Juan Martínez Montañés (1568 -- 1649), el Dios de la Madera

Above are two portraits of Francis Borgia (1510 -- 1572), fourth Duke of Gandía, Commander of the Society of Jesus, Hidalgo, Husband (of Leonor de Castro Mello y Menenses), Father (of eight children), Founder of the Collegium Romanorum, now the Gregorian University, and a top-notch composer of ecclesiastical music, of which, a century before Palestrina--with great skill and a remarkable contrapuntal style--he is said to have been "among the great restorers." The one on the left is a painted wooden effigy by Montañés, the one on the right (above) an oil-painting by whom I know not, though it appears to be in the style of El Greco.

The thing that scares me and scandalizes me about myself is that, for all his repellent baldness, I find the fourth Duke of Gandía, in  his painted wooden effigy by Montañés, incredibly sexy.  Forgive me, Father.  I'd do him in a heartbeat.

From Wikipedia:  "His works are more realistic than imaginative, but this, allied with an impeccable taste, produced remarkable results."  No shit.

Sorry, Ladies (Sissies, Trannies and neo-Marxist Feminists)--Masculinity is NOT a Social Construction...

And, for the matter of that, Social Constructionism (good as it makes you feel about yourselves) is a Crock of Shit.

In living, self-evident proof of which I present Louis XV de Bourbon of France, as portrayed by Maurice Quentin de la Tour, who knew his sitter well, and was known and liked by him, although, being what we would call autistic--perhaps even somewhat bi-polar--the artist was not able to reciprocate the king's generous friendship.  Still, de la Tour was at one and the same time (arguably, of course) the most photo-realistic and the most acutely perceptive (perhaps a function of his mental illness) portraitist who ever lived--and he gives us Louis XV, "le bien aimé," as he totally and undeniably was:  A man.  A virile man, in fact, without a trace or smidgen of the feminine in his constitution, whose essential, innate masculinity neither powdered wig (and face powder, and perhaps a little lip rouge) nor frilliness of attire, nor perky, rococo, smiling-eyed affect can disguise.   Because, you see, Ladies--and, if you look close, you will see in this portrait that--masculinity is an innate and essential quality which cannot be learned, cannot be taught, cannot be faked, and can't even (pace, Shakespeare!) be dissembled.  Conversely, the trannies, sissies, Postmodern feminists, and hoarse-voiced girls in trousers who do attempt to imitate masculinity are, with no exceptions that I can think of,  grotesque, hysterical, (and, the more seriously they try to ape what they imagine to be masculine characteristics) sickening and insulting caricatures of men.  

That I lead a Charmed Life...

That, for no reason I can think of, Heaven seems anxious to please me and to gratify my particular needs and wants--within a quarter of a day of my having become aware of and formulated them--is borne out with inarguable circumstantial proof (I daresay) by the events of my life yesterday:

It was an apartment inspection day, with a scheduled visitation by the cockroach (sometime bedbug) exterminator in the morning, and of general overseeing by our lovely lady apartment manager, Ms. Gomes; so I rose early, augmented my lawful dose of amphetamines with iced Café du Monde, and, after a curtailed session at the computer (checking email, scanning the news), I set to, picking up, sweeping, scrubbing the floor.  The visitations over, I lay back down for a late morning nap that lasted until about one O'Clock in the afternoon; what time, getting up again, I got back online to pursue the chimera of "gay male misogyny," and was about to blog my piquant and intransigeant reflections on that interesting subject--when, suddenly (around 2:00 p.m.), my keyboard died. Seriously, died.  Obviously it was the keyboard which had failed, not the computer, but once I had shut the computer down, I could get back online only in limited mode because, with the reduced functionality of the keyboard, I couldn't type my Chief User's password.  And there it was:  I was facing the horrible prospect of being computer-less till the first of next month--a week--until I would have money to buy another keyboard.  With that realization lying upon me like a pall, I lay back down, not so much to sleep as to avoid consciousness, until it was time (5:00 p.m.) to rise to get ready for the 7:00 free supper at the River of Life (the Honolulu equivalent of the Salvation Army).

