Javier Fernandez Audiencia Reyes de España en la Zarzuela Madrid

Javier Fernandez Audiencia Reyes de España en la Zarzuela Madrid

There are many things to say about this charming video.  One (thing) is, you'll notice, Javi's father is about to bust his gussets with sheer  pride and joy to be there recibido en audiencia por los reyes para honorar a su hijo. Nice man, I like to see him thrilled. And you'll notice too that Doña Letitzia does to Javi what of course a queen should be able to do to adorable young male subjects and air-kisses him.  Javi didn't say that it was on account of the Queen kissing him, but he did say that the audience was maybe the biggest deal in his whole life. And that, IMO, is what monarchs are for.  What amazes me is how educado our young hero is, as I remember his father saying he was, and how adorably cariñoso. 

Koko the Gorilla with Robin Williams.mp4

I haven't watched anything of poor, tragic, brilliant Robin Williams since he killed himself, but I found this irresistible.

Call From Margo

Bless her.  We talked about tea: How necessary it is to have a replacement-tea for those unfortunate but inevitable times that you run out of your essential Darjeeling.  We spoke of Assam and Nilgiri.  I didn't get to prattle on about the Western Ghats, as I usually like to do (being somewhat infatuated with the mere fact of their existence), because we  had other things to talk about; I also did not tell her that my latest shipment of Ruby Darjeeling (which arrived just when she called) has cost me some 200+ dollars--In case she should be running out, and might be needing some more, and can't afford it, and I might have to step forth and send her some (more). I did give her the web address of Teabox.com and reminded her that tea has ('tis said) curative powers.  Which is not something that I say lightly to someone whom I know to be afflicted with breast cancer.  And then I told her the story of the Israeli doctor who discovered cannabinoids and the cannabinoid-receptor system.  Then I mentioned (more to change the subject than anything) that I'm in favor of forcing all Canadians to learn French, even if they live in British Columbia--and retold my favorite self-story about sitting next to the old lady who spoke only French, from northern Ontario, on an airplane--and how I loved understanding her and her life's story in her own words. Which really did happen, and, I insist, when I stand before the Judges of the Dead, will be brought forth in evidence in determining my Next Incarnation. And Margo said how she would love for me to meet and talk with her older brother Jay, who has most of his life been a sitting (as I think I've heard said. curious.) judge in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and who has definite opinions on the subject of French in Canada. Sounds fun.

☆MAD☆「永遠の絆」～ゆづとハビの 物語☆羽生結弦☆Javier Fernández

2016 Worlds Men LP Javier Fernandez Guys and Dolls

This is also, probably, the best damned figure skating ever done by an entirely masculine straight man; it is precious for glimpses of austere beauty only conceivable, only perceivable, and only attainable by those with high testosterone levels in both their brains and bodies.

Javier & Yuzuru

Tout à propos, the chemistry between these two--love, if you will--is so patent, so luminous, it'd take a zen aphorist like Saikaku to convey the beauty of it.  But it's there, plain as day: gay-friendly straight man/bisexual, talented Japanese boy.  Samurai/shield-bearer. Wow. I almost don't care if they have sex. I hope so; but it really doesn't matter, because it's there, in that beautiful young Spaniard's eyes--and in the perfect social composure (despite his tears) of that other, extremely clever young man (could be a female impersonator), whom I now recognize, perhaps, as a great kabuki boy-actor in a former incarnation.

¡Hisahito is a Hottie!

Having just read, and re-read, Ihara Saikaku's Great Mirror of Nanshoku--and lots of other legalistic and scholarly struff on the Edo Period, and in general, of Japanese history--and being a fan, I'd like to remind his young Imperial Majesty that there have been, before, young imperial majesties who had special friends who were seven or eight (or nine or ten) years older than they were. And it certainly didn't do them any harm.

The Ultimate Flesh-eating Lizard was of course Richard Nixon--

If he had the power to morph into human shape, as shape-shifting lizards are reputed to have the ability to do, he could not control it.  He was as he was. One develops a certain sympathy, I hear, when one lives and moves among our aristocracy, for those who are put-upon by Characters they can't very well not speak to. God he was a vulgar man. And people still don't know it.

How Cannabinoids Cause Cancer Cells to Die

¿Quackery? Yes, but sufficiently like the truth that it cannot be denied.  I think, if I were an aristocratic flesh-eating lizard from outer space, that I would find it unsettling.

Eventually, what I'm saying is, there is a certain energy, both peaceful and inexorable, that connects with everything, somewhat in the nature of a Passenger Liner.

Life aboard it is everything that the era that launched it can conceive of of leisured refinement and elegance. It is, while it traverses the emptiness of interstellar space, or the ocean, or the air, a world unto itself. Some men, ship's crew or licensed envoys, may spend most of their lives aboard; others only a few days--but there is no want, and no stinting, either of the necessities of life, or of luxuries. It might not matter (too much) if there are risks; boilers may explode, but there is always excellent coffee, hot and fresh, at any hour of the day or night, with inviolate long siestas in the afternoons.

I am evoking here the Kami (such as I have lately learned of) of the Flying Cloud (which, in its original shape and fitting, with inlays, was exquisitely--one might almost say daintily--beautiful), the Normandie, the Hindenburg, and the Grand Turk, the which, in Shinto, I may believe in, and, in the (not inconceivable) event of my being sincere and virtuous, may hope to see realized.  Which is pretty much what has already happened, for me, actually, in Colorado and the Pacific States with marijuana legalization, and everywhere with Gay Rights.  I wasn't collecting any Karmic Debt, but I very much wished for these things to happen--and I now have tea to drink and pot to smoke to alleviate my diabetic neuropathy.

