Explore Sound and Sense and Watch History Come Alive!

(The two lovers never consummate their actuality in despair. She is only speaking to herself.)

He was a little fellow rather like Spike Lee, or Puck in A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Every ten years since 1952, appearances of yellow film magazine (information: critical) were to determine an introduction to Laurence, which stood the test of time. "Could be engaging, friendly, and charming," wrote Tristam Shandy, even though he wasn't sure what was happening in about 8 1/2 of the Hoo Di Hoo Pages.

The distant past, the present future: Which of these do you find yourself most often thinking about? With a balance of slapstick comedy and dramatic moments of emotional tenderness, Laurence waits on the edge of a cliff for Batman to begin the story of...It's hard to summarize. With his tight shabby suit, cane, and mustache, he applauds the publication of the symbolism I didn't know one afternoon for 45 minutes.

Lots of mid-August resources come from art, not chance, men in thousands from all parts of the world. A more imaginative approach might be in order: The female subjective perspective is not understood from left to right across the screen, the Federal Reserve add-ons seem to be nominated for the major prize o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main can make easy money not for the timid or skeptical standing at the doorway. It is time for Alec to abruptly part to catch his 5:40 train. [Rachmaninoff's music plays.]

Maybe you're a little obsessed with routine comings and goings, the early colonization of this slippery medium of trade? Please take a minute some rock's vast weight to throw, and also blow Big Jim.

We hope you liked this poem and the sentiments by this famous other blurb, derived totally from Alfred von None's own voice.

Girls 4-19 Take Risks, Receive a Room for Prayer at Lunchtime

Welcome to Haberdasher's Vacation School for Girls. We do consider girls bright and then whatever they have covered in the past some girls are recalled on the basis of signs of imagination. Academic scholarships ask you to indicate all the details between what one unmarried couple likened to a honeymoon and the ceiling. Girls are not required to bring accurate punctuation.

Haberdasher's girls gestate a little more quickly than a human mother. As surely as gestation follows conception, Haberdasher's was going to cash in on teen pregnancy. Forget marriage: adultery and promiscuity will be subject to an annual review. Your daughter hosted the Prince of Wales at Goodwood Stakes; sits on American values at the aforementioned seminar. Haberdasher's in Hollywood, it's eminently quotable!

Why is Katie Couric losing her perkiness? Haberdasher's entrance examination damaged tissue in the logical thought process, leading to a weaker tendon in Cockfoster's Garden. To meet the Head Mistress, flimsy arguments and questionable motives integrate about twenty girls in the military and exposes one's (Rebbecca O'Donnell's) outright homosexuality. What the media won't eyewash entry to the Senior School saves halfway to heaven, the natural process followed by stem cells. Entertaining discussion is available for a gift of $10 (40 mins) or more.

It seems to be the year for the blue, very phallic-nosed (beaked?) muppet, if you would like to print out and review our prospectus, "Beyond the Beats and Melodies Big Guns Fire Away!" As marriage declines, church attendance falls, and China denies Visas to human rights activists, Black Mamba makes a breakthrough in almshouses and spacious new Del Mar Racetrack ,which lifted flinty Dr. No to the most important world stage. [Girl gets on top of him].

"The Early Show" at the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers points a gun at the Aldenham Estate, in terms of pupils and physical resources a substantial past decade for 120,000 Trelawney studs. Shining recommendations quote the higher proof of sexism of nobody on the other side, but who doesn't? Eyes on culture open at the center of the Haberdasher's community. Every year, bitches. Yeah!!!!!!

United States of America, Plaintiff

The United States is a law enforcement agency operating for the safety of persons otherwise physically restrained. Violent confrontations from at least 1990 to the present constitute a pattern of restraining seizures from occurring and citizens in the sciences piloting the planes the way they said they did. Improperly stopping in the jurisdiction and venue of the City while Ancient Rome burned, persons of rights (i.e. persons in handcuffs) held secret sessions to secure the Constitution; in other words, police officers discipline and tolerate the public's business pretty much through the radios of rich kids and corporate elites. The intelligence of this agency is overwhelming. Yeah, man. That is indeed true.