It was then, standing in line with many another of God's Unfortunates, waiting to get into the River of Life dining hall, that I had a consciously virtuous thought (which may, or may not, have had some bearing on the day's subsequent bestowing of Providential Grace):  "I don't know whether the kind folks who provide the meal whereof I am about to partake are mere Christians (whose beliefs I hold in contempt) or not, but I accept the charity they offer me with humility and gratitude." Curiously, on my way out, having supped, I bumped fists with the man whom I call the Major-Domo of the River of Life (He seems to run the place), even as I murmured my usual thanks--a gesture which I am too old to find natural, and never ordinarily practice--and it was an astonishingly affecting instant/moment, spontaneous and graceful, on both our parts, which left me afterwards, as I walked the two short blocks to the bus stop to catch the Number One bus home, feeling as if I'd just been kissed by someone I like.  

At the bus stop were Mike and Jennifer, a homeless couple nearly the same age as me, as clearly devoted to one another as they are married to a homeless lifestyle, but distingués in ironic, aristocratic (or bourgeois) speech and manner from the vulgar, simple wretches whom they seem to embrace as their social equals.  With Jennifer I have amusing, out-of-time, just-an-edge-onto-Eternity little conversations, as one does with one's aristocratic (or bourgeois) friends, while with Mike I am sympathetic and good-humored even when he blusters at me.  And I said, to both of them, "Where do you guys live?"

They both replied, "Nowhere."

"Then where do you sleep?"

"Outside."

"Hmm," quoth I,  " I just read that, in the days before Missionaries, ordinary Hawaiians--na Kanaka--slept outside."  And before I could shut myself up I was telling them the true story of how I arrived here seven years ago with no direction home, and, after six months' purgatory in the Homeless Men's Shelter, by no virtue or merit of my own, I found myself virtually the lifetime leaseholder of this lovely little apartmentino on the edge of the university.  And then (the bus being late) I told Jennifer a brief version of the true, unedifying story of how I financed my college education, concluding, "If I had walked into a bank and pointed a gun at some poor teller and demanded their money, I'd be in prison.  Instead, I let the fools send me their credit cards."  Then the bus finally came, and I rode home, closing my eyes and trying to forget the great loss (the dead keyboard) at the center of my being.  

Home at last, I went round to the park lot to check my mail (pizza coupons), and found a tall, middle-aged oriental  (South Korean, I subsequently discovered) man standing to one side overlooking the parked motor scooters, and for some reason engaged him in conversation--talking about the beauty, utility and comparative prices of motor scooters (in which normally I have about as much interest as I do in Kim Kardashian's fat, nasty ass).  Then the conversation veered, and we discovered that we are fellow tenants (James and I) here in the Weinberg Hale, and that we both have computers, and that James in fact has two computers--"You wouldn't by any chance have an extra keyboard?"

And here I am.

P.S.  Unsurprisingly (though I hadn't considered it), with my new keyboard, the Accent Grave that I had so sorely been missing for so long has been restored:  Voilà!

Inventing Music

Finally, in the fall of 1975, when I was thirty-three years old--after more than three decades of listening to music, playing music, and thinking about music--I wrote a short song, 'This Is My Blood,' which was the very definition of a song:  4-part choir (or 4 single voices), with optional, or for rehearsal only, organ duplication of the notes; the music being entirely and organically derived from the text (verses from the Gospel of Mark), one syllable per note, with only two melismas (on the words "shed" and "vine") for pictorial/graphic effect; sung (all 4 parts) in the person of Jesus Christ.  Which is an idea I apparently stole from Thomas Tallis, whose 'If you love me, keep my commandments' has much the same affect and the same effect.  A friend, fellow composer and professional musician to whom I showed the piece said, "It is very correct."  And, I think he meant, exiguous.  Yet, in summoning 'This Is My Blood' from its repository on the Astral Plane (or Lunar Sphere), and re-perusing it, I am still amazed (as if it had been written by someone else) at its boldness and compendiousness as a Gradus Primus ad Parnassum; how successfully it defines, and deals with, counterpoint, harmony and voice-leading--and, incidentally, binary form.  Of particular note also is its status as specifically a religious song, of a religion whereof I am not a communicant, and which I personally believe to be (as religions go) a damned, false, vulgar, hysterical barbarism--and yet, I dare say, I have well and fairly expressed even its innermost mysteries (or what its adherents believe to be such) without the least occasion of scandal for the faithful, or the slightest perceptible intrusion of my own utter disbelief.  As, I believe, any competent artist ought always to be able to do.

Das Judentud in der Musik

Yesterday, for a variety of reasons, I finally sat down and read this notorious screed of Wagner's about which throughout my life I have heard such awful things.  Despite its proto-Postmodernist willful ambiguity and convoluted indirection--and beneath a contemptibly snobby, patently phony professorial affect--it's clear to me what he meant:  (1) Mendelssohn nearly suffocated himself in the neo-classical, linear conservative tradition (agreed).  (2) Meyerbeer wrote nothing but awful vulgar noisy claptrap for vulgar noisy people (couldn't have said it better myself).  (3)  Wagner simply can't get his head around the fact of what a stone genius Heine was, or admit, for one second, how wonderfully beautiful Schumann's songs set to lyrics of Heine are.  (4) The animadversions on Jews and Jewishness are quite simply stupid and negligeable in the way that ALL German philosophy is pompous and stupid and much concerned to demonstrate the truth of things which aren't so--and aren't even, really, at all interesting.  Hegelian Idealism.  Viennese Depth Psychology.  Phrenology.  Bullshit.

The thing is, this is all pretty much a defense of himself by a man who had written, or was about to write Tristan und Isolde, die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and der Ring des Niebelungens--not to mention the 'Siefried Idyll'--(arguably, the greatest music ever written) and if that's how other people's music sounded to him...Well, I admit I'm troubled by his dismissal of Bach.  But he hit Mendelssohn, with his 'Reformation Symphony,' square on the head, as he did the vulgar, noisy awfulness of Meyerbeer.  And Heinrich Heine of course was a nasty, squalid sort of person (as was Wagner), but I don't think, really, it had anything to do with his being Jewish.  

Talking to Phil on the Phone night before last...Actually I guess the night before that--

watching the moon rise--while he was talking from the edge of a meadow in the broad morning light of Westphalia, some 40 kilometers east of Cologne--We ran through a variety of topics, dwelling lovingly on some (like the precise Castilian intonation, with just a hint of a lisp, in which Doña Sofía warbles "esos exhibicionistas pervertidos"), flitting like may-bugs over and past such colossal turds in the punchbowl of the world as the increasing U.S. military presence in Iraq and "our" support of fascism in Ukraine--and suddenly Phil was blurting, "After all, isn't everything vibration?  And periodicity?  And Time?  Isn't Time the same as Being?"  

And I, of course, said "Hell, yes!  And the infinite permutations of Time,  Event, Vibration and Sequence are..."

"The Harmony of the Music of the Spheres--and of J.S. Bach!"

Well, something like that.

O Westron Wynde

Delving but a little into the subject of "Tudor composers" for my morning wake-up Google, I discovered the amazing and arresting fact that this lovely quatrain,

                 O Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
                  That the small raine down can rain?
                  Chryst, if my love were in my armes,

                  And I in my bedde again!

was madly popular in the early 16th century, just as it is (or was), with no additions, extensions, or dip-shit, inept and superfluous follow-up verses, [such as Roger Jackson (whoever the hell he is) tacked on as recently as this very year 2014 of the Common Era; which I will not quote, because they sicken, annoy and disgust me, as well as bastardize, vulgarize and, like a bad fart, inflate and needlessly particularize the gender of "love," while informing the Whole Wide World (in the creepily, anxiously exhibitionist manner of a heterosexual who has been alarmed and threatened by gender-ambiguity, and which makes one fundamentally doubt his sincerity--and his heterosexuality, if it comes to that) that he "does love her so." 

