Sunday, September 2, 2018

Jay Sizemore writes


Devil Teresa and other metal bands on Pope Francis’ iPod

Brock Turner Rapist Overdrive starts the day
off with frat rock he remembers from the warm leather
seats of his dad’s clunker Caddy.
Memories of his father and his Old Spice neck
bring him closer to God the way a warm beer
might loosen panty elastic in a dorm room.

But Pope Francis knows rape is a sin
to be forgiven, much like daddy’s nights
in the backseat of that Cadillac
with the ghost of Marilyn Monroe
and a bottle of Tanqueray,
or the nights he stumbled
into his dark bedroom
with nothing but that ghost on
his mind or his body.

To loosen his sermon tongue,
Francis jams to Sinderella,
cymbal crashes a wash of noise
that leave his mind faded
like a seashell the tide absconds
onto slick stone-edged whispers
of a secluded cave humans have yet to find,
he marvels at the simple truths
found in quatrain rhymes,
the existentialism of gratitude
gone unacknowledged until too late,
a refugee staring at the vanishing coast of home.

Before the Lord’s Prayer, he leaves
his earbuds in to drown out the choir,
listening to Jesus Please Us,
a guilty pleasure he allows himself
to feel guilty about
when listening to confessions of Cardinals
and their latest digital probings,
he knows this is all part of his suffering,
just as it’s the plight of the poor
to starve, to grind their convulsive teeth,
to wallow in filth and fever dreams
without the benefits of morphine.

O suffering. O beautiful Death and deliverer.
O to be welcomed into such loving arms.
Devil Teresa before bedtime,
after the chalices have been shined
and the rings kissed and put away,
after the silk robes have been hung by the door,
he sings the words of the saints
and the saints yet to be,
the squealing guitar riffs of godliness
that put his fists in the air,
punching at something
he hopes is still there.


Diego Velazquez Pope Innocent X 1650. Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pop Innocent X 1953 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved.
Pope Innocent X -- Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez / Study after Velazquez -- Francis Bacon
Study after Velazquez 1950 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved
Study after Velazquez -- Francis Bacon
Pope 1 - Study after Pope Innocent X by Velazquez 1951 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved
Study after Velazquez -- Francis Bacon

6 comments:

  1. Velázquez painted the pope's portrait in 1650. Innocentius X was chosen after a long conclave (lasting from 9 August to 15 September 1644) and was one of the most controversial and politically shrewd pontiffs. When Velázquez painted his portrait it was feared that the pope would be displeased by the ruthlessness in his expression, but Innocentius had it hung in his official vistor's waiting room. A century later Joshua Reynolds thought it was the finest picture in Roma. Francis Bacon began his artistic reinterpretations of the portrait in 1946, and the earliest surviving version dates to 1949. In many versions he gave the figure the head of the screaming wounded nurse mown down by gunfire on the Odessa steps in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Soviet film "Bronenosets Potyomkin" (Battleship Potemkin). In late paintings he inserted references to Pius XII, who had collaborated with the Nazis.
    He continued exploring the subject into the 1960s.

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  2. Brock Turner was a student athlete at Leland Stanford Junior University who was convicted of 3 charges of sexual assault against an unconscious woman in 2016. She described waking up "in a gurney in a hallway. I had dried blood and bandages on the backs of my hands and elbow.... When I was finally allowed to use the restroom, I pulled down the hospital pants they had given me, went to pull down my underwear, and felt nothing.... I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else." Prosecutors recommended 6 years in prison (the felony statute stipulated 2 to 14 years) but judge Aaron Persky (himself a Stanford graduate) sentenced him to 6 months in county jail and 3 years of probation after Turner's father pointed out that his son's "life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve;" imprisonment would be "a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life." Turner only served 3 months. The California Commission on Judicial Performance upheld Persky's sentence, but he was reassigned to the civil (rather than criminal) division, and voters recalled him. The California law that defined rape as "an act of sexual intercourse" under duress or lack of consent was expanded to include all forms of nonconsensual sexual assault, and a new law was passed requiring minimum sentences for sexual assault cases. When Turner appealed his conviction his lawyer maintained that he sought "outercourse" rather than intercourse.

    In 1995 British comedian Jim Davidson produced and starred in "Sinderella," an adult pantomime version of the fairy tale "Cinderella." A film made of the production was released. Davidson was arrested in 2014 as part of Operation Yewtree, a police investigation into allegations of child abuse by Jimmy Savile and other media personalities, but was not convicted.

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  3. In 1997 Psychic TV released "Those Who Do Not," which included "Jesus Please Us, " an early version of the song "Unclean."

