Quotes

The people of New Orleans weren't just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago -- to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.
-- Barack Obama

I have a grandson who's already received a Purple Heart in Baghdad, and they just put him back to duty. One Purple Heart wasn't enough... I just wish George Bush would step up to the microphone and say, "Folks, it's about oil."
-- Merle Haggard, the country legend who wrote the pro-Vietnam War song 'The Fightin' Side of Me.'

It's the oil, stupid.
-- Bob Herbert, NY Times

But this war never ends. It just goes on and on, in different places.
-- Laurie Anderson, The End of the Moon

Nothing remains but what rises above the abyss of today's monstrous problems, as above every abyss of every time: the wing-beat of the spirit and the creative word.
-- Martin Buber

...it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog nosing before you and a dog nosing behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.
-- John Millington Synge

I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They'd serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, vibrate with life, and stay up all night.
-- Amy Hempel, in In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried

A mature woman in Europe is considered sexually powerful.
-- Catherine Deneuve, NY Times

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.
-- Katharine Hepburn

Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.
-- Audrey Niffenegger, in The Time Traveler's Wife

The purpose of human life is to create ~ to penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution.
-- Paul Klee

If an idea in a poem is too complicated and too arcane, the poem begins to lose its emotional power. Conversely, if the poem is too emotional, its intelligence will diminish. A good poet intuitively knows how to strike a balance between thoughts and emotions.
-- Ha Jin, in Crazed

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle

It seemed to me... writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege. Augustus Caesar had sent... Ovid into exile. Why would Caesar fear Ovid, except that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry?
-- Tobias Wolff, in Old School

I believe the truth is we form a family with other poets, living and dead, or we risk going nowhere.
-- Philip Levine in So Ask: Essays, Conversations and Interviews

Music can't be owned by musicians. It comes through the universe. At best, we're skilled presenters.
-- Serj Tankian, singer with Systems of a Down

The conventional wisdom is that a singer sings because they're feeling something strongly and the song is the way to express that. I think it's the other way around. The song is the lever or the tool that allows the emotion to be extracted.
-- David Byrne, singer

Singing is 90% brains and 10% voice.
-- Marilyn Horne

All these guys play so fast, but the guy that wins is the guy that plays the melody and reaches the heart.
-- Les Paul

I was contemptuous of "facts" for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
-- Joyce Carol Oates, in The Girl with the Blackened Eye

Diamonds are magic, she said, and that is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved.
-- Charles Baxter, in Gryphon

I don't know what I think until I write it down.
-- Joan Didion

When I was 11, I began keeping a diary. Most people don't need proof of their existence. But I always needed that. Being alive is not enough for me.
-- Agnes Jaoul, Parisian filmmaker

There is always a delightful sense of movement, vibration and life, ... color and luminosity (in the work of Claude Monet).
-- Theodore Robinson, 1892 in The Century

I only know how to do two things. Garden and paint.
-- Claude Monet

Moats

I was contemptuous of "facts" for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
-- Joyce Carol Oates, in The Girl with the Blackened Eye

People tend to appreciate great songs, so the typical songwriter interview digs into bard 'secrets' with questions like,

Do you write lyric or melody first?
Do you write every day?
What (or who) inspires you?
Do you keep a little book handy to jot down ideas?

I can imagine Bob Dylan, should he be enticed to suffer the little children, evading every one.

The educated mind assumes you can penetrate mystery by amassing facts about it, but I'm skeptical. I think you get to sense the unknowable by plunging in to fiction, your fiction, whatever one occurs to you in passing.

There was an art piece at iNGENUiTY yesterday that called itself Kaleidoscopic Cleveland. A darkened space folded a smattering of trudgy humans (factoid: 93 degrees at 48% humidity downtown) into a smallish room where heaps of glittery materials formed a circle on the floor. Images of words and color leapt against the walls too quick for minds to capture. I re-emerged, apparently unmoved as new earth walkers filed past me when, suddenly, a sliver of mystery pierced my spine. There I was, a shifting fleck in a kaleidoscope of anonymous droids, dust mote in a late afternoon kitchen, ordinary spectacle of soundless light. Did the artist intend for me to feel this way?

