101 Get-a-'bout alley...

A Wonderful Comedy Team in a poem...

Sonnet

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,
Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.
What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic
Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.
He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write
And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic
Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.


In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.
She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered
He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation
Stopped - just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills
Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's
     heart fluttered
And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,
    "But I still have some of the pills."

~Alice Notley

Lets stick a little Chuck in there,

"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
~Chuck Palahniuk

Chocolate Jesus... enjoy....

The Master

It's the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler born in Chicago, Illinois (1888). He's known for his novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe such as The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1954). He started out writing second-rate poetry and essays, but couldn't get much published, so he gave up and took a bookkeeping class, got a job at a bank, and went on to become a wealthy oil company executive.

He lost his job when the stock market crashed in 1929. So at the age of 45 he began writing for pulp fiction magazines, which paid about a penny a word.

Chandler was one of the first detective novelists to become known for the quality of his prose, and he became famous for his metaphors. In one novel he wrote, "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight." In another he wrote, "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."

Ron Padgett, turnin' into a fave...

Fairy Tale

The little elf is dressed in a floppy cap
and he has a big rosy nose and flaring white eyebrows
with short legs and a jaunty step, though sometimes
he glides across an invisible pond with a bonfire glow on his cheeks:        
it is northern Europe in the nineteenth century and people
are strolling around

Copenhagen

in the late afternoon,
mostly townspeople on their way somewhere,
perhaps to an early collation of smoked fish, rye bread, and cheese,
washed down with a dark beer: ha ha,  I have eaten this excellent meal         
and now I will smoke a little bit and sit back and stare down
at the golden gleam of my watch fob against the coarse dark wool of my vest,
and I will smile with a hideous contentment, because I am an evil man,        
and tonight I will do something evil in this city!

~ Ron Padgett

The Striding Man

Taken From  Modern Drunkard...

 

All Dressed Up and

Somewhere to Go

Johnnie Walker

Scotch Whisky

Johnnie Walker’s first foray into print advertising left something to be desired- the 1883 illustration featured a broken-hearted Scot boo-hooing over a bottle of whisky smashed at his feet. The exercise-obsessed dandy who would lead Johnnie Walker to the pinnacle of scotch supremacy didn’t hit the ground walking until 1909.

Modeled after the company’s founder, John  “Johnnie” Walker, the character was drawn by famed illustrator Tom Browne under the direction of George Walker, John’s grandson. Initially called “The Regency Buck,” the icon’s moniker was later toned down to the more descriptive (if less dashing) “The Striding Man.” The family name had more than a little to do with the logo’s ambulatory nature.

Why It Worked: His top hat, walking stick, breeches and riding boots promise a refined product for an upscale market. Combine that with his elusiveness (yes, he can see you fine through his solid-gold eyeglasses, he simply doesn’t have time to dally with the likes of you) and it makes for a very attractive symbol for the rung-climbing careerist set with money to spend. This  formula also dovetails nicely with Johnnie Walker’s ladder of incrementally expensive color-coded whiskies.

 

Evolution: During the 1950s The Striding Man took a break from pounding the    pavement for a bit of sport, appearing in adverts engaged    in the gentlemanly pursuits of golf and billiards. He hit the bricks shortly thereafter and remained relatively    unchanged until very recently.  All    that pacing must have helped him think, because he presently    seems to have solved the riddle of invisibility (see    right.)    If you thought he the was hard to pin down before, try to catch him after he strips down. Why the change? Graphic    artists are ever striving to make marketing symbols simpler,    and thus more easy to recognize. And in this case you’re going to have to recognize him by his threads, because his face has vanished.

 

Dark Secret: Was once a bootlegger. During America’s bout with prohibition, the distillery engaged in what they called their “special trade,” that being the delivery of boatloads of their whisky into the hands of rumrunners working from small Canadian isles near the U.S. coast.

 

Claim to Fame: Aside from dominating the world-wide Scotch market, Johnnie Walker is Superman’s choice of liquor.

 

 

International Neruda Day

No poet has ever touched love's soul like him...

"The night is fractured and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance. The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.
I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like these I held her in my arms.

I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.

Hear the vast night, vaster without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.
What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.
The night is fractured and she is not with me.

That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.
My heart looks for her: she is not with me.

The same night whitens, in the same branches.
We, from that time, we are not the same.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.
Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.
Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.
Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,         
and these are the last lines I will write for her."...

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), whose real name is Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born on 12 July, 1904

Friday Night... and on the town

"Don't try to use me, or slyly refuse me,
just win me or lose me, it is this that the darkness is for."
~from Lady Midnight by Leonard Cohen
 

Born Today

It's the birthday of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo,

...born just outside of Mexico City (1907).
Over the course of her lifetime, she only produced about 130 paintings, most of them on relatively tiny canvases and squares of sheet metal. And almost all of her paintings were self-portraits. But in spite of her small output, she's now considered one of the greatest Mexican artists and one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century.
What made her work unique was that she mixed a 19th-century European style with elements of Mexican pop culture and Native American art, something that had never been done before. She didn't have her own major solo exhibition until 1953, the same year she had her leg amputated after a life of health problems caused by a streetcar accident when she was a teenager. She was carried into the show on a stretcher and then laid down on a four-poster bed in the middle of the gallery, as though she were one of the art works.

She died the following year. She was 47 years old. It was only after her death that her work became well known. Today, her paintings fetch prices at auctions equal to paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh.

A ditty from "Pal Joey"

"...After one whole quart of brandy, Like a daisy I awake
With no Bromo Seltzer handy, I don't even shake.
Men are not a new sensation; I've done pretty well, I think.
But this half-pint imitation, Put me on the blink..."

"...Sweet again, Petite again, And on my proverbial seat again.
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered am I.
What am I? Half shot am I. To think that he loves me, So hot am I.
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered am I.
Though at first we said, "No, sir." Now we're two little dears.
You might say we are closer Than Roebuck is to Sears
I'm dumb again And numb again, A rich, ready, ripe little plum again.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I..."

~from The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart