Slovenian Political Satire

First part of the lyrics: First of all, let me explain what I've been asked a lot of times: Gašpar is my name Gašpar Mišič is my surname. I'm not a crook, I've been supported by Boris Popovič. I don't need any experience, Alenka, kiss my ass, b*tch. I deserve an applause, applause, applause. I deserve an applause, applause. I deserve an applause, applause I deserve. I don't want to listen to your nonsense (?). Applause, applause, applause.

Second par of the lyrics: I didn't give any bribe for the port, port (*port Koper) and I wasn't tormented by sleeping with anyone. I worked hard for everything, I never f*cked up. I never slaughtered somebody with a bazooka (?). The lies are far from the truth, look at the birds, up there on the branch, listen to the birds. Did you hear that? They said CIV CIV, Gašper is not guilty.

Third part of the lyrics: I am always prepared to be in the limelights. Nobody will sweep the floors with me, stop with the harrasment. I am a leader deep in the heart, if I will not succeed in the port (*Koper), I will clean my good name as a host of TV news. Good evening! Exclusive news! Gašpar Gašpar Mišič deserves an appology! I can guarantee you that he ABSOLUTELY wasn't appointed by politics, this is why we should give him a big applause! CIV CIV, CIV CIV, CIIIIIV CIIIV (*the birds)

Fourth part of the lyrics: I deserve an applause, applause, applause. I deserve an applause, applause. I deserve an applause, applause I deserve. Who doesn't applause, is a hillbilly. Applause, applause, applause.

Last part: There, in the lake! Listen to the ducks. Have you heard? They said GA GA, you will be saved by Lord Gaga. GAGA GAGA GA GA.

OK, let's try with the lyrics and the explanation: Gašpar Gašpar Mišič is a sleazy wannabe politician, who was involved in some of the greatest scandals in slovenian past. A month ago, it was revealed that he will be appointed as a supervisor at our only port, port Koper. He is known for his affiliation with the mayor of Koper, which is a well-known crook, if not a criminal (a lot of cases are in the court) - Boris Popovič (mentioned in the song). Alenka is Alenka Bratušek, our premier.

- translation/explanation by tevtica

Retro Illusions

As we age…we continue to live
While hours filter through a sieve
Thoughts dim as false teeth chew
The hour glass flips... and old is new

- Theresa Ann Moore, "Retro"

Primroses

I SAW it in my evening walk,
A little lonely flower!
Under a hollow bank it grew,
Deep in a mossy bower.

An oak’s gnarl’d root, to roof the cave
With Gothic fretwork sprung,
Whence jewell’d fern, and arum leaves,
And ivy garlands hung.

And from beneath came sparkling out
From a fallen tree’s old shell,
A little rill, that dipt about
The lady in her cell.

And there, methought, with bashful pride,
She seem’d to sit and look
On her own maiden loveliness
Pale imaged in the brook.

No other flower—no rival grew
Beside my pensive maid;
She dwelt alone, a cloister’d nun,
In solitude and shade.

No sunbeam on that fairy well
Darted its dazzling light—
Only, methought, some clear, cold star
Might tremble there at night.

No ruffling wind could reach her there—
No eye, methought, but mine,
Or the young lamb’s that came to drink,
Had spied her secret shrine.

And there was pleasantness to me
In such belief. Cold eyes
That slight dear Nature’s lowliness,
Profane her mysteries.

Long time I looked and linger’d there,
Absorb’d in still delight—
My spirit drank deep quietness
In, with that quiet sight.

- Caroline (Bowles) Southey, "The Primrose" (1787–1854)

Whispers from the Woods

Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There's not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a hand
Whose fingers brush the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.

When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door,
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra,

I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
He never heard that fleshless chant
Rise solemn in the tree,

As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,
Had broken rank,
Then knit, and passed
In seamless company.