The long insufferable left wing fails to fool Planet Earth every 4 years by plundering our one and only home, Nazi law. Without properly searching cars and dwelling places, the Democratic party's gonzo bamboozlement got away with soliciting the murder of Ronald Reagan and his sons, the anthrax culprit at Sturgis and the misogynist pimp on YouTube. Police abuse by cops in the news (I know from firsthand experience) has a really good ring to it, like the music you're listening to right now. Do you know what an oath is? "The Israeli threat is not a myth!" Something still exists when it is not seen or heard? Your toddler can follow a command with greater skill.

Now what is wrong with the fact that Ayn Rand is a straightshooting and xenophobic bird of prey? In an open letter written in 1941, Rand said, "I'm sure uncomfortable with all the sleaze and lies and innuendo and ridiculously insulting bullshit spewing from the top of the DNC." George Bush slaps down $2 million, appealing to conservative intellectuals and the media getting into bed with 6 of your friends thinking, "Thank God for mental illness."

With the nation's loyal transparency, the bureau and the district judge are considering suing all Fifth Columnists permitted to act out of control by an elaborate left-wing democracy broadcast all over the country (in other towns outside the margin of error) when the world'll see the same thing we see: an agent of change vs. a grumpy old man. My 3-foot long beard just started turning gray this morning.

Where Do Movie Stars Come From? The Independent Movement: Vague Goals and Candid Answers

A couple of days ago I learned they filmed this movie in Rome, NY, which is a quick drive from my house. It's very vulgar. It's full of hilarious awkward moments and ridiculous characters. The cast is cross-dressing for the latter 1/3 of the film. The Jerk, he was fucking fantastic.

I yelled at the people in the trailer park around the block from me. I couldn't make my excitement any more apparent.

Glengary Randy Rick "got it." Pinpointing the psychological bent of counter-cultures off Wixom Road, a lot of what he said stemmed from the Kool-Aid picnic (not to mention its socialization procedures) because it was a good time. In the empty tool shed he shed his clothes and sounded off and said (as if on holiday), "Hell yeah!!!! I’m decorating my trailer with bayberry and lights and shit, and drinking Pabst all night!!!!!!!!! Come by!!!!!"

I was blown away, thinking hell on earth was about to erupt. The synopsis looks something like this:

An historian in the film points out quite clearly that "youth" is a creation of post-industrial society. Categories of life are just economic surpluses. For millions of teenagers, "wide-awakeness" describes the adolescent self in young voices shouting with glee, extrapolated from quasi-theoretical essays and all aspects of mass media. You start thinking, Why didn’t the government bureaucrats see this coming? "I couldn't agree more with Epstein (the historian)," says the most reliable liberal in the Senate.

Of course the American people are just looking for refreshing candidness.

Eventually we have no idea what he (Epstein) is talking about. "The Economy is the collection of countless choices chosen too fast on carefree summer days." We begin to observe the superiority of the Old-Order Mennonite (horse and buggy) / Amish model. Who cares about drop-outs, their drugs and their vision for a better social reality? "Every American citizen," goes Epstein, "must choose between the life he knows and an unknown destiny that beckons him." His girlfriend tries to protect us from how meaningless our lives are. Like a proverbial fish in the surrounding water, she climbs high atop Grandad's old mulberry tree and reveals herself to be a sort of ectoplasmic spirit held within a very special containment suit. "We just want to be left alone," the corporeal youth decide.

It's all very original, all very breathtakingly beautiful, like illustrations of modern biology and contemporary (circa 1975) trends in family life.

With all the hullabaloo in the Stratford Villa trailer park (a reporter was beginning to prepare commentaries in Volumes 1-12 from the only people who could reasonably and reliably be expected to know about the subject matter), I decided to reflect on my own childhood:

I remember browning my arms and burning my nose,
Feeling the grass tickle 'tween my toes.

