about legal drama "Judge Judy"

The judge stated the facts of the case. The couple had lived together and have one child. The woman also has children from a different relationship. The judge asked how many. In this courtroom built from concrete composite such a shame and brick, finished with mother's defiant girl and wood paneling she tilted her head down in answer, "Two. Two other children." Stain spread wings when life's changes happen in only a few words.

a fictional note about the barbecue

Jim invites you and a few of the other dads on the block to watch Sunday football at his house and eat barbecue. You discuss the importance of a good offensive line with one dad and begin to suspect he has a urinary tract infection. He searches your eyes for recognition, but now you deny him.

Later in life, the doctor, nurse, physician's assistant, medical technician, nurse practitioner, and the patient himself watch his dark urine course through the tubing.

about messing around on the guitar

Sometimes when I fuck around on guitar, I'll find something decent and play it repeatedly. In that rhythm, maybe I can nail it. But if I turn on the phone to record, No. I tell myself I can play it clean without screwing up, but the memory and hands can't believe each other.

 

about a couple I saw trying to cross the street

The young couple paused at the sunny street corner where three cars had reached a four-way stop. The car ahead of them moved first, followed by the car on the right turning left, crossing their path. The man watched the cars move, one by one, without turning his head, fearing that to look and acknowledge the driver would signal his yielding. Meanwhile, two more cars cued up at the intersection. He feared that the responsible caution he thought he was demonstrating for his date now seemed like slow-witted timidity. The sun pumped overhead and focused its energy on him, squeezing perspiration from his brow, his armpits, from his back. Was I supposed to have stepped off the curb and challenge the cars? 

She stepped off the curb, offered back her hand and a wink, her eyes a squint in the UV light. A haughty little sigh slipped from his dry mouth—the last little gasp from his car-crushed lungs—then he took her hand, gratefully, and wished he would never have to let go.

 

(posts) maybe an album cover

 

something about “A Clockwork Orange”

A violent young hoodlum is caught, imprisoned, and behaviorally conditioned to be sickened by violence. He changes from a living thing into a machine—a clockwork orange.

I watched Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” in my teens. It stays with you: Kubrick’s striking scenery and artful shots, Malcolm McDowell’s boiling performance, and the characters’ affected speech.

 

The story and the speech—supposedly a mix of Russian-derived slang terms, cockney constructions, and archaic English—are the creation of author Anthony Burgess. I read A Clockwork Orange after seeing the movie, though, and now I have reread it. I love it.

The end of Kubrick’s movie, released in 1971, famously differs from Burgess’s book, published in 1962. The movie ends with Alex, the young hoodlum and protagonist, cured, so to speak, of his behavioral conditioning and once again aspiring to violence and criminality. Kubrick’s version follows the American edition of the book, which omitted the book's original final chapter in which Alex begins to lose interest in the wanton violence he pursued aggressively in youth, instead thinking more and more of relaxing and making something—a family, maybe.

The rest of the world had that chapter, yet Kubrick’s film is probably still the seminal version of the story. Burgess explains his take on the omitted ending in a new introduction he wrote in 1986:

When a fictional work fails to show a change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or word one is a novel.

One of several nice passages in the book and not in the movie comes after P.R. Deltoid, the Post-Corrective Adviser from Alex’s time in a reform school, leaves Alex’s house the morning after one of Alex’s late nights of destruction. Alex is reflecting on society’s efforts to improve the behavior of young people like him. He shrugs his shoulders at the idea of getting arrested again and locked up in some jail or reform institution.

So if I get loveted and its three months in this mesto and another six in that, and then, as P.R. Deltoid so kindly warns, next time, in spite of the great tenderness of my summers, brothers, it’s the great unearthly zoo itself, well, I say: “Fair, but a pity, my lords, because I just cannot bear to be shut in. My endeavor shall be, in such future as stretches out its snowy and lilywhite arms to me before the nosh overtakes or the blood spatters its final chorus in twisted metal and shattered glass on the highroad, to not get loveted again.” Which is fair speeching. But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that’s because they like it, and I wouldn’t ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by Bog or God and in his great pride and rodasty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, bothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.

 

Notes:

"A Clockwork Orange" seems subversive even now, and in 1962 it must have been nuts.

In the same introduction mentioned above, Burgess suggests the term clockwork orange was first Cockney slang for a gay.

I read this in the website The Ringer (which is taking this part probably from the New York Post):

When McDowell improvised a version of “Singin’ in the Rain” on set during the scene in which Alex paralyzes the reclusive writer Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), he unlocked a contemporary, Hollywood-aimed variation on Burgess’s point, which Kubrick then wove brilliantly into the overall design of the film. Alex uses “Singin’ in the Rain” to express his joy at inflicting pain. In the process, Kubrick “taints” the music in a manner that foreshadows the methodology of the evil scientists’ brainwashing Ludovico Technique (not to mention the pale imitation of Quentin Tarantino, whose use of “Stuck in the Middle With You” in Reservoir Dogs as Mr. Blonde’s own private ode to joy is a tribute). 

 

someone else's *good* poem

Bringing My Son to the Police Station to be Fingerprinted
—Shoshauna Shy

My lemon-colored
whisper-weight blouse
with keyhole closure
and sweetheart neckline is tucked
into a pastel silhouette skirt
with side-slit vents
and triplicate pleats
when I realize in the sunlight
through the windshield
that the cool yellow of this blouse clashes
with the buttermilk heather in my skirt
which makes me slightly queasy
however

the periwinkle in the pattern on the sash
is sufficiently echoed by the twill uppers
of my buckle-snug sandals
while the accents on my purse
pick up the pink
in the button stitches

and then as we pass
through Weapons Check
it's reassuring to note
how the yellows momentarily mesh
and make an overall pleasing
composite

about Sunday morning

The way I feel now, I did not feel when I woke up two hours ago. I woke up, ashes for eyes, marble head. Now signs give me an all-clear. I’m here now—not in waiting for something else, not in service to tomorrow.

 

about drifting empathy

One morning I cut down a nuisance sapling and pulled a couple of tall, ugly weeds in the alley. Then a guy came by, pulled out a piece of cardboard from between the trash cans, and made himself at home where the weeds had been. Looked like he needed an hour or so to regain some of his senses. I didn't mind much—a lot of people walk by there on Saturdays to go to the farmer's market, but they can just ignore him, which they did. But after he collected the remains of his shattered psyche and metabolized enough of the sunshine pounding in his veins to get on his feet and move on, he left the box there.

 

Such a tiny thing, I'm ashamed I gave it any thought.

a note for a Saturday in spring

His ears filled with teeth that told him what to do.

 

The boss to beat to go to the next level. Beat him a little dead to get there. His body comprised God numbers. God-like he was not.

 

Do not talk to friends, do not join dying conversations. This works. Drugged, pharmacy never cared, left to live a life seeing the air move. Security failed if you are alive and for employment with nowhere else to go.