Why would I even need to know?

As lowly does

So the paperclip guy trades up and up until he has in a year a humble house in which to think and write and wow the world with words on paper, fastened with a clip.

I dig inside my pocket
find a pick
a plastic pick
which I will trade you for a coconut
you'll hand me if you're stranded
on a desert lonesome island
with your Martin (rather spartan)
I will float this nut to Vegas
on the Milky Way and bargain
with a Vegan up from Venus
who will give me hugs and kisses
if I make pina coladas
for his mama who disarms me
when I trade my hugs for coffee and
a kiss or two for chocolate
which I hear is better for you
when it's dark and rather bitter
so I hire a baby sitter
and a baby and her sister
and we all sit down for dinner
(cocoa quiche with buttered cherries)
and they serve me bloody marys
which I never touch for breakfast
but the neighbor lady lets us
have a taste of her meringues
she says are great with Russian vodka
and I crush her portulaca
when I sidle off with latkes
in my fancy fanny bag for which
a wealthy Polish heiress says
she'll give her gold tiara
and a view from her veranda
which I'm eying as I wonder
how's the weather in Tahiti
how's the music in the city
how's your pick and are you pretty
sure you've heard the last from me?

Rollerblades

Well, I had a stupid income for what I do.
-- Angelina Jolie, actor, on why she gives one-third of her earnings to charity

I am poor not in material things but in the truth. I've been called a thief, the biggest ever... [Philippine officials] think they have taken everything away from me, including my shoes.
-- Imelda Marcos

What happens to a person visited by extravagant wealth? Imelda stockpiled shoes. Million-bucks-per-show Seinfeld collects cars. Bono trots the globe for the down trodden. Angelina, Bill & Melinda, Peter B. give it away.

I'm curious about the effect of wealth on an artist's creativity. Starving artist -- a nice internal rhyme -- but is there synergy between hunger and output, desire and truth, satiation and barren wombs? Not being a rich girl, I can only speculate.

Water seeks its level. Artists seek theirs. Does a world stage pull unknown capacity from an artist? Or would the Claude Monets, Bob Dylans, JK Rawlings paint their master works on cave walls if canvases were scarce?

How should I know? There's only this: minute by minute you do what's possible with an eye, an ear, a skin cell to the impossible. You don't need money or fame or servants or limpid pools to help or hinder, you need your soul wide open and your wallet sewn of grass.

3D-construction

On the way to the pool today I caught a radio piece about Susan Barry who, at fifty, couldn't see in 3D. Her visual world was mono, everything laid out on the same plane. Born cross-eyed, which surgery corrected when she was two, Susan's brain lacked a capacity to interpret data sent to it from her eyes to perceive depth. Nobel prize winning scientists declared the condition irreversible, so that was supposedly that. Until she consulted a specialist who taught her a series of exercises and proved that even Nobel prize winning scientists can get it wrong.

One morning, after dutifully practicing the eye-brain routine, Susan got in her car and found 'the steering wheel floating above the dashboard.' Since I was glued to the story in the pool parking lot, I looked down to see, indeed, my steering wheel was hovering in mid air. Surreal. The narrator went on to describe the woman reaching up to adjust her rear view mirror which, amazingly, popped out at her in space. I looked up to see my mirror behaving in much the same obstreperous fashion. The story ended beautifully with Susan Barry hurrying from work on a lunch break, stopped in her tracks by the snow. Instead of falling in a uniform plane shared by buildings, shrubbery and pedestrians, the pudgy flakes drifted in a tapestry of depth which drew Susan into their choreography, cradled her with joy.

And as I stepped out on the asphalt under the storm cast skies of late June, I was two years old again, blinking at a visionary's wonderland that laughed at this flatlander's mindset, caroling, 'honey, let's play!'

Solstice

Last night's concert was rain on the roof in the middle of the night. Live music, live audience, live thunder punctuating wet extravaganza. From my onstage view, I could write a book of imagined stories about the listeners who entertained the entertainers. Instead, consider the rainbow that is Eric.

