Newport Jazz Festival 1958. The year that accelerated jazz into a new era. The white race was catching sight at black music, and Anita O’Day, white as snow, swinging “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two”. Fashion was cool, simple and stylish. It was high-level art and completely irresistible. The world would find itself and the music exploded.

She was 10 years old and explosive. She had just saved her father from committing suicide. Or maybe he used her, realizing he would not die by drinking a whole bottle of snaps in one go. However, the gas? Turned up to minimum strength, she barely noticed, when she opened the window and shouted for help, while her father lay in a bloodstream with a hole in the head. Her nose and the smell of alcohol and blood mixed with gas saved them. She had had some experiments with her father’s “circus performance”, making sure he did not jump out in front of a train at North Harbor Station. The repeating pattern: dad on a bender/mom wants a divorce/dad threatens suicide. “Oh, my dear, poor daddy!” Subsequently she drove her mother to madness with psychological questions. Was she malicious? Did she try to save herself by releasing her pain in this helpless manner; did she really resemble her father that much? She had to find out if her mother could withstand her pain and sorrow without giving up, like her father, because she felt empty, selfless and abandoned.

Now her world should change too, so she could find herself for real. What a process, what a chance. In addition, life, so damn slow, lying right there like a big bleeding sparkling love ball, calling for help.

The fool
loses face
So What

Mona Larsen

I read somewhere that an as-yet-undisclosed brand of artificial sweetener is manufactured by Oompa-Loompas, captured and enslaved by the U.S. Government in the heart of an as-yet-undisclosed location (but I’ll bet my Monopoly salary it’s Area 51). They say everyone is paid in packets, with a few cacao beans here and there as incentive for overtime. Even the little ones labor 18 hour days. They say the Oompa-Loompas are overworked, sleep-deprived, and so strung out from snorting their crystalline rations they can’t even wiggle free from their infant-sized shackles.

And all to compete with the coconut sugar industry. Those poor little Loompa babies. For shame. Won’t someone please think of the children?

intelligent design –
does my wallet look fat
in these jeans

Elizabeth Alford

By the next evening, it was undrinkable. The heat wave had done its work. I flinched and turned my head. Yes, I thought. Undrinkable.

Still, I fancied, as I stared into the mug still three-quarters full with mushroom coffee, that I could see a new civilization of fungi forming islands on the surface. The coconut oil was nutrient-rich, dense, but of course, limited.

I wondered: might the life forms sprung from this brown ocean be intelligent? Might they walk, dance, sing? Fall in love? Write poetry? Build homes, have jobs, families? Tell tall tales of their heroic ancestors’ deeds around a campfire? Might some fight for rights to the oil as others strike and strike back in protest? Might they slaughter their own without mercy on dark, decaying streets? Might they be the instruments of their own destruction?

I hesitated at the sink for only a moment and sniffed the moldy coffee again—allowed the unique, dank smell of life itself to wash over me one final time—then dumped the mixture, resolutely, down the drain.

suspension —
this place between
atoms & eve

Elizabeth Alford