I felt the urge to repost an article written by Tariq Ali, well, a portion of a recent article I read of his off Counterpunch web site. The context involves the protesting of certain Islamic women in France, one of which was involved in an anti-capitalist group. She wore a head cover (religious reasons of course,) and there was much misplaced anger directed towards her and this particular group (NPA) for doing so. It was as if her right to be more active in protesting against some of the ravages inflicted by what we will simply call ‘capitalism,’ (as if this means what Adam Smith, or an enterprising farmer in early 20th century United States may have understood it!) was somehow fatally compromised by her religious traditions/belief…anyway….. one does think of some of the typically barbed hypocrisy connected to the past, including those who are now considered to have been part of an ‘enlightenment’ tradition…. (don’t get me wrong…I’m not pissing on Voltaire and the Gang, as if they (men of their time, and able to ‘transcend it) are to be fully slapped till their souls turn an acrid smoke spewing orange…..but as a corrective, as a… well here’s the damn excerpt!

Bye! 

“How many Western citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers undoubtedly took  humanity forward by recognizing no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: “Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes.” Hume: “The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words.” There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the Islamophobic ravings in sections of the global media.

Marx famously wrote of religion as the ‘opium of the people’, but the sentence that followed is forgotten. Religion was also ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’ and this partially explains the rise of religiosity in every community since the collapse of Communism.”

A lot has been written about the humiliation Russia experienced when it ceased to be a superpower; a lot has also been written about the rapid immiseration of a vast segment of the post-Soviet population. But these things were affected by the daily experience of fear. It was certainly bad to be ruled by the senile bureaucrats of the Communist Party, but for a lot of people it was worse to be ruled by thick-necked thugs in tracksuits and Mercedes. It’s notable that the one work of cinematic art to come out of Russia in the 1990s was Alexei Balabanov’s Brat (Brother), a revenge fantasy in which a young man comes to Petersburg after serving in Chechnya and, somewhat reluctantly, finds himself killing all the mafiosi in town. It’s a Russian Taxi Driver, a film animated by a profound wish to wipe the scum from the streets, born in the collective unconscious of a social class (the emasculated intelligentsia) incapable of doing any such thing.

The Pink Sheets provide quotes on these stocks to broker dealers.  It’s not responsible for the legitimacy of the companies and, in fact, warns investors on its web site that these “are small companies with limited operating histories or are economically distressed…Investors should avoid the OTC [over the counter] market unless they can afford a complete loss of their investment.”  In many cases, this is far more disclosure than licensed brokers at the “venerable” firms told their clients when the companies first went public at fat share prices.

A study done by Tyler Shumway and Vincent A. Warther for the University of Michigan Business School and University of Chicago Graduate School of Business found that between 1972 through 1995, 4,188 companies were delisted by Nasdaq, the stock exchange that facilitated the boom and bust in dotcoms and tech start ups in the late 90s. After delisting, many ended up on the Pink Sheets.  In March 2000, the Nasdaq index stood at 5,048.  Today, a decade later, it’s still down 58 percent from its peak.

It’s time for Congress to open its eyes to the reality that this massive decline in Nasdaq is telling us Wall Street is not bringing enough good companies to market.  And the mergers Wall Street has put together, typically traded on the New York Stock Exchange, have created Frankenbanks and debt-laden conglomerates too bloated to figure out their own balance sheet let alone create new jobs.  Two poster children come to mind: AOL-TimeWarner and Citibank-Travelers-Smith Barney-Salomon, a/k/a Citigroup.

Thank you Pam Martens….

I write for an on line music magazine (Perfect Sound Forever,) and they just posted a 2009 best album list…….perhaps we are now removed far enough away from such lists to make it more tolerable to look at…. This general concept is becoming more an more irrelevant for a variety of reasons…but with that said…fuck it…

 http://www.furious.com/perfect/2009writerspoll.html

“What will a Grounds Hog do now?”

By: Ossip Maltempi

He called on friendly acquaintances

Phone calls that were never answered

Choosing minor holidays

(chiefly American minor holidays)

caller would wish them well

hoping that holiday would be enjoyed

thinking to himself that children’s favorite holidays

tend to be those where they receive the most gifts

hardly surprising of course

but amusing when wondering how most children

felt about President’s day or Grounds Hog Day

where at best

they may not receive a garbled lesson of some sort

from a well meaning adult

a mortgage underwater

a debt obsessed government

promising ameliorating conditions

would eventually thaw off the big horses hind legs

and spread to cover all of us

These acquaintances usually never call back

I could pretend to be calling from

A cookie cutter tax preparation business

Letting them know how most accountants

Aren’t aware of the deductions one could make

If they are taking certain medications for syphilis

These acquaintances

They will remain

In the back of the poorly working

refrigerator

Of never to be friendships

It is an impossible dream. American workers now pay about 40 per cent of their take-home pay on housing, and another 15 per cent on debt service – even before buying goods and services. No wonder our economy has lost its export markets! Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.