I can't say how we met; it happened via the radio, I the musical guest, Eric the regular listener. When he did eventually come to a concert, he struck me as shy, gently incapable of small talk. His thoughts run deep and unrelenting. Should you tap into Eric's underground, prepare for graceful candor.

After that concert Eric said, 'Susan, the only difference between you and a mega celebrity performer is that you don't know your music is in that league.' Eric has a way of challenging your wisdom, rewiring your expectations.

During the gabfest after last night's show, Eric the loquacious barely pauses to gather his thoughts. They spill over and into my own.

'Susan,' he says, 'when you talk to people you are completely present to them.'

'I guess it's just my thang,' equivocates Susan. 'I don't really know another way to be with people.'

Eric steps across to his next observation. 'Some can feel more free to communicate openly with you, a public persona, than to someone they might know better. This is a burden I'm not sure I could handle.'

Usually when you hear mega celebrities grouse about their lack of privacy, it's a litany of crude paparazzi maneuvers and obnoxious fans in the checkout line. You don't hear them say, 'people confide in me with more trust than I can handle.' Eric thinks I represent something to people because of what I sing and how I perform. I offer a mirror, a canvas, a challenge to conventional wisdom, a sharpening of the lens.

In this capacity, Eric the philosopher priest and Susan the singing mermaid are droplets in the self same sea.

Underworld

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do.
-- Katharine Hepburn

There's a book that recommends the morning splat (my term) -- a writing catharsis where every inchoate denizen of angst and spin is sprawled across the page at dawn to cleanse the dreamer for her art. I don't buy this theory. It might have been Ms. Hepburn who said a man doesn't need to know everything a woman thinks and feels and so it goes, I guess, with muse and artist.

At the railing of an ancient steamer, bundled in tweed coats and soft scarves, we stare at the sea, let silence speak, more eloquent than we in all our bluster. Glistening creatures rise and fall and spray our open eyes with plunging tails.

Our tongues rapt in reverence. Our minds wrapped in awe.

Eden's tongue

Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.

The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it.

--Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

We who paint language on yawning canvases taste truth with parched tongue. Understanding is a thirst quenched, tenuous and rare, by the masters. Why does a mind crave masterful prose, poem, lyric? That she may see. That she may live brief moments of clarity within her cluttered span.

The information age is here. Googlbloggopedia connects us to a swarming ether fog of fact and fiction. We are sucked into a pixelated vortex of ones and ohs, these and those, cons and pros. We know this even as we hazard educated guesses, publish hunches, wax and wane the starry night away.

Some words draw attention to themselves or to the mastermind who chose them. Smudgy windows. Meanwhile, l'artisan exhales her crystal globe around a paradise so good it must be true.

Gen dig

Sometimes you have just a couple of squat minutes to press a fingerprint on a lined page before the practice itch stitches you to your stratocaster for two prescient hours of godland. So here it is and there it went.

Two boys, preteens, on a bench by the pool, fully clad, porky but not rotund. The smaller one twiddles a baseball cap in dimpled hands, the larger fondles a silver walkman into which his ears are plugged, dipping his head in rhythmic jabs at the cool morning, ignoring his companion as utterly as olympus scorns the toad. From my vantage in a lap lane 10 foot hence, I watch them.

Music man, affecting coolness, is not cool in stature nor aplomb which would make him almost laughable were this voyeur not a mother by her rights and therefore fond of children in their wayward ways of aging, foibled and oblivious, fits and spurts and acrobatic anecdotes withstanding. When my kickboard brings me back around to budding teendom, there is cool one chatting on his cell phone, pacing in his pocket laden shorts and burnished tee, replicating someone with a deal to broker. He now flips his phone shut, snaps it in his holster, rejoins the mute companion.

Just as I would sigh for the lost boys of tetherland, doesn't this mini-borg turn to his bench sitting cohort with a sweet grin and say a word of air on cords through tongue and lips and doesn't the twirling cap master hunker down to pour his lonely heart into the daybreak which has Susan in her water home, admiring.

