Saturday, December 21, 2013

the season of Priving

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com
© 2013 KM Fikes
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.

Priv. 

Oh, my good peops, how this scribe struggled so to avoid this post.  The following was penned last week - of the inkwell's own accord - yet not posted.  After all, the Newtown survivors requested such. 

Howeva, one continues to find that very need of request the most H2Omeloncholic-tempting of subject 'matters'.  Still, outta respect, one avoided indulgence of her quill.  Then, homezgentry?  And lo, Dan WHITE's Twinkie defense was bested last week by Affluenza.

One's initial interest in Newtown's plea for privacy found the notion - itself - a double asterisk bookendin' Priv.  Lil' causes an authentic absurdist's jaw to slacken in shock.  When a teen-age driver multiple murders and paralyzes - behind the 'wheel' - and the 'judicial' sentence is rehabilitation in a veritable country club?  One knows not what else to type.  Gentlesoulfolk...choose thine own discourse and feel at liberty to insert that discussion here...

One cannot reiterate enuf, her empathy to/for Newtown and more so, appreciation/admiration of their instructional decorum in the enigmatic as unimaginable experience that is hyper public grief. 

One had chosen a reverent silence on the anniversary - confident that Priv would live strong to see another sunrise - 'its' star, 'its' sky.  This confidence failed to comprehend itself as prophetic.  Yet, so it proved to be.  The week of Priv for upper-class families of particular descent - some twelve months in mourning and another probating a plural mortal drunk-driving adolescent - occurred as the world bid final farewell to its least privileged prisoner of 27 years.  Anti-apartheid icon and South Africa's first black president, Nelson Mandela, was laid to rest as 'Merican lunacy placed Priv on its own alter.

Has there eva been a 'victim'...or 'survivor'...or howe'er they choose to frame their tragedy...of Other-ed Ethnicity...who required not more, mind ye, but less public support - in order to grieve in peace?  Attention upon Newtown reached a fevered pitch compared to the whimper - if that - for the daily, fatally wounded 'urban' students, nameless and faceless.  And Less.

Much to their credit, Newtown has suggested the country observe 'their' loss thru community involvement closer to home.  Nevadaless, such an exercise in keepin' it real equates down-dirty deconstruction of those societal ills that would turn Priv - acutely vulnerable to Affluenza sans a vaccine - on its flaxen head.  

When at a loss, Bro' Bard will provide, if not safe, at least sane passage:

  
Mandela - too - held a close copy of Da Bard whilst incarcerated on Robben Island.  Julius Caesar spoke most to his days in conscious confinement.  Above, he marked Caesar's words in Act II, Scene 2.

The senseless loss of a six-year-old should not grace the same page as a sixteen-year-old driver perhaps more inebriated by Priv than liquor.  One chooses not to print the youth's name.  One would prefer a papyrus scroll etched with the unnewsworthy titles of underPriv-ed kindergarten tots taken by gun violence.  Their removal dissmissal from national notice?  That fact be the Priv affair on acid.  Priv done gone run amok, linking - at least the coverage - of offspring of the Have's 'n More's as somehow, perhaps, humanely far Less.  Dare any think Priv as some luck of the inherited draw from which our insights, actions, interactions, and ensuing legislation are e'er immune.  

12|10 - sentencing of ten years probation for four deaths 
12|14 - first anniversary of Sandyhook Elementary School shooting
12|15 - Nelson Mandela buried in childhood village of Qunu.

Off Spring.  Today, 12|21, is Winter Solstice.  

One begins the season with what one should have found a diplomatic completion - in the week that was.  Blogger's "publish" button meets one's my...my rather reticent click (the ease of which presents its own existential tech quandary).

The incessantly invisible accommodation to Priv - the most precarious of all socio constructs - is neon highlighted the same week that the light of the premier anti-Priv activist is dimmed.  Then again, dying stars shine brightest in the dust of their cosmic demise.  Stars glow - as they go, bursting forth to illuminate their end.  Perchance Cassius in Act I, Scene 2 is mo' apropos:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."


a clever as compassionate critique
on the implausibility of
POSTness 

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

© 2013 KM Fikes 
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com 
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.




Friday, November 29, 2013

friday noir

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com
© 2013 KM Fikes
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.


