Welcome to this week’s “zine.”

by Mark M

No dollar bills were harmed in the making of these images.

The origin of the idea, with a big nod to Mr. Warhol, was taking advantage of the play money and crayons of the young sons of a past girlfriend:

In this post, I mentioned Salvador Dalí‘s strong opinions that I often find humorous even if I quite disagree.

Christian Zervos was perhaps most well known for his catalogue raisonné (a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known artworks by an artist) of the work of Pablo Picasso.

Since Picasso was pretty prolific and lived until age 91, I was wondering how many volumes were in this catalogue. I didn’t find an answer; I didn’t spend much time looking. Apparently it was at least 30 volumes:

PABLO PICASSO (d.1973) PAR CHRISTIAN ZERVOS VOL. 30: SUPPLEMENT AUX ANNEES 1920-1922

But in looking, I came across this about Zervos on Wikipedia, and that’s why I bring him up:

Salvador Dalí once credited him with being the ‘most mediocre person that ever existed.’

I thought I once read that Picasso kept some works hidden from Zervos who died three years before Picasso died though maybe someone else carried on with the work (and found what got hidden!).

———=———

From Observations and Thinkings, Vol. wxy&z (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and so on)

Foreword

This chapbook volume never saw “print.” It is my intent that it will ultimately be “never-ending.” I add new additions to it to a file.

TV watching is one of the most passive things you can do.

Boycott — when we all ban together

When you want to get fucked up (such as from drink) it means you already are a little fucked up to begin with.

That’s no epidermis off my teeth.

Only the good croak young.

Perspiration lodge

People use the word “awesome” for things that are barely even cool.

I’m sorry, but I’m having a bad dick day.

It’s a women’s group where men are welcome too.

He appeared on the talk show Faze the Nation.

He sent her a letter, the letter “E.”

Wind is the masseuse of trees.

Satyrday

If he hurries up and comes clean now, he can maybe save both his faces.

Science is the attempt to find what all may agree on: proof.

But Reality may be bigger than such a stingy practice.

Chas Atlas Shrugged

Just trying to be fucking considerate.

Returning to the scene of the chrome.

The last word fell on my umbrella.

I love your guts.

Bless my sole.

Appellation spring

The disappointees

Some were disgruntled, but others were actually gruntled. [“Gruntled” is an actual word.]

Rah materials.

Famous bus driver.

Slowly but Shirley.

They could invent a channel that surfs for you…

Deep South, Shallow North

Jesus Crust

Madagascart

Thang Q

silver opportunity

Salvation Navy

get laid

get laid off

Too much malt beverage and one succumbs to beer pressure.

The Daily Correction

The world wide web and my computer have so much information, but I cannot use either to find out if my critical-condition sister will live.

A low, b’low, c-low…

You can lead a hose to water, but you cannot make it slink.

Beauty is only skin deep and sometimes not even that.

Dog: German Sheepherder

It was a stormy and dark night…
It was a dark or stormy night…

Nincompope

They treated him like a doggie.

Tues-date

fact-finding omission

I’d sendya an e-mail, but can’t figure out where to put the stamp.

When you’re alone, some things are “magnified.” Other things are magnified when with others.

Who was that person? He was Nass T.

I’m glad I’m inexperiencing that!

Trainsportation

61 or half a Dustin of the other.

Phil and rePhil

Give thanks to those who served up our country.

One thing about a-holes, they sure make for interesting stories.

Bum rap music

Thank you, Jesus, for saving us from God.

He tried hard. He tried soft. He tried everything in between.

It’s OK to be dis-illusioned. Just not disheartened or dispirited.

Atom and e.

At least 27% of US/Americans are too far fetched.

It took place in the Disenchanted Forest.

When Johnny strikes up the bandage…

One good turn deswerves another.

Everyone nose stink.

Overpopulation is the world’s biggest problem.

I had a very moving experience in the rest room.

Always enjoy the pleasant moment.

Merchants of more.

Back up / front down

Once upon a ladder…

Foregone forewent

A guy wants to have a 3-way with his inflatable doll and his new girlfriend.

If she doesn’t like me, she’s not that beautiful.

…

———=———

The July/August 2022 issue of Archaeology magazine had a story on the city-state of Tlaxcallan focusing on the era of its Aztec enemy Moctezuma II (r.1502-1520).

What is notable from what is being dug up at its site are a lack of palaces and ruins of homes that were all roughly the same size with stonework of similar quality.

Cortés called the city-state a republic and noted they lacked a supreme leader and sent about 60 men to negotiate with him. (Neil Young wrote a great song released in 1975 called “Cortez the Killer” though with certain lyrical inaccuracies in over-idealizing the Aztecs.)