He came alive as the thought of his weakness grew. There were painful admissions made in the chair that never merited sitting time commensurate with it’s worth. Old smoky black lacquer wife poured comfort tongue and taste, two fingered death waltz with negligible ferrymen. And I thank god that it does not present itself in any chillingly sappy way, and that those we love the most we might very well hardly ever know. Glance passers, interloping gassed sentences ululated in a room of groomed senescence.

HE came alive the more he fought himself, touching himself, fighting himself, robbing himself of any sleep, a deep sleep always interrupted at the same time, every night, early day. He realized his worth, and was not troubled by its relative insignificance, but coolly enraptured by it, not trepanned into an oily blue and white drop cloth. Tears moving from cage from ribs to eyes. I am always traveling where I am, and therefore writing more than I will ever write, and for better, for damn better.

• Automata dandruff grief…. Now where is your penchant for using the finest of details to assuage another’s pain, especially an enemy, a weak will o’ the wisp enemy, as most of them are… You move on. But who moves on? How many are in movement? The movement of what poetry might be leaking from their plump limbs… Leached as she said last night, flying in from LA, mimicking her mother’s southern accent: “Graveyard Dead.”… Yuk uk…

But, the world is our Swedish apple peeler. Do you want to

 After finishing her half-hearted jumping jacks by the rear entrance of the Half-a-Hill recycling plant, Tiwara was ‘served’ with papers indicating her role in the “mud for boots scandal.”  It was just then that the governor had brandished what he later called an amnesty-pennant, proclaiming that the thirty year old women was a secret fund raiser for the state, and deserved immunity for her minor role in the aforementioned scandal.  No one knew exactly why bartering precious Mohawk Valley mud for low quality work boots was such a malodorous to-do.

Tiwara, unaware of her exoneration almost occurring simultaneously with the scowling cornering at the hands of the state paper server, held the hand of a stranger.  This stranger was a long time, yet silent admirer of Tiwara.  Though he had plumbed down to a rubbery floor of many an incoherent knotting of her unknown attributes and how she would respond to his ways; he could not bring himself to any emotional high or low ground. When her sweat mingled with his, his left ear almost deaf now for over twenty-four hours for the first time in his life, preoccupied him voraciously.

Thank you for reading:

Domenc

It was basically Emmy Lou’s idea to place this invisible scale in the restaurant. That’s a goddamn fact. I don’t give a damn what the story became later due to an unhealthy mixture of lying and real laced up grass, and Chinny’s mind scrambled up on lust, and who knows what else contributed to the baroque levels of bullshit associated with the decision to allow this invisible scale thing to happen at the restaurant.  She convinced all of us to place the scale in such a spot that one was hard pressed to avoid stepping on it and therefore have their weight revealed on a screen for everyone’s amusement.

I’ve seen Ray and her scraping by each other… getting feel ups from each other… I’ve seen Ray brush his wood on that slab of leg. I’m not afraid to use that sort of description, BBQ style. I don’t think Ray wanted to go along with the hidden scale room. Perhaps his pride in thinking he knew that such an odd…’uncharted’ gimmick to create a new odd trend or sensation or something, needed a ballsy backer,  was also responsible for his going along with it. I’m sure it was, even though Ray was not the vainest of guys for sure.  But still.  It almost seems, and I truly think, that Emmy Lou sabotaged the restaurant. She went to work on Ray. Was she working for someone?  What about Gary?  Was he in on it or just some passive dupe or…

At first all the flirting and the scale business didn’t much bother me. I didn’t feel threatened. I didn’t think it threatened business. People did seem to find the scale amusing, a bold statement about how unimportant things held sacred like ‘weight’ was, or some sort of bullshit like that. I liked Ray well enough. I was getting close to him. He was my partner and everything. Our bad blood was thinning out to a hammered little lost whistle.  But it got to me. I know, I just really know, that I was alone in thinking there would be anything remotely funny or interesting or intriguingly odd about having every patron who dined in this particular area see their weight revealed on one of the large white walls. It was the stupidest idea ever! It was incredibly imbecilic. It would ruin everything eventually.

