, Dies at 73

2007-11-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

Khun Sa, the publicity-loving Golden Triangle drug lord who thrived in the region’s “kill or be killed” cauldron of ethnic rivalries and heroin-financed private armies, has died at 73 in Yangon, Myanmar, according to an officer in the militia he once led."

From that land of poppies
That Golden Triangle
That cauldron "kill-or-be-killed"
You reigned, self-professed

O king,
Thou kingpin!

But the news of your death
Of supposed heart, blood
And diabetic pressures,
Traveled slowly, nearly a week,
To New York, unlike your booty.

O king,
Thou kingpin!

Born Chang-chi-fu, or Chufu,
Or Shee-fu, none a nom de guerre.
Of Chinese and Shan
You ruled impressively illiterately
So rest, though cremated

O king,
Thou kingpin!

November 6, 2007 - Bradford Kelleher, Creator of Met’s Store, Dies at 87

2007-11-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

...oversaw the creation of countless artful and educational tchotchkes, including the museum’s unofficial mascot, the Egyptian hippopotamus nicknamed William...He was not the sort of person you would look upon as the merchant in the temple.

When Jesus set up his niche
In the alcove by the side of the wailing wall
He hated those men
With their scraggly beards
Stained with tobacco spit
And the blood of crushed lice.

But how they all loved William
His radiant cerulean skin
A kosher tchotchke of a treyfene bain.
And he became their mascot
Until they offered him as a sacrifice
At the Holy of Holies
Hoping his sweetness would please Him.

O You, Master Merchant of the Ungulates,
Now that they have laid You to rest
Washed and anointed Your body
And set You on the sepulcher
In the Egyptian Antiquities room,
We, Your loving followers stand lost
And await
Your rising
Up.

November 6, 2007 - Mary Lillian Ellison, 84, the Fabulous Moolah

2007-11-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

For more than half a century, as a wrestler, promoter and trainer, the Fabulous Moolah was a leading figure on the women’s circuit. She held versions of the women’s wrestling championship for all but short intervals from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s.

Wrestling is a very powerful metaphor.
Didn't Nietzsche wrestle with someone?
I often consider body slamming my inner demons.
Jacob wrestled the angel.

Flying drop kick is when
you jump flat-footed
from the floor up as high
as the person you're looking
at and kick them in the face
or in the chest
wherever you want to kick them
and then you fall to the floor.

The Fabulous Moolah is dead.
Out at 84 with a bum shoulder.
Rest in peace.

November 6, 2007 - Peter Viertel, 86, Author and Screenwriter, Is Dead

2007-11-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

...But he did it with grace, often making himself the butt of the joke, as when he told of taking a pratfall down the steps of Hemingway’s house in front of a party of guests. Many reviewers noted that his abstinence from alcohol provided an unusual perspective in his jet-set crowd...

The thud was loud but went unnoticed.
He brushed the marble off his sleeve
And tried to act composed.
His act, however, had no audience.
There were no cameras.
No make-up or soft focus to blur the bruise developing
On his unusually large forehead.

But
The stars
How
Bright
They
Shine

He was drunk with pain.

22 October, 2007 - Lowell Smith, 56, Dancer in Harlem Troupe

2007-11-05T16:24:00.000-08:00

The year he joined the Harlem Dance Theater
they called him, "sinuously rendered."
He was 22,
bearlike, barrelchested, powerful,
smoked after rehearsals.

Once they said he killed
with musuclar expressiveness,
a glowering facial expression.
Beautiful and fierce in his movements,
he doesn't leave anyone behind.

That is, the ballerinas said
they never felt support like his.
But it's only mother and sisters at the funeral,
ex-students and ex-teachers.
Other unmarried dancers.

And he said,
"There is only one way."
Some secret of ballet.
Said he found the absolute right
in movement, it would seem.

November 5, 2007 - Leslie Orgel, Biochemist Who Studied Origins of Life, Dies at 80

2007-11-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

...The concept, known as directed panspermia, proposes that interstellar microorganisms, like spores and bacteria, may have been sown by a higher intelligence...

Who did it?
Made by tiny tiny things
A space sprout,
Luminous,
Wonders.

Was it that man,
Slovenly dressed
and covered in hair,
greased by accumulating exhaust?

Or her, who is hungry and fat. But maybe a little sad as
She walked by the growing waste?

Does it really take intelligence to
Realize you are dirty?

November 4, 2007 - Johtje Vos, Who Saved Wartime Jews, Dies at 97

2007-11-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

...with her husband hid three dozen Jews in their home during World War II, shepherding them through a tunnel under the backyard and into the woods...

Life Savings
Ondanks alles geloof ik in de innerlijke goedheid van de mens...

She had tried saving things before.
Until she hit on the idea of the Jews
Her house was filled with figurines,
Blown-glass bottles, not to mention
The brightly painted tiny klompen
From the souvenir stand.

Then she heard about that bitch
Living on the Prinsengracht
With her collection of eight Jews
That she saved collecting dust
Hidden from view in the back house.
So sad, she giggled, so sad.

So she began saving and saving
Until she was forced to throw away
Her decorations for Saint Nicolaas Day,
Music boxes, her son's stamp collection.
But she never could part from those clogs
Which, unlike the Jews, remained with her.

Whenever she was put on the spot
Questioned by her friends and neighbors
Why she kept them, she'd repeat her mantra —
I cling to them because I still believe
In spite of everything, that people
are truly good at heart.

November 3, 2007 - Igor Moiseyev, 101, Choreographer, Dies

2007-11-03T17:06:00.000-07:00

A creatively passionate man, Mr. Moiseyev said in a 1965 interview: “Everything I’ve done, I love. If you’re not in love, you can’t create. And if you’re calm when you’ve created something, you can rest assured that you’ve created nothing.”

In the last moments of his years,
Igor Aleksandrovich sank into the calm.
And he looked down on his palsy-stricken
Year and a century-wrinkled palm.

Nothing left to do but die,
Thought Igor Aleksandrovich
As his rattling brain tried
to tell his arm to outstretch.

He lifted himself one last time
for his glasses laying by the clock
Strained to note the blurred hour
His grip failed and he fell back.

November 2, 1955 - Dale Carnegie, Author, Is Dead

2007-11-02T22:31:00.000-07:00

Dale Carnegie, whose book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was one of the world's most phenomenal bestsellers, died yesterday at his home, 27 Wendover Road, Forest Hills, Queens... Mr. Carnegie was born in poverty on a Missouri farm, but found that a silver tongue could be more useful than a silver spoon in winning wealth and fame.

Andrew Carnegie had stainless steel spoons
Two pink albino eyes stared back
When he sipped his consommé.
And mute eyelashes blinked away
Gazing above his party guests
At the Pittsburgh moon.

Don't let's go too deep into
This Dale who shot forth from his father
Seeding the dell there in Missurrah
Leaving him alone with his pitch fork
With no one but Mother, the cat
And some lonelier cheese.

I was born in mediocrity
In Silver Spring – Closer to Pittsburgh,
Far away from Missouri's farms.
And in my mouth my tongue feels forked
Like a snake's who slinks into his nest wondering
How to win friends and influence vipers.