The Wit of the Staircase

Not America? Well, It Is

"...when it comes to beating folks up, this country has nearly a million people legally authorized to beat, kidnap at gunpoint (arrest) and kill if deemed necessary, a large portion of which exercise the first two of these rights thousands of times daily. At last count in 2002 America had 14,254 law enforcement agencies employing 675,734 sworn officers and 294,854 civilians. With the "war on terror," heaven only knows how many have been added.

Public protest usually provides a glimpse into this force, and every year we see more smuggled videotapes that somehow seldom make the news. Jumpy footage of ordinary folks beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Tasers, and riddled with rubber bullets, even while on their knees praying. Elderly protesters of Miami's free trade zone were Maced in the face and dragged across the ground in handcuffs and a female reporter testified she was forced to strip before male cops. People who bother to find and watch these videos on the Internet keep saying the same thing over and over again: 'This is not America.' Unfortunately, it is.(...)"

Link: Joe Bageant: Smirking Allies: Nazi Brown and Kevlar Black.

Via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

New Issue Of The Hatchet: Journal Of Lizzie Borden Studies Online

Link: The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

--Sylvia Plath

Link: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Wit, Off The Hook

Wit will be back later today. We're in the library just now, studying up......

Performance Based On A Dream

"17 year old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail and dances on wine bottles, June 1958. Her performance was based on a dream and she practiced for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance."

Link: Vintage Photographs.

A Toad For A Princess

"As a way of getting yourself a date, it would raise more than a few eyebrows nowadays.

But for those desperate to win a lover in Elizabethan Britain, burying a dead frog in an anthill at a cross roads and putting its bones in a river was apparently a sure fire way to secure a woman's heart.

The bizarre spell has been unearthed in a unique handwritten book of 400-year-old magic due to be auctioned next month...."

Link: How a dead frog could help you woo a lover | the Daily Mail.

Via: Professor Hex.

The Dirty Ear: Senate Issues Subpoenas in Eavesdropping Investigation

Link: Senate Issues Subpoenas in Eavesdropping Investigation - New York Times.

Poets In 'Agon' Face Off

"At ancient Greek festivals, poets competed alongside athletes, matching verse with quick-tongued rivals in public battles of wit and wordplay. Two millennia later, you find QuickMuse.com , the modern descendant of those ancient Greek poetry jousts. For the past year, QuickMuse has been asking pairs of well-known writers to create poems on a shared topic and posting the results online.

'It's not a competition like a fight to the death,' with clear winners and losers, QuickMuse founder Ken Gordon says. 'It's a competition like a bunch of jazz musicians improvising together and playing different solos.' Gordon calls these contests 'agons,' an ode to the ancient Greek poetry competitions of the same name.

The latest participants in Gordon's experiment are rock musicians with poetry-writing experience: the Silver Jews' David Berman and Crash Test Dummies' Brad Roberts ...."

Link: QuickMuse.com prods poets to seek their 15 minutes of creativity - The Boston Globe.

Above, David Berman. The Silver Jews have a new album coming out later this fall, Children Of The Staircase.

What, No MDMA?

"Troubled rocker Pete Doherty faces a stretch in jail after being charged with drugs and driving offences yesterday.

The 28-year-old will appear in West London Magistrates next Tuesday.

Kate Moss's lover has been charged on four counts of drug possession and charges of driving without insurance or tax.

Pete was caught with cocaine, heroin, cannabis and ketamine in May after being stopped by police in his Jaguar, reports the Daily Mirror."

Link: Pete Doherty faces jail - Now Magazine .

Cloak And Dagger On The Staircase: Wit Spied On, Smeared, And Physically Threatened

And they used your stolen money to do it, children of the Staircase....

"The C.I.A. undertook a domestic surveillance operation code-named Chaos that went on for almost seven years under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Mr. Helms created a Special Operations Group to conduct the spying. A squad of C.I.A. officers grew their hair long, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.

The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over the United States...."

Link: Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War - New York Times.

Wit and Mr. Wit have experienced theft, intimidation, illegal wiretapping, a 1950s-style smear campaign based on utter psychological projection, damage to our property, verbal and physical harassment and death threats from New York "artist" Anna Gaskell's murderous Midwestern thug family for years:

Link: The Wit of the Staircase: The Trouble With Anna Gaskell.

Fortunately for Wit they're all also really dumb.