Yesterday I drove south into Franklin County to check on some friends who live near the town of Phil Campbell, Alabama. Phil Campbell was one of many towns and cities across the South devastated by Wednesday’s tornados.
WASHINGTON – At a press conference on Tuesday, President Barack Obama dismissed public concerns over the long-term…
The ride to the airport across the desert sands took about thirty-five minutes. I couldn’t help but…
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(Cross-posted at Skundered!) The combined cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has now reached $1.29 trillion…
Okay, I finally finished reading The Sun Also Rises. I sat on the porch this afternoon and I read the dang ending. The weather was too nice for anything except loafing. I knew how it was going to end, but it was still fun, and there were breezes and blue skies.
Scrappy Pappy came over for some attention. He was puffed up and cocky today. Last night he fought another big tom and “won.”
It says something about a fighter’s character when his immediate reaction to being handed his first defeat in 27 professional bouts is to say that he’s thankful that no one was injured. Those were the first words out of the mouth of a still-stunned Andre Berto, upon hearing the judges unanimously award his WBC Welterweight title to the younger phenom, Victor Ortiz. While words like class, grace, and dignity start springing to mind when you hear something like that, Berto’s other post-fight comments quickly brought him back down to earth; he rationalized the loss by claiming that he “felt off,” and said “that wasn’t me in there.”
It came over me like a dark cloud: a wave of muck, broken tree branches, moss, liquid filth containing the putrid remains of reptiles and rodents. I was drowning, suffocated by a toxic funk. I couldn’t breathe, my throat was parched, my eyes burned, and my ears were ringing. It started off slowly and the sound grew. I figured that if I was going under, I might as well be able to do it in peace and quiet, but the sound grew louder. I still couldn’t move. I was trapped, caught up in a swamp with darkness closing in. I couldn’t move. I tossed and turned, but it was to no avail. The sound grew louder.
…
“What are you smiling at?”
the man with a bag of cans
snarls at me
as I swoop by on my bicycle
to the door
of the grocery store
(Originally posted at Skundered!) I got hit with a double-dose of boxing disappointment last weekend: I missed…
Memory is unpredictable. What stays and what goes lacks any rational processing.
From Dave Pagel’s Los Angeles Times review of Analia Saban‘s “Grayscale”:
The Argentina-born, Los Angeles-based painter’s second solo show, at Thomas Solomon Gallery, does not begin with grand notions, abstract ideas or idealized fictions. Instead, the 13 intimately scaled works that make up “Grayscale” start with stuff: physical substances that, in the right combination, become paintings you never tire of scrutinizing.