The Reality

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

A few years ago I offhandedly mentioned that George Clooney should make All The Shah’s Men into a movie.  Well, after the whole BP oil spill I started thinking again about Syriana (and how effing good it was) and All The Shah’s Men (and ditto) and then I wrote this long blog post right here in this space all about how the rights to the book All The Shah’s Men really should be purchased and/or developed with Sam Rockwell as Kermit Roosevelt, the badass Jamshid Hashempour as Mohammed Mossadeq, and George Clooney directing.

Then Google tells me somebody named Matt Bird beat me to the blog post.  Minus the perfect casting, but his write up is great:

Genre: Spy / Historical

Premise: A determined American spy develops an outrageous plan to overthrow the fragile democracy of Iran in 1953, at the request of the oil company that would become known as BP.

About: I haven’t heard anything about this getting adapted so far, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t on a development board somewhere.

Writer: Kinzer is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has written plenty of books about U.S. dirty dealings overseas. This book became an unexpected hit in 2003, as U.S. efforts in the Middle East fell about apart and people started getting more serious about the question “Why do they hate us?” Unfortunately, it’s gotten even more timely since, due to the BP connection.

The whole writeup is pretty stellar. The book had me at hello. Read this other blog post.

I used to watch this show on PBS with my big brother in the early 80s.

Tim Sheridan is obsessed with Doctor Who on itsasickness.com.

this is something i keep wanting to quote:

Soulless Cultural Wasteland ‘On The Grow’ In Southern California Desert

Los Angeles to Be Hellish Megalopolis by 1950

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – The soulless cultural wasteland in the California desert, considered one of the bleakest and most God-forsaken stretches of uninhabitable scorched earth in the nation is “on the grow,” West Coast sources say, as the burgeoning city of Los Angeles continues its cancerous expansion.

Originally a tiny villa called Los Diablos, a coastal settlement of no distinction save for its capacity of heartlessness, the boomtown is now bigger than ever. Despite its lack of any life-sustaining natural resources, the city, which has no reason to exist at all has all the earmarks of a spectacular soulless cultural wasteland on the rise.

Tourist-Friendly Dystopia

Thanks to its policy of draining every conceivable water source from within hundreds of miles via massive network of pipes, as well as the Chamber of Commerce’s approval of a name-change to the more tourist-friendly “Los Angeles,” the up-and-coming wasteland shows every sign of ballooning into a full-scale dystopia.

Although recently a mid-sized, primarily agricultural settlement, trends indicate that the city is on its way to becoming a sprawling nightmarish megalopolis within the next few decades. Complete with desperate poverty, rampant crime, and a callous indifference to the spirits it has crushed, this business-minded realm of demons is hoped, by as early as 1950 to be the leading soulless cultural wasteland in the world.

Thriving Arts Haven

Staggering in its economic disparity, the planned wasteland will be an affront to human dignity, not only in the shallow excesses of its bloated overlords, but in the anarchic savagery of its desperate underclass. Yet, it is in the area of the arts that Los Angeles hopes to truly make its mark.

“Our town’s lowest-common-denominator cultural output has the potential, one day, to be second to none in insipid banality,” Wasteland Development Director Randolph Moloch said. “We hope to suck up the souls of promising artists like a great, black vortex, spitting out only the most lifeless, commerce-produced cultural products possible.”

“We have high ambitions for the lows to which our community will sink,” Moloch said. “We don’t just want to be an overpopulated crucible of dehumanizing corruption, materialism, and race hatred; we want to be known the world over the a place where ideas come to die.”

A Faustian Bargain

Perhaps the words of the late civil engineer William Mulholland, who was responsible for the construction of the aqueducts that feed Los Angeles as blood feeds and vampire’s undead corpse, best articulate the civic spirit of Los Angeles. IN a speech before the city’s Chamber of Commerce in 1930, the “Father of the Wasteland” said, “We’re willing to do whatever it takes, including entering pacts with Satan himself, to achieve our hellish dreams. We have stolen an entire river from an ancient ecosystem hundreds of miles away, destroying the lives of all who lived there. WE built a criminally unstable dam whole collapse killed more people than the San Francisco earthquake. That takes guts. No, it takes more than guts – it takes sheer, unrelenting hatred of all that is good and decent.”