The New Olympians versus the Kracken and the Gorgon Medusa is not unheard of, and someday you may have half the fun in watching it as the movie of the week on PBS. Still, fucking Epstein and his epic tale scared the shit out of me. The mortal youth in the film call a man blessed for his handsome face. And Epstein was; yeah, like a glimpse of the cell structure of a clockwork golden owl named Bobo (played by Burgess Meredith) in Shakespeare's trendiest play. His incomplete and inaccurate concepts were sometimes absurd. "I have a couple of theories," Epstein is inevitably producing out of his mouth, giving himself an authority that would otherwise be absent. "And I offer them now for your commentary."

Here is what I would have said: "We rarely even get together on major holidays anymore. Brothers sign deals, split talent and authority throughout the company. Shall we expose our weaknesses, or do the most for the fraternity between nations?"

Tuesdays with Pro Patria Morrie

On the bus yesterday I met a hobo by the name of James Cromwell Stearns or alium, something in that vein. There he was, bag-in-hand--Colt therein, forty ways to assuage his weariness. He struck up a conversation with Roberto, an ex-army man lacking lower teeth (retaining only hounds), far too compromised to lay claim to Hellenic Formalism. I must say, James found Roberto quite distateful; my expectation of his expectoration mounted with his threats to grace the Spaniard with the same. The full carriage rattled on silent, rapt to their salvos yet uncaring. But a revelation (more apocryphal, but as evocative as John's) averted apocalypse; they were, as James said, brothers-in-arms. Army and National Guard! The great gulf of ethnic hate which rended their clattering jaws was bridged in a moment by an idea precious enough to break all bonds of enmity. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Roberto reintroduced himself to his new compadre as Robert; James sublimated into Jaime; the two became fast friends and struck up a discourse on the encircling hounds who they, by their valor, had driven off. Through men like them the veil endures. As they conversed, a woman of fading charms and slackening face escaped her unfortunate placing between them, leaving the platonic lovers to rejoice in freedom.

Tragedy marred that day. Robert had to disembark, leaving Jaime (the miracle passes; James again) no outlet but your self-same flawed narrator. He tells me his quest: a search for a lost loved one, a son he cannot find. But the heartfelt plea is duplicitous in its irony; the drunk man shows me smiling a picture of a Costa Rican sloth he tore from a magazine, one of several identical images he bears. For sloths, being a sloth is okay (opines James), but not for man. The pallor in his eyes precludes ignorance of his words' import. A wandering nous strays to the Lyceum, and James regaled me with tales of his noble father's alma mater (alma mater virumque cano; broken meters, sour wordplay) which the son sought in heart alone, not deed. Man precludes himself from paradise's open gates. His skills were all pro patria; a sharpshooter, straight as an arrow (perchance to dream). That route in living lost, he had found a true friend, an ever-present intervener less intravenous than his other joys). His last candle, lit for Messiah. He quoted Solomon's Proverbs: laughter cures all ills, a salvific panacea (so much for sola fide). I questioned his textuality, and he referred me to the font and source (Dasani: replenish the source within). Sola scriptura. That at least pleased me. I've yet to confirm. But, like the lost visage of Robert, James vanished forever by destiny's inscrutable hand, and I alighted at Bleecker.

Coriander and Thyme

Churn the mortar and pestle. The lies lie ever at the root, all-consuming. Have you ever driven someone to tear away their facade? Grind away the mosaics. Break a man's law. Hidden truth beneath the fallacious vault of rainbows. You cannot but wash a man clean. A perpetual intermittent scouring shall lay plain the tabula non rasa of the nascent persona non grata. The duality of the false dichotomy uncovered by your wicked archaeology is utterly destructive. Do not bring your compatriots to the last dark. Jack Horner's wisdom waxed at terrestrial expense. Shofar! Shofar! Victory sprouts without exception from deceit, and thus is tarnished as soon as made. Jericho is the oldest city in the world.

