and a sufficiently bifurcated brain, watch these two videos at once. Or watch one and listen to the other.
His name is Kayvan Sabehgi. Ex-marine, veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq wars. They busted his spleen with those sticks, left him to writhe for 18 hours before they took him to a hospital. "They" being the Oakland Police Department.
These gusy, you know their names already, I hope.
"The woods are full of wild anemones now, shall we go? no Darling, I didn't say wild enemas, I said wild anemones, flowers, hundreds of thousands of wild flowers all over the ground under the trees all the way up to the gazebo. They have no smell but they have a presence just like a perfume and quite as obsessive, I shall remember them all my life.
Are you going somewhere Darling?
Yes, going to the woods.
Then why do you say you will remember them all your life?
Because you are part of their memory and you are going to disappear, the anemones are going to blossom eternally, we are not."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
of a recent interview with (by?) Sesshu Foster:
SF: What are Palestinian toy tank war sculptures made out of plastic?
BE: That is a hard story to tell, but I met a young man named Eid Suleiman Hadhalin in a tiny Bedouin village in the south Hebron hills. A black goat followed me around the village like a puppy, nibbling at my shoe laces. Another goat, four days old and born with deformed legs bayed miserably, ceaselessly, dragging its crippled forelegs, its chin in the dirt. The village was half in ruins, destroyed by Israeli bulldozers. Ezra Nawi, the Israeli activist who took me there, had been arrested in one of the ruins when it was still someone's home. He had refused to leave, refused to make way for the bulldozers. You can watch it on YouTube. The soldiers dragged him out, then bulldozed the house. Ezra went to prison for several months for that. The army has since issued demolition orders on every standing structure in the village, including the toilet and the communal oven. (The villagers, who are very poor, use goat dung for fuel; the Israeli settlers who live behind a fence just yards away claim the smoke is an environmental hazard.) Ezra told me I would like Eid. He was right. He told me that Eid was such a gentle and pure soul that he should not have been born in this world. I cannot judge that, but Eid had bright, glowing eyes and an open, joyful face. He lived with his wife and their two-year-old daughter. He was an artist. He gathered plastic scrap and trash from the landscape, cut it in strips and sewed them together to build small, scale sculptures of attack helicopters and bulldozers. They were perfect, beautiful things, precisely painted. He had put a small motor from a child's toy in the helicopter so that its rotors actually spun. But he had stopped making helicopters, he told me. "We don't make war here," he said, and laughed. Now he just made bulldozers.
of a recent email interview of Sesshu Foster:
Me: Given that elephant seals are the marine descendants of bears, and manatees are descended from cows, and otters from foxes and sea lions from dogs, what are you doing to prepare for the inevitable human evolution into analogous pinniped form?
Sesshu Foster: To prepare for eventual evolution of humans into pinniped sea mammalians, I continue to walk in the rain every chance I get. Even in memory, you can find me walking around downtown Seattle in the pouring rain on First St. down to Pioneer Square and back to Pike Market, where there used to be a good bookstore, and it’s the same rain I was walking in in East L.A. in 1973 in army jacket thinking about the CIA supported military coup in Chile that resulted in 3,000 desaparecidos and I was walking the hills of East L.A. thinking about that as the Vietnam War ground on and on, and it was raining... it was raining... Not to mention all those years of rain in the Bay Area, San Francisco in the pouring rain... rain pouring into the Grand Canyon... the ancient rain, Bob Kaufman called it---the dry rain of photochemical particulate on Los Angeles sunsets expelled from my lungs in little Aztec plumes of breath. I swim in the rain behind my eyeballs. In the jails and on stairs to nowhere it rains, sometimes dry rain, sometimes rain of darkness. Sometimes rivers of dreaming.
In other news: Euro-komedy kontinues, as leaders of leading democracies are outraged by Greek leader's quasi-democratic gesture, and the Los Angeles Times reviews Ether.
b.