In short, there appears to have been an unusually egalitarian class structure with a decentralized, consensus-based political system.

That’s the way to do it.

Meanwhile, about 500 years later in the present-day US(A), in order to prevent a rail-workers‘ strike, legislation is passed to prevent them from doing so. (Only eight House Dems voted against the strikebusting rail-worker bill.) I understand the need to try to keep the economy stable, but howcum the rail-workers pay the price and not the rail corporations whose net income is $27 billion? My understanding is that the workers want the same number of paid sick days that management gets. My hunch is the Tlaxcallan people wouldn’t think twice in granting that. (And dig: Out of the planet’s 193 countries, 179 of them enjoy paid sick leave.) But the strikebreaking legislation amounts to being of the corporations, for the corporations, and by the corporations and not the rail-workers. I could be wrong, but I don’t think anyone gets rich being a common rail-worker. Corp CEO’s are another matter, however.

Certainly people don’t get rich when they aren’t even paid the minimum wage. A law is only as good as its enforcement. Until then, wage theft is estimated to run to $8 billion annually.

Whenever Congress votes themselves a pay raise, the minimum wage should correspondingly also be raised, yet the value of the federal minimum wage is at its lowest point in 66 years.

Actually, the railroad rank and file cannot compete with the corps they work for in making campaign donations to Congresspeople.

And so we have, as has been pointed out by others, “the best Congress money can buy.”

When it comes to Offense, I mean, “Defense,” there are few, if any, rules in place that restrict or prohibit members of Congress who sit on committees that oversee and legislate defense policy from holding direct personal financial stakes in defense companies, including through the ownership of stock. This means there is nothing stopping members of the House and Senate armed services committees (as well as each chamber’s respective defense subcommittee of the appropriations committee) from directly tying their own personal financial interests to the financial interests of defense contractors, all while passing laws that would steer billions of tax dollars to those very same companies. Again, these contracts total hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

There are more than a dozen members of Congress who own stock or have some other direct financial investment in the defense industry while sitting on committees related to appropriations and defense, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets and Smart Insider. Though this is not ethical in a conflict-of-interest fashion, it is not illegal.

And in 2020, Raytheon, for instance, gave around $790,000 to the re-election campaigns of members of defense committees.

This article names some Congressional names referred to above and refers to the problem as the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Actually, Ray McGovern, a former CIA officer turned political activist (he’s a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)), says the complex is broader than that: “The corporate-controlled mainstream media have become a cornerstone of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT, if you will.”

Similarly, scholar and cultural critic Henry A. Giroux has referred to the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (MIAC). In his 2007 book, The University in Chains, Giroux documented how since the Cold War the U.S. academy had been a recurring site for research, investment and collaboration with the U.S. military-state in proliferating war and war profiteering across the planet.

An example: In 2019, the Swedish manufacturer Saab announced it would build the airframe for the T-7A Redhawk fighter jet at Purdue’s Discovery Research Park to help train the “next generation of fighter and bomber pilots.”

It’s not really a matter of secret meetings involving these groups, it’s just that they are populated with people who think alike and operate with the same assumptions of the U.S. and its role in the world, a very large flock of birds of a feather.

When it comes to the corporate media, for instance, there is a form of self-censorship on the part of writers. As a “good employee” knows what the boss will like and works towards that end, so a writer will know what stories or slants to stories the boss wants to see and will write accordingly.

And so, Manufacturing Consent occurs.

A little more in this vein (from here which is an excellent overview of the propaganda we are being fed re Russia/Ukraine):

“Since the G. W. Bush administration, broadcast and cable news channels have been packed with foreign policy analysts drawn from the community of retired intelligence officers, high-ranking military and defense officials, and politicians, many of them concurrently on the dole of defense industries, but without viewing audiences told about it. They include such figures as retired four-star general Jack Keane, General David Petraeus, and former secretaries of defense Leon Panetta and Condoleezza Rice. These conflicts of interest go largely unnoticed in the neoliberal boundary- and ethically-free and militarized U.S. political culture.

“The circuit of corporate state-MSM [mainstream media] propaganda is constantly renewed within the echo chambers of Washington. As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky noted in their classic study of news propaganda [Manufacturing Consent], few journalists who cover foreign policy are willing to jeopardize their privileged perches in the corporate media by seeking sources outside of the national power complex – the White House, State Department, DoD, CIA, and DC-area think tanks [which makes the MSM akin to a stenographer for these –Mark]. Journalist Stephen Kinzer has said that the worst aspect of the closure of public debate on US policy in eastern Europe is that ‘the press is such an eager participant,’ in its ‘over-the-top demonization of Putin’ and its ‘portrayal of Russia as a predatory enemy about to crush us.’ This has led newspapers like his former employer, the New York Times, ‘to become even more militant than the Pentagon.'”