Disciple

A song requires a feeling, a knowing, a desire. A certain fulness. This fullness asks for space. In the mind. In the body. I think it may require a need. A songwriter needs to shun the prepackaged conclusions hyped by media, religion, business, politics and even, dare we say, relations. She needs her slate blank. Because if she already knows what her song has got to say, believe me, she might as well chronicle the rain -- yesterday's, today's, tomorrow's -- every dull rumbling of a temperate clime. I don't say a writer seeks adventure. Thrill. Abandon. Rock stars and hippies preach that mumbo and maybe a song leaks through but rarely a masterpiece. The master sets her peace on a pristine tablet long before commandments chisel in. She crouches in her work worn rags and asks the world one favor.

Come.

Things you know

Two thin women. The tall one, neatly clad, is hand in hand with a lady who's easily lost six inches to the curving of her spine. Out from under penciled eyebrows and rouged cheeks this small creature grins at me warm as the midday sun on Thursday's cars and asphalt. Her escort is not a nurse, home helper, neighbor -- she is the woman's daughter. I know this as I eavesdrop on their lives.

'What a fantastic store!' says the smiler.

'They fill the bags just right. I told the checkout woman this is a farther drive for us but we like it.'

'Oh yes!'

This is all quite loud -- I'm setting my bags down several cars over.

'It's nicer to come where the people are the same.'

The same what? Same as 'we' are? Same as each other? Same ones who've always worked here? I don't know, but I'm fairly sure these two do.

I'm watching them before I back out of my space. The mother's ample stretch pants float above her ankle socks and gym shoes. Her checkered jacket celebrates the outing. I'd like to say she wears a Yankee cap down over her fine white hair but I can't make out the logo as she turns to clamor up the steps into the van. Daughter pulls the seat belt deftly out across her mother's chest and tiny arms.

And here I am all soggy eyed, recalling.

I once held my mother's veiny hand, took her on excursions that slowed me down and perked her up, talked in code and pushed away the coming of her leaving. Enchantment followed us, and perfect strangers, with our charms.

Ghandi walking

His greatness lay in his doing what everyone else could do, but doesn't.
-- Louis Fischer, The Life of Mohandas K. Gandhi

Any songwriter can start a band.
Any player can get better.
Any brain can launch a business.
Any jock can handle touring.
Any will can self control.
Any dame can gaze beyond her navel,
hear the neighbor's belly,
feed the children amber waves of grain.
Any fool can fall in love,
or schmooze the anaconda in the briar.

Love the righteous, baby,
when you set your world afire.

Obsidian

No one wants to grow up. But everyone needs to grow.
-- Jo-Ann Armao, The Washington Post

The 'grown-up' bumps her head on the glass ceiling of molten sand and broiled air. She crouches in the vestibule of time, making notes on match books and candy wrappers, puzzling the odds of her escape.

All the world, a google eye of warning, calls her mad when she glides her mind beyond the artificial strictures of her station.

Growing. Glowing. Gone.

Peace

Clichés' Eden

It cannot therefore be said that God 'wonders' -- because the knowledge of God is perfect... Only a being who does not know fully can wonder.
-- Josef Pieper, The Philosophical Act

So. God. You can't wonder.

You say you're the rich dude in the gated community, eternally bored by your velveteen lawns and angel buds, camping out with us hobos one fine night? Here we are, calling you wise and, what d'ya know, you're just a logic man, hungry for the salty stew.

Are you telling me (pass the corn) you'd rather be human, it's no fun knowing how the movie ends and you don't dream because imagination's moot? You're not making sense, brother -- what's not to like about the infini-cruise you got floating up there? No fuss. No muss. No bills. No ballyhoo. You're kidding, right? This is one of your domestic eavesdropping stints, that's it, right?

Got to admit, though, you had me going. Seemed almost likely (life's that crazy) you might need us more'n we need your type, all dripping in hyperbole and what not (Thought hobos stuck to small words, did ya? Honest mistake -- naw -- didn't steal a thing, it comes from reading -- still free, last time I checked). Imagine, the boss man bummin in the skids with a bunch of losers, tryin to convince us he's loony up there in his great white way. Got milk, mister? Ha ha! Just yankin your chain! Heard about your wife, though. Derned shame how she died in childbirth. Say again? Oh -- it was her heart give out cuz her kids never called her by name and you, her good companion, we kinda forgot about too?

