Today, I had a brief flash of concern when I left the book I was reading cracked open and went into the other room….

I was worried I would drain the battery…

In case you never remembered, I started a loose collection of writing about the people in a coffee shop and the couple that own it…

It’s called Ophelia’s Cafe…

It was to be a hipster romance, with the couple owning the shop being a solid unchanging rock amidst the turmoil of the fast paced inner-city and it’s very odd inhabitants. Not sure if I want to keep it that way though. Here, in 1st draft, the unnamed male owner reveals a past indiscretion…

Brie came in the door mid day with sleep still in her eyes and a sun-ray smile. Part of the Artists Co-Op down the street, her clothes reflected her mood for the day. Today she was punk cabaret with a shortened distressed gown, visible stockings and garters with a tri-corner hat that brought back Adam Ant songs to me.

She was a prettier version of Amanda Palmer. A comment that if spoken aloud would of instantly caused them to shun me, as beauty is internal, or a process that is created. An easy way to see the world when all of them were young and beautiful. She was, of course, perpetually broke, and perpetually rich of imagination. She ordered an americano- the cheapest on the menu. As she spoke, a perfume of patchouli and sweat roiled from her body in invisible fractals.

Staring into nothingness, I went to the La Marzocco and whipped her up a quad venti extra vanilla breve latte. More to see her milk white thigh tap incessantly at the table than due to any altruism or respect for the arts.

I once tasted her mouth. Isabella had already gone home for the night. A wild night her “troupe” played the coffee shop. Even though she had been drinking almond italian sodas all night she tasted of cotton candy. And youth. Glorious, vibrant, unobtainable youth.

My cock immediately grew hard during the unprompted kiss before they called her onto the stage (really just a few sheets of raised plywood) at the front of the coffee shop. I looked into her eyes and saw freedom. She smiled and ran forward. They played until way past closing. Her ethereal smile and odd lyrics carrying the night.

To her it was nothing. A good luck charm. Something performed at every show. Like someone saying, “Break a leg!”. To me it was a brick wall around my heart. Or a tidal wave of lost opportunities. To me it crushed me. To her it gave her an instant of strength.

I still feel her lips when she walks in the door. She feels hunger, or thinks of a warm coffee. Maybe the nice owner giving her a free scone.

Do we celebrate talent? Or the unlikely intersection of beauty and creativity?

Either way, life moves on. The pain only real to the observer…

Our re-incarnation factor is up to at least a gecko now. Perhaps even a tree frog.

I couldn’t pry one of Sarah’s books out of her hands as a contribution. She was, however, gracious enough (after thrashing on the floor is a tantrum screaming, “My books! My books!”) to purchase a lovely five book set of the Newbery Medal winning The Dark Is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper.

Personally we feel this is going to be a much more rewarding gift than some of the other things the kids were requesting - nail polish sets, bratz dolls, razor scooters. But each book geek (or non book geek) to his or her own..

Since I really don’t want to be re-incarnated as a potato bug, I figured it was time for my annual karma boost. This years opportunity came while buying a hazelnut and white chocolate latte at my new favorite coffee shop, Zoka.

The red cards on the tree are for less fortunate children asking for gifts. Upon gazing onto it I saw a red sea of “Barbies”, “Transformers”, etc. This one, however, stuck out from the crowd. The mental image of a 12 year old being asked to pick “any” present he would like and him answering “a book” warms the cockles and sub-cockles of my heart.

So, later tonight we will wrap up a book or two (stolen from Sarah’s collection) and we’ll head down and place it under the tree for the so-called less fortunate child that loves to read. I see it as an investment in a literate society.

Madeleine L’Engle passed away yesterday at the age of 88. Her books were the first non-fairy tale sci-fi/fantasy books I read as a kid. The first, of course, was A Wrinkle in Time and I was hooked from that moment on. Long before JK Rowling and Philip Pullman, she was one of children’s fantasy fiction greats.

But first, a little backstory:

Edith: Meredith is Edith with Mer in front of it. Edith means rich war gift. Mer means sea. Meredith means rich sea war gift. Meredith is treasure. Meredith is a pirate’s name.

Me: Aaaarrrrrhhhhhh! Mad Meredith the Pirate Queen – silk-clad scourge of the seven seas. There’s a bodice-ripper plot for ya.

Edith: I’ll be sure to let Linda whatever her name is know. (Reference to Linda Berdoll who wrote a rather bodice-ripping sequel to Pride and Prejudice and is currently leaving snarky comments to bad customer reviews on Amazon.)