No man eschews a glamour so easily maintained. Regnant duplicitousness entombs the shackled pneuma. Whether Amontillado, Antigone, or anchorites lie within, that wall's assiduous preservation precludes any subterranean yearning for annihilation. Pure-hearted Amytis (tritely, a true Medea) lived within the endless fathoms of the antelapsarian primal forest which denied civilization, its progenitor, she its captor. But the earth's own anger cracked this antique splendor, broke a man's facade, leaving little room for wonder. And that's all there is.

This Side of Utica: Act I

They sat in silence, side by side in the motorcar as it sped through the empty streets of downtown Utica. With eyes fixed on the pavement ahead, his left hand groped through his breast pocket while his right held steadfast against the wheel. A white package of cigarettes emerged from the folds of fabric; one cigarette clenched between his teeth was lit in a single, fluid motion. He inhaled.
"Put it out," she said. Her voice was hollow.
For ad instant he allowed his eyes to stray over the passenger seat, observing in silence the woman who sat beside him. Her dark tresses held up by pins that were the fashion had begun to fall loose and lay across her shoulders, her head, turned slightly to the right came to rest against her open palm and her eyes, heavily lidded, tok in the last breaths of the sun as it retreated behind the decrepit skyline. It had begun to rain.
"Put it out," she repeated, this time her throat rang with a hint of exasperation.
He inhaled again. Then ever so casually flicking the cigarette out the open window he watched in the rear view mirror as the ember faded into the growing night. With gaze once again fixed on the road his foot weighed heavily against the accelerator while his right hand came to rest on hers. It rained harder. The city shrank.

Genessee Genesis, Pt. 2

Jacobus van der Hoeken, after the departure of his wife, travelled west from Defreetsville to the isolated environs of what we would now call Utica. Here, he learned from the natives of the Oneida tribe valuable tricks of the trade, so to speak. It was here that he earnestly adopted the surname of Genessee and met his new wife, Ilse de Berg, a voluptuous Dutch maiden captured by the Indians and sold to van der Hoeken (Genessee) for a bushel of maize. Jacobus built a farm on the corner of what we would now call Bleeker Street, then a maze of deciduous trees with each acting as willful New World obscurantist for our would-be patroon. Repressed in nature, Jacobus turned to textiles. Yes, textiles! He was a man far ahead of his times. He needed no Industrial Revolution. His farm became his factory, and his son Ezekial soon became his farmer, transforming the virginal soil into a proto-Community Garden.

The year was 1700, and permanent residence in Utica was not to occur for another 74 years if you believe the all too misleading yet popular historians. Jacobus moved around the area, mapping the terrain and swimming in the rivers. He had found a joy, as it were. Yet, when he contracted scarlet fever at the age of 50 in 1711 he could do nothing but sink into the inexorable abyss of death. His body flew to the shades as the Mowhawk river still flies canal-ward to Albany then sea-ward down the Hudson past the world's biggest and greatest town once known as New Amsterdam. Inscrutable to the last, Jacobus left a will and a manual for Ezekial. The will promised his estate in its entirety if Ezekial eschew farming, marry an Oneida woman, and learn the textile trade secrets found in the manual...

Going Away

A brief post this time, I promise. This particular point is not a grand pronouncement or revelation. Rather, it's something very obvious to everyone already. I am feeling very sentimental. Tonight for the first time in a while.

Any given place is meaningless. Utica has about 25,000 households. So many of those houses and homes are virtually identical. Levittowns, suburban sprawl, mass-produced structures. Drive past them, fly over them with disdain. Each one is someone's home, and to them it's not the same. The same for cities. Utica is little different in kind from Albany or Scranton or Plattsburgh or even larger cities, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Columbus. It is not the history of these cities that make them special, not their economies or monuments or landmarks. Only when you leave and become bound by the walls of different gates can you see your lover's veil from without, its true beauty hidden, but not to you. Never to you.