You know, you do have a story or two up your sleeve (is that polyester -- I notice it don't wrinkle) -- and as for being Mr. Know-it-all, I beg (respectfully 'course) to disagree. I doubt you'd a come all this way lookin for handouts if you already figured we'd share what little we had with a big shot like you. I doubt you even know my name. Well it's Leander and if you're wonderin if I'm a man or a woman, how old and what manner of believer or disbeliever, welcome to planet earth. Wonderin's common as dirt around here and you do appear to have a knack for pickin philosophers for friends.

Go on. Dig in. Grub's gettin cold.

Toil and moil

I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole. I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

The German painter, novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist, philosopher and chief minister of state at Weimar died in 1832. The quote is found in Josef Pieper's essay, Musse und Kult (Leisure the Basis of Culture) which makes a case for 'a contemplative attitude, a receptive attitude... the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.' If you would drink this holy brew, try silence:

Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed."

Pieper's 1950's world is enamored with work. Rational thought is king. Action and effort are gods. The essay lays out a society's frenetic absorption in accomplishing goals to the point of... sadness. Cognitive striving rooted in a person's 'despairing refusal to be oneself.' (Kierkegaard)

Metaphysically and theologically... a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being... Behind or beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not one with himself, or, as the medieval writers would have said, face to face with the divine good within him, he is prey to sadness.

From Hemingway to Cobain to (your name here), artists have a leaning toward sadness. My theory, that hypersensitivity to the groanings of reality gnaws at the artist heart, is upended by Pieper, who pairs sadness with a profound lack of sensitivity, a driven hyper insensitivity to that divine good inside you. Prozac according to Pieper: be quiet and listen up.

It is in these silent and receptive moments that the soul of man is sometimes visited by an awareness of what holds the world together, only for a moment, perhaps, and the lightening vision of his intuition has to be recaptured and rediscovered in hard work.

And here, it seems, perfectionism finds a worthy companion to her unrelenting mad devotion.

Vetted sperm

'So what's the life span of the African water frog?' she asks.

'No idea,' says the woman handing her the can of floating food sticks and calling, 'Hey Lester, do you know how long water frogs are supposed to live?' to the groomer heading out to lunch.

The frog owner elaborates. 'The frog's 4 inches long and still kicking. It was a tadpole when my son was in kindergarten. Sunday, he graduates from college.'

'No kidding?' -- three mammals grin in unison at the amphibian's accomplishment.

'Your frog's got some serious longevity going there,' says the groomer.

Serious longevity.

A friend tells me she stopped writing songs once she moved beyond her divorce. The songs soothed the monster but as grief gave out, my friend laid down her pen. We stand beside the circulation desk, in sisterhood, pondering. The poet's strangled need yields squawks of rage; acceptance finds her famished but inert.

'Words fail me.' Oh sure, observes the lexicon, blame your writer's block on words you can't come up with. Diaspora is not of words but of the pen holder's nerve endings, dissolving in shades of gray. What does it take to bundle synapses into the fire breathing, word snorting, talon flexing wonderbeast? Agony gets the job done. But who endures that hell for long?

Longevity.

Pollywog in captivity: sprout legs, kick up sediment, scrounge for factory food in a glassed pond. Or, it's goddess incarnate, checking out the humanoids.

Ribbit, dollbaby, let's go boogie down tonight.

738 mph

Ha Jin. Decorated Chinese-American writer invited by Cleveland's public library to read his work. He chooses a short story about a composer's devotion to a mute parrot. The library's air, stagnant. The author's accent, heavy as my narcoleptic lids. I'm impressed by the holding power of the man's non-theatric presentation. Easily two hundred Clevelanders belie the culture's inclination toward glitz. This crowd could be just as happy in our own recliners, hammocks, porch swings -- surveilling the writer's words incognito. But here we all are, literature groupies, entranced.