———=———

On occasion, some outfit will suggest I write a prisoner. It can be anyone from the famous Leonard Peltier, to people I never heard of before.

I recently wrote to Jessica Reznicek who was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for a series of attacks on the Dakota Access Pipeline and is imprisoned in the “Federal Correctional Institution” in Waseca, MN, but the letter was returned with a form saying it was rejected due violating one of the following reasons:

“All incoming general correspondence, envelopes, and paper must be white in color. Item will be rejected if it is anything other than white, contains glitter, stickers, return address labels [this was circled in pen], lipstick, fragrance, markers, crayons, stains, or an unknown substance.”

Other than unknown substances, who’da thought any of the above could aid in a jailbreak? Or can you imagine something like, “And he held the prison guard hostage with a return address label”?

Of course, it’s not hard to read between the lines and conclude that the real message is: “We’re trying to make it difficult for there to be communications between the outside world and those imprisoned here. Have a nice day.”

Actually, they didn’t even include my non-compliant letter, unless it’s been stamped “return to sender” and hasn’t yet separately made it back to me.

Speaking of prison and letters, here’s something courtesy of reprieve.org that one might write and send:

Commanding Officer
PSC 1005
Box 25 FPO AE
Guantánamo Bay
09593

To whom it may concern,

I am writing on behalf of the men unjustly locked up at your facility in Guantánamo Bay. Years of their lives have been lost because of the mistakes our country has made since 2001.

No one should have ever been sent to a legal black hole like Guantánamo. Especially not men like Ahmed Rabbani, Abdul Malik Bajabu, and Khalid Qasim, who have never been charged with a crime. So, if you can, please speak up for them and end their nightmare at your facility.

Thank you

Sincerely,

(sign your name here)

———=———

This oughta put you to sleep (read each word):

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…

———=———

Lit Assertions

“Bradbury’s stories, for example, are actually tales of a religious moralist. When you fear that man will most certainly destroy himself through his misuse of technologies, then you are expressing the same feeling in different form expressed by the religious attitude—only religion’s devils are turned into technological devices. So Jane [Roberts]’s belief in the Sinful Self went underground in those years.”

…

“The use of the Frankenstein monster and so forth in television dramas, and the merging of strong destructive tendencies intermixed with the psychic abilities in current psychic horror stories, shows again the potent mixture of religion’s Sinful Self and science’s flawed self. To some extent, though in a different fashion, both fear the emergence of new knowledge, since new knowledge is apt to upset either framework entirely….

“I want to emphasize again the poor reputation held by both science and religion concerning unofficial knowledge, an attitude clearly put forth in many tales and legends, from Adam and Eve to Pandora’s box to the Frankenstein monster.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Personal Sessions, Vol. 6, Deleted Session, April 20, 1981

“You consider the Greek tragedies great because they echo so firmly your own beliefs.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Session 772, April 19, 1976

“This is also the reason why the plays of Shakespeare have endured the centuries. The dramas are not true to life in physical terms, but are true to life in psychic terms.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Early Sessions, Vol. 4, Session 183, August 30, 1965

“The creative abilities must revolve largely about man’s definition of himself, his source and purpose, and all of your Western literature and art has revolved about the concept of the Sinful Self in one way or another. The Shakespearean plays are an excellent case in point, even when they concern even older heritages, so the creative artist in any field has certain creative traditions that become classic models for his art and that of the world.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Personal Sessions, Vol. 6, Deleted Session, April 20, 1981

 “The male in your society is taught to personify aggressiveness with all of those antisocial attitudes that he cannot normally demonstrate. The criminal mind expresses these for him, hence the ambiguous attitudes on the part of society, in which renegades are often romanticized.”

—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 663, May 14, 1973

The End.

Next week (subject to change): How the English Language Worx, Volume 2, Etymology, Nakam and Not, My Shrunken Musical Tastes

Boilerplate: As part of my community project as Racine Writer in Residence, I hereby invite Racine-area people to send me prose or poems of 250 words or less for me to consider for inclusion in my posts as a “guest appearance.” Former Racine Writers in Residence, I want to explicitly include you in this invitation. If you want, also send a photo and a very short “bio.” You will retain the copyright for the material you submit. Send to m.mk at att.net with “Racine WiR” in the subject line. Thank you.

Don’t hide your light under a bushel-sized basket; it is recommended that you let it shine brightly.