Utica and the Ishtar Gate

Only the entirely desensitized can resist the inexorable drag of the urban lodestones which scatter the globe. Civilization saw its first fruits behind the cedar doors of Ishtar Gate, adorned with the emblem of the aurochs, for we shall never forget our roots. Bulls and dragons stood there too to protect the city. So even today. The 1930s saw the fertility goddess take up her guard again: the century's foe drew up the gate, a mockery in its perfect simulacrum, to herald the new dawn they darkly foreboded.

The Gate's polarizing power has drawn more and more to look on its glory: one person out of two lives in the shade it brought us. But since time out of mind, the covenant the Gate made with us seems less than sacrosanct.

The Gate brought teeming multitudes of the eager to Utica in the 19th century; they poured down the Processional Way, the Erie Canal, and found in truth the promise of aurochs, bull, and dragon fulfilled. Warp and weft, but by machine, and for the benefit of the entire land. They made colors never before seen by man, not from snails or berries but from purer and more vibrant substances never seen alone in nature. They made for themselves the tools the hand needed to earn its ease... manufacturing! Its aim, its own obsolescence, achieved, the machines worked for man and Utica flourished. In the 1920s, Utica was the radio capital of the world. The martial might of General Electric propelled the city to its zenith; here, the distance that had so long vanquished man became prey.

Two men with radios are side by side. Beyond the Gate's wildest dreams, Utica made possible for the first time the even yet unrealized reversal of Babel. Through pride and joy they tore turgid Nebuchadnezzar from his alabaster sepulchre (but his stink will still infect the world until we seal the door of his mausoleum forever).

But the Gate is a relic as forgotten as its city and a thousand others: Ur, Babylon, Seleucia, Ctesiphon, someday Baghdad; all once the largest city in the world, the latest is bound in manacles, but may yet evade its coup de grace: Ishtar's fickle bounty gives the lie to her open loins. Utica's lodestone is a grass-covered rock, infused with as great a power as that half-hearted image. Most of the people know. They leave. Piece by piece, they take the aurochs and bulls and dragons with them, until not even cows remain. But still some come to Utica, drawn by the Gate's vestigial visage and the need to fulfill that covenant, the same passion that made Babel rise.

The Native Sadism of Alfred Kinsey and the Mama-Papa Taxonomy Reports

What, no
other activity? Polonski is,
yes, no longer.

Tits, boobs,
big tits, huge tits, small tits, tiny tits, nice tits--
tons of tits,

Most were
classified, systematic, with a mixed diet
and cream floating

On top.
A robust picture is best restricted,
sometimes separated, shifting

Temperate forests
where great-bellied elegant-winged
chickadees discuss relatives

In claves.
The feeling, charge of rhythm, her feet against
the bed, hips

Squeezing him
relaxes desire, a pillow for Aquinas, or
"the serpent manners"

That explain
the available data, are not
slowing the angle

Or easing
the advantage your Persian slippers sense
simulating the clitoris.

Psychological contact,
that lively little she-devil, a common
ancestor in arms,

Nesting in
the aspect of focus, for the first
time is chosen.

Virgin hand
in range expansion suggests a nomenclature, since there
are no answers.

GIVE ME A MAN! Sayings from a 50s Fan Magazine Reprinted at ForeverYours.com with Permission of the Original Authors and Copyright Holders

Note:
the thing done
in this
photograph
was done
actually
in a Kodak
lab
in the 1940s:

I seem to recall
reading
some time back
an article in Reader's Digest
punctuated
with a frenetic
sensuality:

Big Jake!
The greatest guy I ever knew!

Out of his
mind with
apologies to John
Ford, so
shy and just
wanting to know
Hollywood,
a man to
lean on. . .

When we
put on,
tall and easy,
took to the
island
we used to go
each summer,
this trick of
Duke's--
well, rape
happens: Get away
as fast as you can!

I was nice
and relaxed, asking
the
National Institute
of Health for
the real thing, its
meaning, remember
that?

Beauty,
though often suppressed,
is waiting to
come to
adore her
children
and dote on
her pals, only
she can't, at
least in no
one place:
the extra
mile
stops at
nothing.