- Emily Dickinson, "The Wind"

Mixing Blud

Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars
Buy shoes for the baby.
House rent to pay.
Gin on Saturday,
Church on Sunday.
My God!
Babies and gin and church
And women and Sunday
All mixed with dimes and
Dollars and clean spittoons
And house rent to pay.
Hey, boy!
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord.
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David’s dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean bright spittoon all newly polished—
At least I can offer that.
Com’mere, boy!

Langston Hughes, "Brass Spitoons"

Our Life Sustaining Fantasies

It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son. [In a famous letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg (December 31, 1778), Lessing relates the death of his infant son, who "understood the world so well that he left it at the first opportunity."] That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.

The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's buff on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this—although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power.

What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?

- Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense"

The Fantasy Beneath the Reality

What does it mean, more precisely, to say that ideological fantasy structures reality itself? Let us explain by starting from the fundamental Lacanian thesis that in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality: it is, as Lacan once said, the support that gives consistency to what we call 'reality'.

- Slavoj Zizek, "The Sublime Object of Ideology"

Lost Amusements

Background

Proof that there are only 3 Physical Dimensions + Time

because if there were more (n) dimensions, solar systems wouldn't be flat
Four fundamental forces: Gravity, Weak, Electromagnetic and Strong


Hmmmm....

Amores Mios

So although the boulders with the tooth of the patient plough
Perish with time, poetry is absent from death:
Let kings and the triumphs of kings yield to poetry,
Let the bountiful banks of gold-bearing Tagus yield.
Let the common people admire common things; to me may golden-haired Apollo
Serve cups filled with Castalian water,
And may I wear myrtle on my hair that fears the frost
And be much read by anxious lovers.
Envy feasts on the living; after death it is silent,
When each man’s fame protects him as he deserves:
So, even when the final flame has consumed me,
I shall live, and a considerable part of me will survive.

- Ovid, "Amores" (1.15)

Can a House Have Too Many Windows?

ReFocus

Can you Get Some... Satisfaction?

The things we have
Within our reach
Seldom we hold them
Close to our hearts
For we are so busy
Chasing the things
We would love to have
That we don’t have time
To love the things we have
Little do we realize
Their intrinsic worth
Until they part with us
And then often it’s too late
To do anything
Except to regret that
We took them for granted.

J R. Sterling, "The Things We Take For Granted"

Dragon's Breath

A dictator, hiding behind a nihilist's mask,
has killed and killed and killed,
pillaged and wasted,
but is afraid, he claims,
to kill a sparrow.
His smiling picture is everywhere:
in the coffeehouse, in the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.
Satan used to be an original,
now he is just the dictator's shadow.
The dictator has banned the solar calendar,
abolished Neruda, Marquez, and Amado,
abolished the Constitution;
he's given his name to all the squares, the open spaces,
the rivers,
and all the jails in his blighted homeland.
He's burned the last soothsayer
who failed to kneel before the idol.
He's doled out death as a gift or a pledge.
His watchdogs have corrupted the land,
stolen the people's food,
raped the Muses,
raped the widows of the men who died under torture,
raped the daughters and widows of his soldiers
who lost the war,
from which, like rabbits in clover fields,
they had run away,
leaving behind corpses of workers and peasants,
writers and artists,
twenty-year-old children,
carpenters and ironsmiths,
hungry and burned under the autumn sky,
all forcibly led to slaughter,
killed by invaders, alien and homegrown.
The dictator hides his disgraced face in the mud.
Now he is having a taste of his own medicine,
and the pillars of deception have collapsed,
his picture is now underfoot,
trampled by history's worn shoes.
The deposed dictator is executed in exile,
another monster is crowned in the hapless homeland.
The hourglass restarts,
counting the breaths of the new dictator,
lurking everywhere,
in the coffeehouse, the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.


2
From the Caribbean to China's Great Wall,
the dictator-dragon is being cloned.
When will you do it, St George?

- Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati, "The Dragon" (1996)