Citizenship and Consumerism have long since been the strangest of bedfellows.  Please see Transatlantic Slave Trade for specifics.  One may think oneself patriotic for keeping steadfast to cranberry sauce on November's last Thursday.  Alas, it is the following day, gentlesoulfolk, that validates your loyalty to our democracy.  Upon this Black Friday, perchance MasterCard-s will hit their max.  Might such honor the stark adversity of the Pilgrims befo' us - inspired by yon 'debt' owed to Indigenous Peops?  Let us then revert to the last line of the credit commercials.  How 'Master' ad execs manage to wed merciless sentimentality with commerce.  A single-word prayer, if ye will: 

"Priceless."

The 'priceless' pre-holiday moment for H2Omelon moi is no sale - brick n' mortar, on-line, nor catalogued.  Rather, the tantalizingly subversive Norman Rockwellian poster of POTUS - notorious for his mythological Kenyan citizenship - turning to silence undocumented immigration activist, Ju Hong, deserves a gilded frame over a crackling fire upon our national hearth.

IMAGE CREDIT:Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/27/my_family_has_been_separated_for

One is unaware if the Affordable Care Act web engineer may have also chosen to place the organized DREAMer behind the podium o' POTUS.  Such an esteemed position results from White House invitation.  Might the egregious error possibly be a symptom of the worst of dissOrientalism?  Twenty-four year-old DREAMer from UC Berkeley, Ju Hong has a public record of vocal dissent.  A stereotype has been blown wide ope: that of a docile Asian presence - mo'ova flattered to be 'chosen'.  South Korean Ju Hong?  He done gone rogue.

Pilgrims, Colonists, Slaves, Ellis Island-ers, Veterans, Freedom Riders, DREAMers (Development, Relief, and Education for 'Alien' Minors), Et Cetera.  Those Et Cetera are by no means less brave and commended for the tenacity of their conviction despite their invisibility.  All are championed, if not as Founders, as chief contributors to the union as it stands today.  POTUS chose to lecture Ju Hong in this holiday week punctuated by a feast in commemoration of immigrant survival and native exploitation.  Mr. Hong was encouraged to slog thru the inept legislative process instead of "shouting".  His protest, howe'er?  It sho' nuff be 'Mericana personified.  As an undocumented activist, removal from that Bay Area hall was the least of his concerns.  Deportation for Mr. Hong - and over a million more - remains a daily threat at any moment's whim.  What inconvenienced or even insulted POTUS was an Act of Resistance with consequences too grave for contemplation by those who may take their nine digits of existence - socially secure - for granted.

One suffers bouts of nausea from a visceral ick to certain displays attempting - albeit failing - to stain this historic presidency.  Gubernatorial, blonde hair on end, wagging a finger at POTUS on an airport tarmac.  Shouting "You lie!" as the Commander-in-Chief addresses a joint session of Congress.  Or...Or...Pick thy diss - any diss...One shall halt there, conceding - sadly - that the list is only shorter than Santa's frost-bitten hemp scroll dangling past his sleigh and precariously trailing under a hoof of Rudolf.   

Nevadaless, for the first time, in quite a ripened H2Omeloncholic turn - effortlessly theatrically absurd - one, well...one...ah hell, I...stood.  Surreal as surprised.  I stood with Ju Hong.  He put not only his opinion but his very life on the line.  That opinion, coincidentally, happens to critique the glass 'Merican Dream as it shatters from the random removal of bread-winning, border-crossed parents from their children. 

Arguably, the Hongian dissruption is not the official offense in the contentious 'exchange' almost upon Thanksgiving Eve; that charge is reserved for the present administration's deportation 'record'.  'Record'.  Indeed.  Outta respect for the current administration and quasi belief in its redemption on this despairing issue, one refrains from printing the unnerving number of our fellow humanity disscounted as deported since the inauguration of POTUS.  A precedence, though, continues to set itself - oddly apropos for this time of year:

"No room at the inn."
For as long as this blog draws H2Omelon-ed breath, one shall not begin to comprehend why Truth2Power speech is mo' oft than not a dissturbing confrontation.  If da Status Quo is stable, 'twould seem it could betta tolerate a challenge in the form of conscious kinetic discourse.  When the façade of certain socio tropes - like POSTness - breaks, reality floods forth in catastrophic force as if from ill-constructed Louisiana levees. 

I stand with Ju Hong now.  And all those drowning as damned.  DREAMers - most Milliennials - are superheros.  One does not gush in usage of the term.  How else do we dare to understand adolescent phantoms who thrive academically in challenging circumstances only to emerge from dire protective shadows for nuttin' but the distant sake of raw Justice?