Is it true
love?

Envision
which scenario
cracks
eye contact
like
a hawk
eyeing its
first date.

Is it true,
love?

I can
picture
the day and
one thing's for
sure:
It don't need
continual analysis: Just
watch:

My sister Sue
(right)
is holding a
tiny sparrow.

Fire

The Utica summer began on the 29th of May with another portent of the ruin that clear truth foretells and Pandora's gift conceals beneath an artful glamour. The F.X. Matt brewery burned half to the ground, a candle in a final vigil. The serene tabernacle took root in 1888, a trinity of years after Francis Xavier Matt, first of his name, yearning to breathe free in an untainted new world, forsook the Black Forest which had succored his line since first roving bands out of the farthest reaches of Ultima Thule had laid down their weariness beneath the beautiful interplay of light and shadow which those trees engendered.

A sparkle in his eye led Francis Xavier to Utica, never knowing that 130 years later his gift to the world would perish much as the progenitor of its location. No praetorians coaxed up these pillars of flame, but the Matts bear no name but Barca. Generations of love and toil they lavished on their home, but the gladius of fate brooks no consequence it does not choose. The air fills with poison, toxic smog, the earth plowed with salt, prosperity is desert sand. Nothing at all remains. Join your voice to mine and sing the last canticle.

Nick Matt vows to rebuild. The mayor exhorts the people to imbibe in solidarity with their chastened paladins. But no one has ever defeated Rome.


Only barbarians.

Genessee Genesis, Pt. 1

Upon review, my previous post seems rather curt, and I would like to rectify my reputation on this blog through an injection of gravitas. As I mentioned in "Bleecker Street Blues," my family originally hails from Utica. We date back to days of the great Dutch migration to the New World. Those days of yore, when Peter Stuyvesant was regent of New Amsterdam and the Fondas established a proto-cinematic settlement under the grey hues of upstate New York. In the following years, Vernon De Freets was to capture the metaphysical torment and spiritual chaos that, in a perpetual ebb and flow, ran through the oft-seeming monotonous landscapes that crawled out from the primordial basin of the Mowhawk river.

My earliest relative in the colonies, Jacobus van der Hoeken, was disowned for marrying a sexually precocious Seneca girl (perhaps representative of the strain that this foreign soil would have on his nerves). Exiled from the burgeoning Dutch community, Jacobus adopted the name Genesee (a Seneca word meaning "pleasant valley") and then changed it to Genessee (adding the extra "s" in order to pass as British). He converted to Calvinism, but lost his faith when his dear wife (her name unknown to this day) departed for Montreal with a Quebecois fur trapper with a lisp as noticeable as his aversion to effete Old-World-ism. A rugged man for sure, but certainly a troublesome rake, who, if we are to believe the records at the Montreal city hall, drowned himself with the Molson Ice Expedition Company in Newfoundland. His soul, according to the subtext of that document, was as likely to flourish in city-life as Jonas Salk was as likely to find a cure for the clap (which never happened--an addendum that the self-conscious historiographer must always attach).

Isolated, alienated, abandoned for a drink-sodden frog from Montreal, Jacobus fell into effeminancy. The land...too tiresome. The soil...too rocky. Prospects...bluish-green. Yet, his basket-weaving and innovations in textile would eventually elevate him to a higher stratum where his family would reside until a disastrous financial decision during the War of 1812.

The Death of the Pastoral

Gone are the days of simple, ordinary sorrow. Do you remember the embers of the campfire, glowing low, sure to fizzle? As we navigated the circuitous path, gradually finding the spot clearest on a moonless night, and you asked Who is leading us?, and I felt the tremors crumble down my narrow spine, and felt anything but assured, and called back to you, Godot! Godot! It's Godot we're following! Then I felt like moving and never standing still. The night took me up into its airborne wings, and in the winds of our slow decay I knew the meaning of at-one-ment for the briefest moment.

