alternative visions



Sihstrin as Pinup | Copywright © Beth Bajema & bajema.com



The Angel Balm | Copywright © Beth Bajema & bajema.com
Brings to mind the images of Gustav Klimt:



Hygieia | Gustav Klimt

Future Plans

One of these years, I'm going to this:



...I think I like last year's poster better, though:



And I just think this one's cute:

Life in Mosul

As seen through the eyes of a soldier in the U.S. Army: My War - Fear And Loathing In Iraq.

something's gotta give

~sigh~

The Band thinks everyone must agree -- this site is so much better with visuals. Your Humble Chronicler can't help but wonder -- if I'd've had this funtionality from the start of this blog, would I today be one of the Net Stars?

wonder what carl's up to these days

surely you remember:
pop-tarts

poptarts.bmp

"children should be supervised"

pop-tarts, doritos, cheez-its, they weren't allowed - we were on a budget, and the budget did not call for the likes of pop-tarts, or doritos, or cheez-its. in the breakfast foods aisle, andra looked at the rows of pop-tarts - frosted and unfrosted, chocolate and fruit-flavored - then hesitantly placed a box of generic artificially flavored strawberry toaster pastries in our cart. she glanced back at the shelves. "go ahead, get the pop-tarts," i said. -- from placing, by Carl Steadman

- from suck, 02/06/98:

on a lighter note....



you just gotta love the la perla site.

what you once were / isn't what you wanna be / anymore

an intriguing collection of pix, ranging from battle sketches to the holocaust to x-files to 90210 (??).

the trajectory of life, the incredible lightness of being -- variations on where are they now??

fascinating -- rented the weather underground last night. another review here. you should do the same.

''Like Bonnie and Clyde, many of them were attractive personally. They were into youth, exuberance, sex, drugs. They wanted action.'' - Todd Gitlin, former president of Students for a Democratic Society

here's what some of the sexy lefties are up to now:

• bernadine dohrn is an attorney and activist
  
• brian flanagan owns the night cafe, an upper westside bar
  
• todd gitlin teaches journalism and sociology at columbia
  
• bill ayers is a professor of education at the university of illinois
  
• mark rudd teaches math
  
• naomi jaffe promotes progressive causes
  
• laura whitehorn is free
  
  
• fred hampton was assassinated

fascinating stuff.

''Sometimes when you try to oppose something, instead of becoming the opposite, you become the other side of the coin." - David Gilbert, political prisoner.

Making Art History on the Edge of Culture

Pulled an all-nighter Friday night. Started things out by catching the opening of Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, then stayed up reading On Top of the World. Jumped in the car at three a.m., picked up a Red Bull for me and a diet Coke for The Muse, and headed in to Cleveland to the East 9th Street pier for a pre-dawn gathering. Spencer Tunick was in town.

We gathered. Men and women. The black and the white. The short and the tall. The thick and the thin. The bearded and the clean-shaven. Blonde and brunette, long hair and short hair, curly hair and straight hair, pony-tailed and bald. Old and young. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, cousins and co-workers. Tatted and pristine. Pierced and not. Couples and groups and all alones. All shapes, sizes and colors.

And, shortly after dawn, with the wind coming in off the lake and the temperature a cool 57 degrees, 2,758 brave souls stripped bare in the name of art. Here's a nice shot of our sea of bodies, covering the pier and pouring up onto East 9th street in the heart of downtown Cleveland:


"Lie down and look serious."
Media coverage:

TV: CBS | NBC | ABC | Fox (lame)

Cleveland Plain Dealer: Slideshow | Tunick Interview | Journalist's Account

Akron Beacon Journal: 1 | 2 | 3

The host: MOCA Cleveland.

We'd do it again in a heartbeat.

happy bicycle day!

More brainfood (Mo' Fodduh fo' da Greymattuh)

Shizzle fo' da brizzle, if you wizzle. Listening to:

• Lee Morgan -- The Cooker. Cool-hot import i was turned on to by good old public radio. Pricey as hell through the usual channels, but found an indie vendor and got it for a normal price. As I said -- cool. Hot. Interesting -- knew he was kind of a wildman, as many jazzers were, but had no idea until just now that he was shot!
  
• Tupac Shakur -- Greatest Hits. Ok, what's a 42-year-old white guy doing blasting 2Pac out his dayum car windowZ? Jes' representin' fo' sho' yo'. Ain't got nuthin' but luV 4 yA.
  
• Eroica Trio -- Beethoven Triple Concerto Op. 56 and Piano Trio Op. 11 (w/ Prague Chamber Orchestra. Classical's version of babes with guitars. Could easily cross over if they changed their name to the "Erotica Trio." (gurlz with instruments are hot, and a lady with a cello just does it for me) Subtle, emotional, yet still rocking.
  
• The Cambridge Singers -- The Cambridge Singers Collection. Lotsa good stuff -- "sacred and secular, historic and contemporary, a capella and accompanied" say the notes. A little Debussy, some Verdi, a bunch of folk songs, a Gregorian chant -- I grabbed it for their treatment of Bruckner's Ave Maria.

That's it for now. What are U listening 2? There's a sadly underutilized message board over there on the left, ya know.

R.I.P.



Humphrey Osmond, who coined the word psychedelic in 1956 in correspondence with his friend Aldous Huxley.

The two men were looking for a word to describe this new class of drugs, and they were doing so in rhyme. Huxley wrote:

To make this trivial world sublime,
Take half a Gramme of phanerothyme.

To which Osmond responded:

To fathom hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

Psychological Exercise

This is an effective way to determine how to get your needs met, when you're experiencing negative emotions.

1) Feelings. Label the feelings that you are having. Think of a few different words that you feel describe the emotions.