Me: Aaah… yeah. No. The problem with that one is that it was a bodice-ripper in disguise. People like to know what they’re getting into. I think Mad Meredith should be written by Fabio. (He’s got one pirate romance under his belt already.)

Edith: Umm.. ew.

Me: Yeah. So he’s not the greatest writer in the world, but he’s got pecs that could poke an eye out. (Hence Mad Meredith’s eye patch.) Is Mad Meredith Jewish too? “Ships ahoy vey?” (Hehehehe)

Edith: I think maybe you should write this one since you’ve got all the ideas.

Me: Perhaps Sarah Waters can write the pirate queen book. Might be interesting then….

Edith: That would be fantastic!!

Five minutes later and I’m thinking that there may be a rhyme coming on… perhaps a little she-sea-shanty.

Ode to Mad Meredith, Pirate Queen

Mad Meredith, the Pirate Queen,
She’ll cut your throat and eat your spleen.
She’s rougher than the worst of men,
A more feminine rogue there’s never been.

Mad Meredith, so slim and lean,
She’ll stop the fight so she can preen.
The worst of cads become her prey
For crossing her path on a bad hair day.

Mad Meredith, the Pirate Queen,
Can’t make her cook, can’t make her clean.
Her rapier wit is sharp and quick,
She’s one bad-ass butt-kicking chick.

Mad Meredith, with eyes so green,
And cleavage so deep it’s almost obscene.
That silk-clad form fools many a lord
And they find themselves at the end of her sword.

Mad Meredith, the Pirate Queen,
She’ll cut your throat and eat your spleen.
When she isn’t fixing you with her damnable glare,
She’s down below, washing her hair.

“Hey bean”, I say as what looks like a grumpy, sexy, gypsy bangs through the door. “Shut up, and give me a quad vente”, she growls. Uh oh, I think to myself, the date-of-the-week must of went poorly lastnight. She’s a minor local celebrity after her coffee table book of dildo cozy patterns went nuclear on one of the local morning talk shows. She is also one of our oldest and best friends.

Her parents named her Lima after the bean. She tells people Lima, as in Peru. She pulls it off too with her light olive skin, round luscious hips and thick dreadlocks always wrapped in some exotic print or knit. At least she fools other people. We know she is a sex-starved neo-hippie with a noble English ancestry and a nasty three latte a-day habit. Goddess bless her.

Her dating habits went from sad spinster contemplating a bulk cat purchase to needing to use iCal to keep track of her dates. It all happened after her ex-dotcom friend woke up one day and decided he was going into the publishing and binding business……

I guess it could be said that I’m a bit of a bibliophile. Lately it’s become evident to me that non-collectors sometimes have the misconception that collectors are in it for the “investment”. That the value of a particular book is measured in dollars and cents. While I don’t deny that money is a factor in the market value of a book, I truly believe that a book’s intrinsic value lies in the information it provides.

An antiquarian book is a piece of history. It was brought to life in a time when our little lives were not even yet dreamt of. It was held by hands and perused by eyes that have long since passed on. An antiquarian book has the ability to open doors we didn’t know existed. It can divulge little tidbits of history that have never been and will probably never be a part of any educator’s syllabus. It can tell us a little about the lives of people whose efforts and sacrifices have paved the road to the way we live today. We can find humor in customs no longer practiced, wisdom in truths that hold up even today in our modern world, and moments upon which to reflect.

As long as a book is able to impart its information to us, even if we do not necessarily agree with what it tells us, that ability to open our minds and bring ideas to life is its true value - its intended value. I do not believe that a book’s value lies in how much that Texas billionaire is willing to shell out just to have it sitting on his shelves. Those are the bibliomaniacs - possession seems to be their ultimate goal. The true bibliophile realizes that a book does not breathe unless it has been opened.

With this in mind, I offer the following:
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I usually keep this blog pretty bland politically as we have family members from various walks of life that have very different viewpoints from our own. Not to mention that arguing politics on blogs has become so passe that even midwest houswives on livejournal are doing it…

Anyway, I came across this and found it interesting that I never heard it before…

Published on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

 

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.

“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 – a year to the day before he was murdered – King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Full text/audio here. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm)

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 – and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”

King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life.

Jeff Cohen http://jeffcohen.org/ is the author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” Norman Solomon www.normansolomon.com is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” now out in paperback.

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/04/304/

Even though that third button on the left makes reference to a bookshelf, this is one of our real bookshelves. There is another one just like it on the other side of the room. The button just tracks what books we are reading and have read - But you probably knew that, right?

Anyway, just picture the floor in rich, dark wood, and the walls in a soft garden green.. This room just might end up looking pretty damn good… Earnest thinks so…