I have no other choice but to take this stance if Da Founder's intent - as flawed as conflicted - is to be observed in its finer possibility.  In so doing, I stand for all our states united.  One writes not of 'Merica as she currently conducts immigration policy.  Contrarily, one envisions a culturally, ethnically enriched land - mine - that one suspects a justifiably offended POTUS, too, supports.   

At least as much as our economy.

Black Friday.  Bargains galore.

What is priceless to you n' yours?  What cannot be bought nor sold nor even discounted?  What is too immense in its import to affect a credit score or be wrapped in holiday ribbon?  One does not believe in speaking for others.  Yet n' still?  One might consider placing an undocumented bet on Ju Hong's answer.

a clever as compassionate critique
on the implausibility of
POSTness 

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

© 2013 KM Fikes 
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com 
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.


Thursday, November 28, 2013

corn, you COPE, yeeha!


VOGUE copyright Conde Nast
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com
© 2013 KM Fikes
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.

Hamlet's TO BE soliloquy:
"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune 
Or to..."
We interrupt this blog post...and the Bard
to wish our Jewish brethren/sistren
Chanukkah Sameach!
The last time The Festival of Lights
fell on Thanksgiving Day was
1888 or 1889.
One stresses "or" 
as both years were sourced googling.
We will join our post
already in progess
after this culturally apropos musical interlude:

Peops of Opression, howe'er, ne'er take a holiday...
 Hamlet's TO BE soliloquy:
"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune 
Or to..."
          "...slings n' arrows of"...
...of our Native peops genocide.... 

             "Or to..."
...to outrageously feast - fortunate enuf to be in da spirit of gratitude...

The former doth seem to warrant a meditative fast.  The latter begs to be accompanied by a bold, dry red with a serious pucker - decanting.   

Horn of Plenty o' H2Omeloncholy!   

 File:Cornucopia.png    
Creative Commons 2.0

Outta CONtrol fortune, daresay, a bounty hunting...

 http://pleasurephoto.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/colors-of-models-make-up-accentuated-by-the-color-of-an-open-watermelon-1951-erwin-blumenfeld.jpg
© 1951 Erwin Blumenfeld

A post of uncharacteristic brevity.  Thou art quite apt to take note, my good peops.  Leaving breathing room here for gratitude - howeva you n' yours choose to define and/or experience it.  May a grateful thought neva be too far, heralding abundance in those least expected sweet seeds of moments.  May compassion always outweigh melon.

One of my innumerable points of Appreciation?  The fact that you are reading this.  And are most welcome to second helpings...

a clever as compassionate critique
on the implausibility of
POSTness 

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

© 2013 KM Fikes 
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com 
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

post with the most

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com
© 2013 KM Fikes
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.


Well one remembers the following Levi 501 commercial from one's Reagan era youth.  Perchance the memory is owed to the enigmatic message - open ended - and thereby left to the audience to imbue with one's own meaning.  

 TV board Levi's
  proprietary image Levi Strauss/Mike Salisbury 

Advertisements rarely engage the viewer thus - encouraging us to ponder past the product.  Such was Levi's confidence with their place in pop cult psyche; it ceased to sell us on their blue jean.  Most were already sold.  The ad execs were then at liberty to indulge their curious preference to leave the viewer feeling a little blue - in the existential sense - RE: time...passing.  Then again, Levis last forever.  Sponsorship mission accomplished.
http://www.onehellofaneye.com/2010/07/22/ 

 

The landscape was classic 'Mericana - western-inspired, dust bowl dust spoon-soft focused lens for a product as apple pie as stars n' stripes.  One scripted line totaling six syllables to a moody soundtrack.  To what, tho', is Travis "late"?  And has the spokesmodel/commerce character been wearing the same jeans since Travis left?  Upon his return, the protagonistic pants are shrunk to fit - like a melon geo-squared:
The XX chromo messenger speaks in both tone and denim-donned body language to illustrate the opposite of a lady-in-waiting.  Now, this post-cowgirl?  She done been done wit Travis.  Travis arrives not only POSTmarked but can return himself to sender.  She is all about Da present...in 1981.

Travis was "years too late".   

Upon this first Tuesday in November, one ponders: who has been years too early?  