Furthermore, I expect, as a sincere and virtuous devotee of Shintoism and Buddhism and American Transcendentalism, to see this Passenger Liner phase of human civilization realized (made real), with the full authority of a fucking Galactic Empire* behind it, starting about, say, a century and a half from now, for maybe a theoretical one thousand years, and maybe actually only five hundred years, of actual Civilization.  ¿Why not a Utopia with a built-in Historical Nostalgia Factor?  Like for example Classical Humanism?  Or say, Ruism?  ¡Gone With The Wind to the Stars!

I start back from that precipice with alarm.  No.  Really Not.  Still, something like this is true of Rome, with its tow'ring aqueducts and astounding fresh water supplies for everybody, and amazing poets and letter writers. But how can a man look another man in the eye and say, "You are my slave"? **...And, whereas the nasty, quite unnecessary business of punishing whole families, even the innocent grandkids thereof, seems to be a recurring legal solecism of Confucianists.  Really?  You think it wise or just?  How the fuck, you smug little Gook, do you arrive at that conclusion?  Again and again? Libya? Afghanistan? Iraq? Yemen?


*Shouldn't there be one?

**As Horace several times did, and understood the absurdity of, and wrote about with astonishing candor, but never once, that I know of, did the honorable thing and freed the man.

You see, Sometimes Hyperbole is the only Rhetorical Device that Makes Sense:

77,000 Buddhist temples in Japan?! And the Imperial Court sometimes calls on them all to work together?!  And but consider that I personally have seen interviews with yamabushi (¡!), many years younger than I, who talk openly and candidly about how they evaded the official suppression of their order, and are now back in business (which is basically magic).  On the fringe of the fringe, and/but deserving, from my point of view, maybe, of a whole lot of real excited ejaculations and exclamation marks, so as adequately to signal their actual extraordinary existence.

Trump Still Considering Military Intervention in Venezuela

Here's the boy pretending he "considers" things. Insolently (Who is he defying?) outrageous and cruel things. He was once and is still a prime-time television star, even when he considers. A being totally without compassion, honor or probity, who is, consequently, a puppet of the warmakers.  As they breathe, he squeaks.

There are, however, a discernible malevolence, together with an off-hand cruelty, in Trump's speech, and his manner of delivering it, that are instructive, and which afford virtually identifying insight into the actual (bad) character of those who hold the Reins of Power: Inhuman, I'd say, but possibly Aristocratic. Oddly so. Suggestive of Shape-Shifting Flesh-eating Lizards from Outer Space, one might almost think, of the sort to whom crèches* (egg-clutches) are determinants of class and rank  Definitely into Mexican toddlers à la Bave et au Sang. You can smell it on them. Like it's their national dish.



*The creature envisaged here is the Komodo Dragon--We've all seen the pictures of the late George Bush half morphed into one--a venomous and stupid animal.  Also notably, on occasion, parthenogenic, creating grave problems for the evolutionary biologist, and for those who earn their right to power by their birth-order.  It envenoms with its bite, but not with any particular venom except the utter foulness of its mouth. And it. or something like it, began thinking about the relation between a circle and a square, approximately one billion years ago on the second planet in orbit around the larger of the twin stars of Alpha Centauri.  Reptiles are way earlier on the scale of evolution than humans; no doubt, in worlds without catastrophes, such as befell us 67,000,000 years ago, the dominant life-form throughout the universe (though I hope, personally, that most of these turn into birds--as dinosaurs seem always to have been trying to do.).

But what peculiar circumstances, exactly, I envisage as likely to promote classical music in the coming age of inter-stellar space travel:

Primo: The ordinary extraordinary length of  inter-stellar voyages

Secondo: The privileg'd favor we will enjoy, as being of the same species-race as Mozart and Monet and Michelangelo, from other inhabitants of the universe, when we begin to go about in it, for the art and music at the core of our culture, especially the "classics" of our civilization.  Chlorine-breathers from Procyon will automatically think of Rubens or Van Dyke when they see (they're constitutionally deaf) that we are humans, and accordingly think us under- or over-fed. The many other, more likely both hearing and seeing inhabitants of the universe whom we will probably encounter, will want us to have at least a working knowledge of how to write a Parody Mass. I say: Let's have it ready for them.

We have always before us the example of Unico Wilem van Wassenaer, who, really, wrote the six Pergolesi Concertini for strings, which I have loved with my whole heart since I first (maybe when I was 18 or 19 years old) heard them, not knowing they were fake, and in the estimation of their composer, "some tolerable, some middling, some wretched." And the hell-holes our man Unico got himself posted to! The interminable bad weather! And the waiting! No wonder that he took to writing music--which wound up being played, more or less as a joke, back at the Hague at his friends' Ricciotti's  and Bentinck's soireés musicales. That's how a gentleman writes music. A gentleman and, you will notice, a world traveler and man of affairs, renown'd for his probity, intelligence, and musicianship: the absolute epitome of God's finest, most sensitive, connoisseur of everything: the early eighteenth century Dutchman of the minor nobility. There is a certain sanctity about this paragon of refinement, which comes, I think, from our subject's astonishing affluence compared to other societies' milieux of approximately the same priviligié mingling of solid middle class, and upper class. This child of Fortune, compared to his fellows in Milan or Paris, was several times as rich as they were. Butch to a fault, but delicate in his tastes, and subtle in his distinctions: His were the ears that Ruckers' harpsichords were made for, which, effortlessly, appreciated, or felt, the purity of that instrument's tuning, while they delighted in the fullness and richness of its total sound.