The Bill O'Reilly and Miscellaneous Lesser Quatrains (October 2017)

Megan Kelly calls O'Reilly
A goon and a jerk,
He says she turned down
His offer to twerk.

No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.
You're less hot, says Megyn,
That John Le Carre's Smiley.

No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.

You're unpleasant, says Megyn,

And bilious and bile-y.

No harm, no foul!
Says Bill O'Reilly.

You're less sexy, says Megyn,

Than poo in a piley.

Bill O'Reilly inhabits a swamp primeval.

Where women grunt and sew and weaval.

Where female equality hasn't begint,

And Cupid's arrows are tipped with flint.

Said the women of Fox,

"Bill, stop calling us 'Toots!' "

And they pitched in to buy him,

A swimming pool, and concrete boots.

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Leonard Bernstein Centenary -
Lays a trap for musicians unwary.
Nothing brings one to one's knees
Faster than those awful symphonies.

Leonard Bernstein Centennielle
Music from heaven, music from hell.
He wrote the score for West Side Story,
But never for Edward's Amphigorey.

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Tim Burton just turned 59,
He was an early starter.
But his relationship didn't last
With Helen Bonham-Carter.

Time Burton danced and partied the night -
Strike up the music, strike up the bands.
But the piano's shape was quite a fright
After three pieces by Edward Scissorhands.
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Political Comment

Drop the bombs and rape and pillage

Every last Potemkin Village.

Cut the taxes for the rich,

And blow the candle on one last death wish.

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My poems are getting better and better!
If I enter a contest, I might win a sweater.
I might win a sweater, or even a coat.
And then I'd beam and preen and gloat.

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Whose woods these are, I think I know
He plays golf in the village below.
He will not see me putting here,
Or driving with his woods so dear.

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Holiday Gift Ideas for Someone with Everything

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The Harvey Weinstein Quatrains

Harvey Weinstein's not so bad -
He's not a cad, the frisky lad.
Just let him grope, or else he'll mope,
And you won't work on any soap.

Harvey Weinstein caught the girl,
and fondled her, and made her hurl.
Massage demanded, nothing got -
He fired her, his parting shot.

Harvey Weinstein, tongue in cheek -
The cheek was hers, it made her shriek.

Harvey Weinstein didn't mind
Harassing every girl he'd find.
He felt there was no harm in trying,
And evaded the police by lying.

From Shakespeare in Love to Kill Bill 3,
Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Apollo 13.
The Founder, Django, and The Aviator -
They'd all feed Harvey to an alligator.

Harvey Weinstein
Thought himself virile and racy.
But he was creepier
Than John Wayne Gacy.

Simchat Torah 10/2017

Beverly Hills synagogue closest out High Holy Days 2017, with Simchat Torah and a lively Klezmer Band, live-streaming online in the Shabbat Music Artists Series.  Don't miss the: Pizza and pie.

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Two Creative Novels by Laurent Binet

Author is Laurent Binet, a French author who has now published two novels.   In both cases I listened about 70% as audiobook and 30% as reading as I had the Kindle joint text/audio option.  In both cases, the English translations by Sam Taylor are a delight.

THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE is a comic novel in which a gruff French detective is investigating the death of Roland Barthes in 1980, who was actually killed by a laundry truck, and actually after having had lunch with Francois Mitterand.  Unfortunately, all the persons of interest are semiologists, linguists, philosophers, existentialists, etc, which drives the policeman batty.  He gets a postdoc assigned to him, it what is clearly a sidekick type role like Dr Watson.  However, here it is the postdoc who is the "genius" making brilliant detections like Sherlock Holmes.  The two also have cause to roam about Europe, Rome, Venice, attend a conference at Cornell, etc.   One of the characters develops a suspicious around 2/3 through that he may be a character in a novel.   

HHHH was his first novel.  Ostensibly, it is a detailed historical novel about how two fighters in the Czech resistance actually assassinated the Nazi leader for Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, who was also an author of the Holocaust plan.   However, the author spends variably a LOT of time talking to the reader about what he is doing, how his research is going, and so on.   Sometimes a chapter is all in the voice of the author, and sometimes the voice of the author just shows up once in the middle of a chapter in a parenthetical.  (Along the lines of, "I couldn't find out the name of the bridge they are crossing, despite weeks of research."  "I can't quote the letter he is handing him, because I lost my xerox of it after I left the Warsaw archive last year.")    HHHH is not a "comic" novel but it is an interesting and creative one.  

I believe a movie was made based on HHHH but it is a normal "straight" movie only about the actual events in 1942 or 43.  

Footnote

Another novel where the author talks to the reader, primarily in footnotes, is The French Lieutenant's Woman, (book 1969, film 1981).   It was made into a movie and in the movie, they recreated this double perspective by having the characters be actors in a movie, so half the film is "inside" the historical movie and half the time is "the actors" talking to each other or off the set.   

St Boniface (1908) in SF as a Homeless Shelter

This fall, I rented an office in the WEWORKS building at Sixth and Market in San Francisco - only a block from a huge upscale shopping center and cineplex yet adjacent to the Tenderloin skid row area.

Heading to the office, a taxi inbound on Golden Gate Avenue brought me past St. Boniface, a 1908 church reconstructed just after the 1906 earthquake.  I walked back two blocks to see it.   It's a beautiful large church, filled with impressive arches, carved pulpit and turn of the century stained glass.  Amazingly, it was also filled with sleeping homeless people occupying nearly all the pews.

Called the Gubbio Project (here), homeless people can sleep in the church from 6 am to 2 pm each day.  Yes - that runs right across the daily 12:15 mass, too. 

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It was deeply affecting and moving - really, unforgettable - to see the church used this way.  It almost took my breath away.

The parish dates to 1870, when a small wooden church was built for the German immigrant community as St Peter and Paul.  (Growing up, my mother's German Catholic church in Iowa was also St Peter and Paul.)   It was replaced once with a larger wooden church, and then a fine brick church was built in 1902 and promptly destroyed by the 1906 earthquake.  Today's church was built in 1908.  In recent decades, the church passed into the hands of the Franciscan order and is today called St. Boniface.  It's at 133 Golden Gate Avenue, a block east of Sixth and Market.

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WeWorks is a real estate venture valued at $20B and has over 100 locations internationally.  Their second SF center, opened in 2014, renovated the L-shaped shell office building that surrounds the 1920 Golden Gate Theater at Sixth and Market in SF.  It's two blocks south of the Union Square Hilton and, as mentioned, just a block or two from St. Boniface.   WeWorks' business model is typically to convert three to six stories of office space into easily rented glass offices, variably for 1, 2, 4, or up to 20 people.  WeWorks now has 14 centers in the Bay Area, 12 in SF itself.  That suggests as much as 42 floors of executive office space rented out in small parcels in as little as a few minutes by incredibly upbeat, helpful staff.






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For a 2002 article on the Franciscans' work in the Tenderloin, here.