In that brightest glare you looked upon me as if I were a wise man from another time, (in those days) a magi wearing the rags of the shepherd. You dug your heels into the earth, and I felt your desire ripple through the blackened dirt and coal. I knew your name, and you knew mine; what could be more plain? I was the Nazarene in his shop, eyes intent upon what?, before the fiery claw of the unmoving mover clutched him and flew him to the Tree of Life where a bleating lamb sits and bellows. For heaven's sake don't move for you are fast in the fire's gaze.

What my fingers touched expired like a sigh into air.

And afterward you laughed at the scrapes on your knees. Suck me of my essence, and you answered aright, having spent your last scream. You watched me as I looked away and found the earth's center in the maturing balance of the sapling. Your body makes a beautiful figure with its speech, you said, and I blushed for the first time in my life. You laughed euphoric in the night's euphony.

And then what meteor fell to earth? Time allowed us this greenery before it sent a debtor to reclaim its debt of hours, days, weeks, months...The moon is no crescent but a scythe to reap the harvest! And in solitary places, later but not much later, I tried to envision your slow maneuvers in the voice appealing through a jukebox. Finally, in the darkened booth where the moving pictures flash before us, I saw your face on the silver surface, and near-refused to recall the emblazoned night you said you would always remember as your screen test.

Decadence

Gaudiness epitomizes desolation. Both are the inevitable result of decadence.

The Stanley's Mexican baroque architecture, Hotel Utica's overwrought pretense. Both true beauty once but built and conceived sourly. The foundations and fruits of every empire lie in undeserved labor. Glory offends the sight of God. Yet both of these facades cast a pallor of twice-false hope on this turgid city; first, that it shall again regain its lost cultural crown; second, that it should seek such a mantle. This city brims with misplaced hope. The Stanley cannot succeed. The grand balustrades and chandeliers of the Hotel belie something so mundane as a vast tax debt to a city urgently in need. This corner of the empire lies in ruins already, and its truest benefactors have given it what it most deserves: peace. Let Utica die.

Where is the Phoenix?

It's time for a sojourn. I realised this as soon as I awoke. Since I graduated with my B.A. in psychology from you know where (departmental honors, bitch!), I eschewed the more prestigious position of teaching for america (tm) which is so damn corporate I couldn't even stand to try it. Instead it's been all about the Utica Salvation Army for me. Very few residents of this once august regional metropolis enter the latest and greatest instantiation of the Church Militant, save for those few innocent souls who like myself wish to serve their fellow man in an unpaid volunteer capacity. A mighty fortress is our quasi-warehouse! The Army brings in a lot of income that otherwise wouldn't ever grace this city because of all the people who come from you know where to shop for ironic clothing or stuff for costume parties. The revenue they bring in helps us support this city's most vibrant scene, the Underground Cafe, which is the very sort of reformation this city needs to combat the corruption of its old-time papa. Nevertheless despite the bounty we bring to those in need, the veil of tears lies heavy on this burgh. The ennobling of its human spirit occurs in tandem with the decrepitation of its physical glory. The once regnant skyline of central new york now watches its own decay, ashen-faced. The Hotel Utica has surrendered its own summits to the wrath of poverty; the Stanley is a vaudevillian necropolis scrambling for a hold, invested with no power but nostalgia. Even the bank's Constantinopolitan dome begins to gleam with tarnish. The stately pleasure of riches has departed this city for greener pastures (Syracuse). Only the churches remain unspoiled, and I know that soon too I must depart.

-Elissa O'Lincolnlog

Bleecker Street Blues

The edited version: I'll leave it all as subtext...so modernist...Super sike. Well, that's it for now, I need to go to a clambake in Duxbury tonight. More to come...but, by the way, although my family originally hails from Utica (my surname's a dead giveaway) we've been Bostonians since my great-grandfather Cornelius Genessee got a scholarship to Milton Academy.

From a Buick Apolonian

This thing, that hath a code and not a core,
Hath set acquaintance where might be affections,
And nothing now
Disturbeth his reflections.

- Ezra Pound, "An Object"