Anyway, this sweet, and poignant and brief little poem--which on first hearing smites anyone who knows English, gay or straight, with an unappeasable ache in the genitals, in the heart and in the throat--was used, respectfully, entire but unamplified, by three different early 15th century English composers (John Taverner, Christopher Tye, and John Sheppard) as cantus firmus for their respective masses.  

How very different the thought and mindset of the jolly French 'Homme Armé' from the bittersweet, melancholic English 'Westron Wynde'!

Apodicticity!

Has anyone besides me ever noticed the similarity in the expression on the faces, in repose, of Mary Baker Eddy and Mark Twain?  Not that either would have welcomed the comparison, still it's there:  The word that comes to my mind (having just re-read the Nun's Priest's Tale  for the umpteenth time) is "vulpine."  A gentle-seeming, predatory watchfulness, not unmixed with admiration (presumably of any ex tempore singing they might be listening to).  It reminds me that recent (within the last couple of decades) Russian experiments in breeding captive Siberian foxes have resulted in the virtually perfect domestication of foxes--an animal hitherto thought to be untamable.    But that aside (because, though interesting, it's irrelevant), it is to Mark Twain and his keen-tongued dissection of the Mother of Christian Science's billowy/pillowy prose-style that I owe my own use, and hyperbolic misuse (i.e., wrong, but deliberate, over-use), of the words "apodicticity" and "apodictic," which I have only since yesterday decided to adopt.  Basically, in my usage, it is the assertion of the inarguable (oh shut up) truth of certain legal and political presuppositions, which are held to be proved and demonstrated by their acknowledged outcomes.  Examples of Apodicticities:

1)  That Abraham Lincoln was (as, while assassinating him, his assassin said he was) a tyrant is proven by his having abrogated the First and Fourth Amendments, and denied the rights of Habeas Corpus and due process to his political opponents; by his prosecution of the Civil War (resulting in the loss of more than 750,000 young men's lives); and by his military invasion of the states of the Confederacy and destruction of the property of non-combatants.  Think how much greater as a nation (or as several nations) we would be if Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated four years earlier!

2)   Chief among the apodictic proofs that 9/11 was indeed an inside job, are the Patriot Act, and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.

Leyendo, Siempre Leyendo

Slogging grimly on through the Paradiso (what I hate, hate, hate, in literature written before the Enlightenment and after the Great Oath that everybody swore in the late Fourth Century to believe only in Christianity,  is how much was "known" that was just not so), I have now also with me several books in Spanish (I just discovered that there's a Spanish section at the library):  a collection of recent Mexican short stories, a poignant memoir of Chile's plunge into horror under Pinochet,  a history of the "Surge" in Iraq (Bajo las Bombas), and Seymour Hersh's The Chain of Command (Obediencia Debida): The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.  All of which I'm taking to the beach on the bus with me this afternoon, and will read in sequence, one after another, till the tears in my eyes make me stop.