That’s what happened…patron steps on scale, and their weight appears on the right hand corner of the back wall of the dining section. The number fades after a few seconds in a disintegrating like fashion. This corner has built into it a very large High Definition, super fancy television that blended in with the off whiteness of the wall. The screen itself mimicked the walls color when not showing other images.  It was pretty difficult to detect. Besides one’s weight, you would also see some sort of image or series of images that followed that private and sometimes embarrassing number. Other times there would simply be a succession of interesting images, images thought to excite hunger and digestion, cool stuff that didn’t distract one too much from their company, or create an anti social atmosphere.

I didn’t mind that. I thought that was fine, but I wanted that scale and all that weight stuff removed.   It was Emmy. She was the brain child of this nonsense. But Ray and Gary became more and more involved with the images. Ray got really into it, not so much Gary, but that’s not to say he didn’t support it.  I suppose this was a way of distracting them from the eventual problems we would have with patrons angered over seeing their weight displayed in public as they were about to order victuals! It was simply a matter of time before someone got really pissed off. What were the chances that some possible positive word of mouth about the whole back room business would be enough to counter the eventual bad press and reputation we would catch like a crippling venereal disease from angered patrons?

So this moose-gobble sabotaging bitch  got us all laughing that night with the screwy Lucy, talking about this invisible scale idea that was supposedly used in some extremely successful restaurant pandering to the same sort of ‘art’ crowd (Whatever the fuck that means.) It was a scale that one had to step on as they walked that one down step onto the outdoor section’s floor.  You could shut the scale down. It would only be used occasionally to start a buzz about the restaurant, appeal to some humor our clientele was suppose to respond to because we were located in an area known to be home to many artists, failed academics, nutty shrinks, that sort of thing. Well, Emmy’s pitch sounded great, and we heard all those reassurances over and over. I did like the idea of the images shown on the built-in TV that would be more subliminal, to help with digestion, or create a tranquil atmosphere.  I really did like that part of her pitch.

So I got sold. Chinny sure as hell got sold and whipped on being sold. He thought he was so ‘with it’ as they use to say. He really understood Emmy’s vision, trusted her know-how of what was in or what could be in, what would be daring in the restaurant business , really avant-dumb ….understood in an adulatory way. Ray did voice a few concerns about offending people, and then Emmy started talking about how we could have contests…and this and that. Patrons in that dining area could guess the combined weight of the room that night. They would jot their guesses on paper we handed out, or tell their server. They might win a free meal, or bottle of wine!  They would really want to spread the word about all the fun they had at The Oldest Tree House. What great word of mouth fire we could stoke!

So Gary got sucked into all that. I was the only one against it. I was more than vocal about it. I didn’t trust that bitch. It was those fucks, stoned as anything. I wanted her fired. I warned Ray about her. I cared about Ray now. But he just infuriatingly ignored everything, got really weird about it. Things really deteriorated. There were a few patrons that were not thrilled to have their weights flashed on our screen.  But you know what happened? I ended up getting forced out by Ray and Gary. They accused me of betting on the individual and group weights of patrons, running an illegal game on the side. I allegedly told select customers what I was up to in order to get money from them for giving them certain ‘inside information.’ That was nonsense. I know that I had a bad reputation for such things. But this was way beyond the pale of what they were accusing me of.

It was me! I fucked up they say! I fucked up. It was a set up. It might have been sabotage, someone who knew all of us, working with someone else, who in turn was working with someone who wanted what we had, what we embarked on.  Well I wasn’t about to take this accusation lying down, or take it like the old Sam might have. Not with what I’ve been through. Fuck that. They forced me out, but that place wouldn’t last anyway. It wasn’t just this blockheaded weigh you’re patrons in a restaurant nonsense that did them in…as if that wasn’t enough. I did those mother fuckers in. I did those bastards in because they would not believe me about how I thought Emmy was using them, that she was in cahoots with a guy that I most certainly saw pushing her up against a brick wall and sucking at her mouth over by Delphi 2’s small free standing 1930’s era cinema on Nogsicorg Road between Route 18 and Grandervum Service Road. Did she know Low? I could not remember if I knew this Emmy from Leg Up. I could not remember. I know… I was getting paranoid.