2) Needs. Using the labesl you came up with for the emotions, now think of words that would be the opposite of those. Often, the opposite of the emotion is the need that is going unmet.

3) Action. Focussing now on the words that you came up with for the needs, think of a couple ways that you could do something that would allow you to get the needs met.

So, practice that for awhile. Btw -- street value? $120. But, for you, dear reader? -- gratis.

Feeding my Head

Reading:

• Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs -- John (Johnny Rotten) Lydon
  
• Dude, Where's my Country? -- Michael Moore

Listening to:

• Jeff Buckley -- Live @ Sin-e. Tremendous and touching.
  
• Joe Firstman -- The War of Women. Ok. Kinda poppy. Made by a friend. Like the last tune a lot.
  
• And miscellaneous streaming punk, just 'cuz I'm in the mood.

Something in my Veins, Bloodier than Blood

You can't tell what it is. Not exactly, anyway. Did you hear something? A vibration in your stomach, something not quite unhinged, but on the verge of coming loose. Somewhere between nausea and panic. Did you forget something? A snippet of a conversation, something someone said, something that sounded innocuous in context, transparent, yet, taken out of context in and of itself, holds foreboding. Something coming loose -- what? A moral? some priniciple? some fine line wavering between right and wrong? A bill you forgot to pay? a phone call you forgot to make? a day you forgot to take off? did you remember to turn in that sick day you took last week? how much will your tax return be this year? will it be enough to get a new car? put a downpayment on a house? or to escape? Did you remember some obscure personal anniversary? Did you forget another sibling's birthday? Will this cough ever go away? Are your lungs damaged forever? why do you wake up with the cold sweats almost every night, every winter? why was I born here? why now? Paranoia.

Stuff I Gotta Do

• Get my vision checked and get a new script for glasses.
  
• Trade in my car.
  
• Get back to the gym every day after work.
  
• Find a way to make this job interesting again, or find another one.
  
• Move south.

Every Moment is a Little Bit Later

Read my previous post and laugh along with me. At the absurdity of my current reality. Here. In the Midwest. Where it's currently 13 degrees. I won't even bother calculating the wind chill factor. It's too boring, too atrocious -- too absurd that it has again become the lead story on the local news. Just as it does every year. Every year. Every year. Does enyone in the Midwest ever get tired of enything??!?! ~sheesh~

(Suffice it to say that one of the highlights of 2003 for Yours Truly was experiencing Hilton Head Island. And I made a promise to go back. So, The Muse and I will be returning this summer. Prolly gonna take Haze along with us, which will change the dynamic a little.)

Also realized that in all of 2003 I blogged a total of 12 posts. That's an average of one post a month, and a fairly atrocious record for a veteran of the medium like me. I fear I can't hold a candle to my pal lola........much as I'd like to........*smile*.........

[Aside: Listening to some tune by a band/artist named Genovese -- called "Swinging on Poles" -- a fairly nondescript hip-hop jam -- with the marked exception of these wonderful little female sex grunts mixed into the rhythm track. Not enough to make me buy it, but *yum* for that.]

So, fans -- what's been going on? For our part, we present, in brief:

The been-there-done-that list for 2003:

• we -- that's the US, which is us, for better or worse, folks -- went to war, again. For the second time - ? - in as many years, that we're aware of.
  
• we "won" the war, but remain in foreign lands, with a status of Foreign Invader & Tormented Victor.
  
• we "went orange" twice, but hung tight through it.
  
• we had a big East Coast electrical power grid fiasco -- remember that?
  
• the ever-sexy Madonna smooched her de facto wannabe proteges Britney and Christina on TV, initiating waves of hope and nausea, respectively, among the sexually enlightened and the homophobic. I, for one, would kiss any and all of them, in any combination -- and can't understand anyone who wouldn't, but, hell, to each their own. I've more than learned that. (Check out the divine M's site, btw -- pretty neat.)
  
• perhaps even more scandalous, Dubya remained president.
  
• "we" caught Saddam Hussein, former leader of the vanquished nation of Iraq, after killing half his family and reducing his already decimated country to further rubble. The other bearded nemesis remains at large. And gas prices in the old US-of-A remain no more or less better.
  
• my own primary love r-ship hit a bump, causing me to initiate a separation, but we humanly and miraculously found ways of coming to terms with the break-up, each other and our differences, and, while we remain living apart at present, we remain very much together, and are shooting for a spring re-synching of physical space.
  
• your pal Runey saw the fair city of San Francisco for the first time, liked it much, and hopes to return.
  
• and, somehow, in the waning days of 2003, I discovered a penchant for hip-hop, which I never had even the slightest interest in or understanding of before.

And that's the news that was, gang. So, an eventful year or not?? -- you be the judge. Please. We even fixed the message board for you (click on "Comments" below).

Write and let us know how the hell you are, how you were in 2003, and how you plan to be in 2004. Much love to you, always.

Stay tuned......

we remember



"The Rock," on the main campus of Kent State University, as painted by students the week of 9/11/01.

...missing...

All of it. Watching shooting stars in the crystalline sky every night. The nervous clack-clack-clack of the hermit crabs scurrying across the sand. The smell of the sea. The sound of the sea. Late-afternoon frolics after a sun-filled day and collapsing into heavy sleep. Making sun tea with our bottled water. Drinking coffee on the balcony, listening to the ocean and reading The Packet.

The decisions. My, what decisions. Will we walk today? Or bike? Should we try to go see dolphins? Do you feel like trying this place for lunch? Feel like getting in the water? Hungry? Let's stop at the tiki hut again after our ride! (click on the "LiveCam" button.........had a few very enjoyable beers there.)

Man, it's hard to be back here. I need to move.