Up indeed betimes, with our feral Chanticleer steadily proclaiming the changing Orizontality of the Sonne--

Dame Pertilote's wilde paramour and my Apple clock together telling me it's 5:47 a.m.--I will soon be abroad, a-bus, and Taking Care of Business:  paying back an installment on the Great Debt I was suffered to incur from Housing Solutions, Inc. last summer (on the occasion of having my apartment fumigated for bedbugs, which Thank-the-Lord worked); rendering unto Netflix, by return mail, their DVD copy of The Fellowship of the Ring.  About which, not to seem churlish, I am as well pleased as anybody might be who has read the beloved original, maybe, thirty times--After all, that is Strider, and Boromir, and Legolas (in the persons of Viggo Mortensen, and Sean Bean, and Orlando Bloom who portray them) in the flesh.  But the too-early intrusion of Arwen and the exclusion of Glorfindel at the ford of Bruinnen is a monstrous fucking  goddamned blasphemous usurpation. And if Peter Jackson should protest that otherwise the narrative had been too exclusively male, without gender balance, I would answer, for him maybe, but, for those of us who constitute the vast majority of the Lord of the Rings' readership and viewership (and let's face it, girls don't understand TLOFTR, or get it, or like it),  having a male (high) elf (lord) set Frodo on his horse, Asfaloth, to ride  through the ford of Bruinnen and to call down the destruction of its torrent on the steeds of the ring-wraiths is important work, in which girls, be they elf-maidens or no, can, and should, have no part.  (Because they're fuckin' dip-shit girls.)

Abdication of Juan Carlos, and Accession of "los Príncipes," Don Felipe de Astúrias y su Principesa, la Doña Letizia, announced today

Sometimes the news is all good and makes you want to cry for happy.  If anybody deserves to be king and queen of Spain it's the astonishingly handsome, well qualified, competent, "intachable" Don Felipe (who will reign as Felipe VI) and his lovely, stunningly beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent wife, Doña Letizia.  They are both in their own right remarkable people, devoted to one another and to the welfare of their country.  Let's hope that, for once, the Spanish people, while quietly decapitating all the many hydra heads of Fascism (voting them into oblivion), will grasp the opportunity, offered them as subjects of this profoundly democratic constitutional monarch, to realize all their many distinctive national characters in one civilized, democratic republic, Andalusian, Castillian,  Aragonese, Gallician, Basque, and Catalanese alike.  (Did I forget anybody?)  Don Felipe's own word for a Spanish nation so constituted is "diversa."


¿Did I forget any Autonomous Regions or Cities?  Hah!  Of the former (Autonomous Regions) there are fully 17:  Anadalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Balearic Islands, Basque country, Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castile-la Mancha, Castile-Leon, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre, Region of Valencia; of the latter (Autonomous Cities) there are 2:  Ceuta and Melilla.   Sometime very soon I'm going to get me a geographical history of Spain and spend a week or so reading it.  Do they all have their own dialects and local customs--these regions, and districts and cities and "countries"?  What makes them all Spanish?  At what point does diversity become stiff-necked recalcitrance?  How in the world could you tax them all?  What made them (¿all?) so Gay-friendly?--some of them, I would guess, more, and some of them less so.  The Greek Queen Sofia, soon to be "dowager," we know, is as homophobic as, in all Christian charity, she dares let herself be--and her naughty subjects, at least in the Zarzuela district of Madrid, say that that's about what they'd expect from a Greek Queen.  Indeed, even "la Corte" (¿Doña Letizia?) is at some pains to distance itself from Sofia, almost seeming to shush her--and it appears that only when she gets to far St. Petersburg, among the decorous, "anti-Carthaginian" Russian orthodoxy, schmoozing with the ever-pleasant, ever-polite Medvedev, that she can really let her hair down and say what she wants about "esos exhibicionistas pervertidos."  At any rate, the vast majority (89% at last count) of the Spanish people seem to find Sofia's outspoken homophobia offensive, and presumably make some sort of connection between it and Juan Carlos's appalling propensity for butchering elephants.

"Leopold," the white rat, came to live with us at 322-B Baker Street in San Francisco towards the middle of October, 1968.