Pointedly, one speaks not of eva forward artist, scientist, and/or thinker 'ahead of one's time'.  Fo'sooth, thaz a whole 'nother surreal blog post via quantum/astro/astral physics, traversing a worm hole or two ...
Trademark information for POSTMARK AMERICA from CTM - by Markify
POSTMARK image from CTM 
Stephen Hawking 'wormhole' depiction from How to Build a Time Machine article, 04.27.2010**
  
My good peops, instead one speaks of the invited guest - no longer "guessing who's coming to dinner" - who knocks softly when we have yet to decant the Cabernet nor defrost the more 'involved' 'dish' whose laborious preparation we had intended to pass off as our own.  Said guest - albeit still welcome - is quite unfashionably early.

Was POTUS elected too soon?  Has the nation been ready to critically deconstruct the cultural identity of its Commander-in-Chief - with all of those ramifications upon...so upon...its conflicted citizenry?  Does his election 'fit' or authentically encapsulate our collective conscience?  Might his tenure be an absurdist anomaly from which we will long reel - internally - far past 2016 in an ill begot attempt to keep it real, yo? 
 
POST advocates retired racism - using POTUS as the case upon which Defense rests.  This particular Ism is all but removed from viable discourse.  Please see the specific directions from the bench to the Trayvon Martin jury.  Ism cannot even be considered as a factor motivating the dynamics of 'encounter'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/us/zimmerman-case-has-race-as-a-backdrop-but-you-wont-hear-it-in-court.html?_r=0
Wheneva an alleged 'racialized' moment rears its nappy head - rife with profundity of possibility to evolve - noble gentlesoulfolk are subjected to a fortnight of cable-network 'investigations' of presumed non-Ism. "To be racist or not to be racist?The melancholy of Hamlet - accessorized in stiff Elizabethan ruff and 501 denim tights - is conspicuously absent on the stage of televised inquiry or tweeted soliloquy.  'That (is the) question' - event, occurrence, or utterance of said incidiss - must first tread thru the mill of racism's verification.  The needle on this meter is oft spun by commentators ill-equipped with even a rudimentary course to decipher the complex social constructs that create any Ism.  How can pundits or the populous decide upon Is or Ain't when the initial What remains the algebraic unknown X?  Only some tardy Travis in the disstance is privy.  Code goes uncracked.  Doomed - by a reticent dialogue - to be eternally un(re)solved, 'X', homez?  'X' POSTmarks no spot.  This post-liberal, nigh progressive disscussion can - inadvertently - replicate the very dynamics that place Ism not post, but right smack back along our cultural continuum.  H2Omeloncholy?  Down the rabbit worm hole.

Cause of Hamlet's death - as writ upon the scrolled certificate?  'Duel'.  

Notably, the fatal blow, PREdestined by a poisonous sword tip, "touches" POSTmatch.  Hamlet actually bests his fencing opponent, Laertes - in skill - save his 'royal' ignorance of a fatal POSTfight plan irrespective of any tactical feat.

'Staged' duality?  Whata...whata...watermelomoment!

Whilst racism - as concept - hath been poof! banishéd, how can motion pictures presently flourish with the worst of the reality of our past?

ObamaCare is on time to dispense affordable collars for H2Owhiplash:

Twelve Years A Slave.  Django Unchained

Is Dominant Cult subconsciously yearning for the truth of our past to inform this mad, mad, maddening POST present with more truth and beauty?  Art will always indulge our inclination towards humanity's integrity expressing itself.  Is this confounding receptivity to narratives unapologetic in this most harrowing depiction of 'Merica's stained as strained history a cogent sign?   

Might POSTnessity, afta all, be for naught?  Less agile than fragile, it seems to teeter on a bizarre line - daresay, 'theoretical string' - betwixt ancestral memory and mass entertainment.  Can POSTness serve as the prompt to embrace or at least face what was dared rendered enigmatic? 

Upon this first Tuesday in November, what say ye, Travis?

**  "A wormhole is a theoretical 'tunnel' or shortcut, predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, that links two places in space-time - visualised above as the contours of a 3-D map, where negative energy pulls space and time into the mouth of a tunnel, emerging in another universe. They remain only hypothetical, as obviously nobody has ever seen one, but have been used in films as conduits for time travel - in Stargate (1994), for example, involving gated tunnels between universes, and in Time Bandits (1981), where their locations are shown on a celestial map." 
 - Stephen Hawking
on the implausibility of
POSTness 

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

© 2013 KM Fikes 
© 2013 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com 
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.  No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.