I scribble some words that don't make sense now, two days later. 'Affectionate without being soft. Sorrowful without anger.' Ha Jin might have used these words to describe his protagonist. They fit the writer perfectly, too. A man without guile or affectation.

After the reading, he answers questions. He would not recommend to anyone to be a writer. Friday's newspaper quoted him on the physical demands of writing the novel:

Just to carry the book around in you is exhausting. A good part of your mind must be devoted to it.

So we circle around like the story's laconic parrot to the question of devotion. A young man asks Ha Jin if he writes for his audience or for himself. The writer says an ideal audience is neither a group (too fickle) nor yourself (too partial?). Find one person you respect and devote your writing to this audience of one.

I accept the golden kernels from the master's hand. He's earned my trust several books ago. I think about the yackety parrots of this world, each with her own glib affront to stillness. I wonder about the decorated Chinese American author and his solitary audience. I consider the burden of carrying around your book, your composition, your painting for the sake of one winged miracle of receptivity.

I listen to Ha Jin and marvel at the velocity of silence.

Tarnished opal

Jack Benny had an adage: 'A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.' An art form has a language its best practitioners master as the wannabes effortlessly mangle the nuances. How mysterious, creative minds. How can one spin out poems, another speak oil-on-canvas or hand-on-keyboard? Why can most of us dream stories while very few dreamers translate their imaginations into novels?

Another mystery: Harvard's Kaavya Viswanathan, the young writer accused of plagiarizing Megan McCafferty's work. Was Viswanathan naive enough to think nobody would notice the similarities or, as she says, had she internalized the passages so completely, she thought they were her own?

Readers, bloggers, finger waggers assume the worst, a get-rich-heist of another author's intellectual property. But many a songwriter has wondered, when a phrase comes dazzlingly into consciousness, 'did I really write this, or did I hear it someplace?' The cauldron's a thick soup of old bones and grizzled memories.

Intellectual property is vulnerable to poaching. Who will keep watch? Maybe someday a computer will have 'plagiary check' to run creations through, so the art vigilantes can take a break and, who knows, go throw some clay, carve some wood, sculpt their own fictional masterpieces.

Girdered loins

Acrophobia's my middle name, notwithstanding the Swiss blood flooding my veins. This worker apparently has no such qualms about high places. The Empire State Building on which he sits was the world's tallest when it opened 75 years ago today. Immigrants and Mohawk ironworkers melded steel, aluminum, granite and limestone into a life sized tribute to our nation's primal instinct. Pride un-toppled by the World War II bomber that lost its way in a fog, butted the fortress' north side, killed three crew members and eleven office workers. Pride incumbent still.

It's the worker's nonchalance, not the panorama, that takes my breath away. If you told me the gentleman fell to his doom after wrestling with strongmen, I'd be shocked but not surprised. If you wanted to show me an artful film about the struggle, I'd pass.

United 93 debuted to the tune of $11.6 million over the weekend, music to Hollywood's collective ears. Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal Pictures says,

It's about the fact that the American public spoke out... This is a wonderful result. What they said was that it wasn't too soon for a film about Sept. 11.

Fling wide the gates, let the disaster movies roll. Shall we stoke down popcorn and slurp cokes from our stadium seating as the entertainment moguls fatten up their bottom line?

Our local paper had the grace, in weeks following 9/11, to forgo the ads in pages covering the tragedy. No maidenform bras, no cellphone deals, no turbo charged wonder cars vying for our bucks. I appreciated the restraint. In retrospect, I guess nobody knew how to do business as usual with a gutted public. Over time, the gleam of glamour stuff resumed its chummy relations with the news.

I won't be going to United 93. I see it as a for-profit distraction from the liberties being whisked away as we watch. Around here, musicians have their sound unplugged by stage owners who don't like the band's anti-Bush tee shirts (or lyrics). A woman faces jail time for 'abusing' policemen who manhandled her for refusing to take down anti-Bush flyers.

Freedom's on a lunch break, nodding off. Taller the skyscraper, more perilous the fall.