Like the majority of us, he was a young male, past adolescence but not yet fully grown, single, and with no outstandingly bad habits (except of course for peeing everywhere he went, and pooping wherever it suited him--but it was a large apartment [This was before Gentrification], which we were fairly assiduous in sweeping out every two or three days, and we didn't worry too much about it).  As all of us had done, basically, when we came to live there, he just showed up one day, out of nowhere, and stood on his hind legs in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen, politely waiting to be acknowledged, and then joined us, going from one to the other of us and sitting on our knees and climbing up on our shoulders.  Like us, San Francisco being what it was then, he had a knack for making everybody in the room feel welcome.  So we petted him, and bumped noses with him, and let him climb on us, and put down little saucers on the kitchen floor of whatever we could think of that a rat might like to eat or drink, and begged him at least to consider pooping in the garbage.  And we called him Leopold, simply to have something to call him.

Everyone smoked cigarets in those days.  Those who didn't, like Dennis, our senior housemate at 322-B, suffered horribly from the ubiquitous suffocating miasma of cigaret smoke, and often said so, but were ignored.  I also smoked of course, but, in a partially successful effort to cut down, and to add to my repertory of genteel 18th century affectations and mannerisms, I began in the late 1960's to sniff snuff.  I quickly found out, however, that having the occasional piss-elegant pinch of snuff, like getting fucked in the ass, is something which, if you are not utterly to disgrace yourself, you must diligently and scrupulously, and with much forethought, prepare for:  (1) In the first place, how do you get the snuff, in just the right amount, at just the right force of aspiration, and with a minimum of ado, into your nostril?  Instinctually, with my habitual child-of-Virgo Pudeur and refinement, I shrank from the pretentious display and pother of shaking out a certain amount of tobacco from the slot in the outer circumference of a small tin wheel (the form in which it was packaged by the Dean Swift Snuff Company) onto the web between my first finger and thumb, and thence conveying the snuff to my nostrils with a flamboyant gesture that covered half my face.  "No," I said, "let it be an honest, precise pinch of snuff, measured by eye and hand from an open container, and delivered with a discreet gesture to the nostril(s) between the thumb and forefinger."  Adieu, therefore, to fussy round tin cookies, and Salut! to winsome colored plastic boxes, with lids sufficiently tight to carry loose and ready-to-hand in my outer pockets without spilling their contents. I soon was carrying two practical, modern, very pretty snuff boxes in my coat pockets:  a diminutive emerald green plastic box, about 1 1/4" square for mentholated "Dr. Johnson," and an amber plastic box of the same size and dimensions for Dean Swift's exquisite, sandalwood-scented "Inchkenneth."  (2) In the second place, you must deal with the fact that the nose is really not a good place to stick things: the pleasant, peppery, perfumed powder, once aspirated, and having done its momentary soothing and prickling, quickening and clarifying of one's thoughts, must and will be expelled--as dark brown snot; lizard shit to all appearances.  You must, in short, have something to blow your nose on.  And here again the Modern Age, with Disposable Paper Tissues, proves itself infinitely superior to ages past; I never went out without two mini-packs of Kleenexes in my pockets.  I was so taken, moreover, with the beauty and convenience of my little plastic snuff boxes that I bought bigger ones in the same colors--several times as big--to store the snuff I bought in bulk, and kept them on the mantle of the fireplace in the living room.  And, of course, I invited any who might wish to to help themselves to a pinch whenever they wanted.  For this was the height of the Hippie Renaissance in the Haight-Ashbury and we shared everything, even things that no one else wanted.

Surprisingly, it took me more than a week after he came to live with us to think to offer Leopold a pinch of snuff. As I'd expected he would be, he was indifferent to the sharp menthol of Dr. Johnson, but when I took the lid off the box of Inchkenneth and extended it to him, he grabbed it and laid his little head right in it, and stood on his hind legs and did a little dance, and wandered off sideways. So--what the hey--I left the box open for him when I went to bed.  The next morning my small personal box of Inchkenneth was empty where I'd left it--and the big storage box of Inchkenneth which had been on the mantle was lying on the hearth, sprung open and half empty, with many, many little rat footprints in it and around it...and Leopold was gone, and we never saw him again.