I knew that prick as an ex investor of Prawn Dawn who got told to keep his money and take a hike because he was more than an unscrupulous scavenger. This guy was planning to open a restaurant in the same neighborhood we were in. He wanted us out. He wanted what we had, as well as open up his own cookie cutter trendy restaurant. Andrew Belsker had somehow got information that a developer was going to procure the rights to knock down a large swath of an industrial park in the neighborhood and have it rezoned for residential use with the help of a patron of ours who was the most angered with the invisible scale (just so happens.) Belsker knew that our location would become a gold mine. He wanted to take us over, or force us out before official word got out about the redevelopment project which was assured to be approved and make this neighborhood’s real estate, and concentrated money supply take off to the stratosphere.

It was Amy Duncan. She was the one who really acted outraged about her weight being displayed. I knew it was an act. I didn’t know at first. But when I found out what kind of political power she held in town and her relationship to Belsker, well– that eliminated any doubt that she was putting on a show that night. I can still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs about how outraged she was. She threw a plate of lobster ravioli into Gary’s face when he went on apologizing to her, explaining to her that it was all just for fun and so on.

I could see her throw a punch at Ray as he was giving her more rehearsed sophisticated reasons for why we had this set up, and how everyone knew about it who dined there. It was so popular, and people thought it was a great antidote to all that obsessing about diets, and weight, and image. He went on and on with that sort of talk. Duncan decked the neck breaker. She then contacted every paper, radio station, organization, you name it. She contacted them, and raised hell about how awful we treated our patrons, how little we respected their privacy, how insensitive we were.

I felt miserable. It was a few weeks after this spectacle that I got accused by the whole staff including Emmy Louise, of gambling on the whole damn thing.  I still don’t know how this rumor got started. I shouldn’t think about it. I’m seeing my therapist again. I’m fucked! I’m just fucked.

There was no way to counter the bad press. Sure there were people who supported us, and not just our steadfast customers, but we were done. I was done. I was incensed about how this all went down, how I was ignored when trying to prevent this scale debacle, as I began calling it, and then accused of using it to benefit me secretly. I was betrayed and made an enemy. Ray wouldn’t even give me a chance to defend myself, never mind Gary. It took so many years to make peace with myself, with these guys. So much of that had to do with having a chance to heal by running into Ray and Gary, discovering he was living town, actually becoming friends, opening The Oldest Tree House. It was miraculous the way it all happened, and I’m no believer in miracles, but it just felt that powerfully unbelievable that all that could and would happen.

I was outraged, and began telling some of the most loyal patrons I knew about how Ray and Gary used me, ignored me, and got played by Emmy Lou. Many of them believed me, and no longer dined there.  I helped put that restaurant under. It deserved it. How could they do that to me? How will I find peace now?

Sam did not gamble on the patron’s weights. I let myself believe he did. I had quacko little visions of him while taking a piss, somehow fixing the digital read out on someone’s weight. I’d see the big weak Bing cherry red dots forming numbers, and Sam’s smirking confidence as I waggled off the end of my urination.  But he didn’t, and I wasn’t simply manipulated by Emmy. My inability to give him the benefit of the doubt was due to our shared past, his abusive gambling on me in the most egregious personal and dehumanizing way. This much would be obvious to anyone who really knew me.  I’m not trying to excuse myself from my own set of wrongs. It was simply impossible to get past that. I lost control of my better judgment. It’s clear what Emmy Louise did now. She is currently the night hostess at A Better Night. She must have known something about us, before she even met us. I don’t want to speculate anymore. I’m sick enough from all this.

I sometimes desperately watch her walk from her car to the back entrance of A Better Night. I do have lusty thoughts about her as she presses buttons to activate her car alarm. I fantasize about having a little control with buttons of my own. Instead of a panic button, there would be a fuck me fast kiss me slow button, a button I would worship as certain ancients worshipped Mithras or perhaps Jok who might allow some precipitation fall if the proper black goat was slaughtered by his subjects.  Anyway, instead of an open door button, I would have a… I’m sorry. You get the idea. I can’t stop the ideas. My libido get’s over worked when I feel emotionally at sea, when I feel I’m losing purpose in my life. Purpose?

I’m sad, it’s terribly sad. I do cry. I look at Emmy and I see a Dorothy from my Chittenango past, a Dorothy flattened by the shadow of a falling house. I won’t spray the Wizard of Oz can too thickly against this wall I’m thudding up against. I don’t want this rut to blast me back to those painful moments. I’m trying to regroup. I might open up a comedy club for functional Autistic people, or do something very challenging and wildly unexpected. Maybe I will start my own line of juicer. Are juicers still a hot sell? Gotta make a note to check into that.

A Better Night is the name of the new restaurant that Andrew Belsker opened up where our dream restaurant died. Sometimes I visualize the bones of our old restaurant rattling underneath A Better Night. I could imagine The Oldest Tree House still perfectly intact and untouched but aged, wizened into a living artifact, growing in some labyrinth of crushed dreams. I know it’s corny. It reminds me of those tacky horror films where some sunken luxury boat suddenly comes back to ‘life’ or revealed and unhidden to some lucky witness, who ends up being not so lucky, because… Ok, ok…

So our restaurant is practically unrecognizable now. It’s been over two years since The Oldest Tree House was forced to dissolve. The neighborhood is a real estate gold mine now. It’s choked with affluent younger professionals living in new construction ‘green’ buildings, a million pretty girl’s texting their boyfriends or internet dates, riding their bikes, wearing the fashions of the moment with puissant nonchalance. Everything sort of looks and sounds and smells like a music video in an era when music videos ceased to be any fun, and weren’t really music videos, but meta-videos, where more and more of the punched out music was a stand in for something else, ancillary bird house clock creature waddling out of the fashion of the moment hole maybe on the hour maybe not….

I hear the gazpacho at ‘ABN” is every man’s dream of a woman, and every woman’s dream of a man, as well as every man’s dream of a man, and every woman’s dream of a woman, and also every hermaphroditic dream gazpacho… melon with crispy prosciutto laced together in the cool and sophisticated pool of incredibleness, and yes I’m getting confused, and still crying, but holding the shrillness of it all in my knuckles, in my chewed fingers. Yes, let’s not be so heterosexual about our comparing ‘ABN’s’ gazpacho to a ‘dream’ of…

I’ve wanted to call Sam and do whatever I can to gain his forgiveness. He’s moved, and I have not been able to trace his whereabouts. I’ve thought about hiring one of those agencies that helps you track missing people, but keep chickening out.  Sometimes I see the number or numbers 116 dancing in my head. Sometimes Leda Ray is holding a shiny white sign with that very number in black and red written on it. She’s riding a bicycle that travels across water. There is a new city far off beyond that water. I want to go there, but there is no there.

116 is the weight of Amy Duncan, or was the weight of Amy Duncan. There should be a band called The Weight of Amy Duncan. Amy and Emmy both work at A Better Night. I think Duncan is some sort of manager. I have a thing for managers of restaurants, especially night managers, if there are day and night managers, then the night manager title becomes more meaningful of course.

I desperately want to walk into the restaurant for perverse and sentimental reasons. I don’t have the courage.

I don’t talk to Gary much anymore. He’s back with Heveilah Low. I hear that he is trying to start a satellite radio program. Maybe it’s already on the air? Maybe he has his own call in hour. Maybe it’s some sort of super free form, constantly changing goofy call in show with some wacky guest-star DJ coming on every week.  There are a lot of these satellite radio programs out there. How would I know which one was Gary’s? If he’s still with H. Low, perhaps, that would make it easier. She would blog her program, disseminate the thing to death. I would find out. I would call in. Maybe Sam would call in. I don’t trust Gary. I have a funny feeling Gary did something terribly wrong, or allowed it to happen. I won’t know. It will be one of things you will never know.

We could reunite. I could tell Sam I was sorry this time.  It wasn’t him. It’s all so stupid. The way things fall apart after these incredible rapprochements, these sort of fortuitous collisions that spark a new amiability, or drive to put something together, to work together, to bury enmity, to build over it, to open up for business, to close business, to stand as sentinel in front of doors behind receding home. Maybe I will try to paint it. I can’t, but what the hell.

The old person’s tirade becomes so wearisome and frothy, that the counter person begins developing heart problems. As the young coffee person dies, the ‘OP’ sips on a very handsome mug of the most exotic and luxurious cafe drink available, replete with unusual edible ornaments jutting from the silky membrane of treated milk. As the counter person receives medical assistance from two specialists who happen to be reading various high brow magazines in cafe, old person increasingly mellows out, and begins listening to i-pod, which he/she is not quite sure how to work at first, but then uses this device, as well as other devices that the youths of today are surgically attached to, in order to mock the moribund and ultimately quite terminal state of employee. At one point, such a device is placed on genitals of young barista, while ‘OP’ declares something or other about MP3s, and sperm, that makes no sense. After this death, old person destroys signs of all fancy coffee names in shop with a toy violin, and walks away from cafe with a posse of other old dicks.

(I have to refine idea..but I think it’s ripe for volleys of improvisational zeal.)

Domenic Maltempi