    Jesus walks down on the water
    Jesus walks down on the water

    Jesus with your message of love and dis- ction
    Jesus you are the- in the-

    You can't even insult God without a little interference on the technical side
    You can't even insult God when want to start a beam of light
    Well, I'm going to insult God
    I've seen the destruction of God
    And I don't walk on the water

    You, you're unclean
    You, you're obscene
    You may think that you are holy
    You may say you're the only
    But you, you're obscene
    To me, to me, to me
    You sit there lying through your holy book
    You tell us all we should take a look
    I saw your lies
    I know your spies
    I've seen you play your games
    I know your name
    You, you're unclean
    You, yes, you're obscene
    You may say you are holy
    You tell us you are the only
    But you, you're unclean
    To me, to me
    You filthy, you filthy god with your corrupted evil tales
    You tell us everything, you think we're snails
    But you are unclean to me

    You, you are unclean
    You, you are obscene
    You may say you are holy
    You may say you are the only
    You tell me your disgusting tales
    Like little wails
    But you are unclean.

    The experimental video art and music group was formed in 1981 by Genesis P-Orridge (Neil Andrew Megson). In the late 1960s as a student at the University of Hull he founded "Worm," a student magazine that published everything submitted, but after 3 issues it was banned by the Hull Student's Union, which feared prosecution on obscenity charges. He also won the university's Needler Poetry Competition, judged by the school's chief librarian Philip Larkin. After dropping out he became a performance artist and, in 1971, legally changed his name. In 1975 he formed the pioneering industrial music band Throbbing Gristle (a Northern English slang term for an erect penis). Probably in 1980 he became closely associated with Brion Gysin (who had introduce William S. Burroughs to the cut-up method of composition). In 1981 he formed the Psychic TV band dedicated to musical eclecticism, magical experiment, and the destruction of consensus language; at the same time, under the influence of Gysin, he organized Thee Temple of Psychick Youth to promote occult studies. In 1992, while P-Orridge was doing famine-relief work in Thailand, police from the Obscene Publications Squad raided his home and seized several tons of art work, looking for evidence of sexually abusing children in a ritual setting. To avoid arrest, he moved to the US and was eventually absolved of the abuse charges. With his wife Lady Jaye (Jacqueline Breyer) he undertook the Pandrogeny Project -- they underwent body modification, including implants, tattooing, plastic surgery, and hormone therapy, to resemble each other and identified each other as a single being named Breyer P-Orridge; when Lady Jaye died in 2007, he has maintained that she represents the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the immaterial world, and Genesis in the material world.

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  4. A bishop or priest who was incorporated into a church for which he was not originally ordained was a cardinalis (from "cardo," meaning pivot or hinge. Early in the 6th century the word came to mean principal, eminent, or superior, and the term was applied to the deacons of Roma's 7 regions, the senior priests of the city's parishes, and the 7 sees outside the city. By the 8th century the cardinals had administrative and liturgical roles and constituted a privileged class. After the death of pope Paulus I in 767 Toto, the self-styled "duke" of Nepi in Etruria seized power in Roma and installed his brother Constantinus II as pope, even though he was a layman; however, the city's clergy had him arrested and blinded in 768 and elected Stephanus III as pope. The Lateran Council of 769 had Constantinus beaten, excommunicated, his tongue torn out, and his official acts burned. Then the council ruled that only cardinals could be made pope, and in 1059 Nicholaus II gave them the exclusive right to elect popes. In 1244 Innocentius IV allowed them to wear their distinctive red hats. Numbering about 224, they are appointed for life by popes and collectively are known as the College of cardinals.

    After a grand jury in Pennsylvania in 2018 found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,00 children, and that the crimes had been covered up by cardinal Theodore McCarrick and otherlaimed taht pope officials, Carlo Maria Viganò, the papal nuncio to the US, claimed that pope Franciscus had been aware of the cover-ups and called on him to resign.

    The Lord's Prayer was taught to his disciples by Jesus, as related in The "Gospel of Matthew 6: 9-13:

    Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

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  5. Marilyn Monroe was an iconic movie star in the 1950s and 1960s. She starred in films such as "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and "How to Marry a Millionaire" (both 1953), "The Seven Year itch" (1955), "Bus Stop" (1956), and "Some Like It Hot" (1961), and was known for her marriages to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller (whose play "After the Fall" was based on their union) and her affair with president John F. Kennedy. She died of a drug overdose in 2005.

    After a dispute with investors Henry Ford left the Henry ford company in 1902, and William Murphy and Lemuel Brown renamed it the Cadillac Automobile Company (named after Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who had founded Detroit in 1701). It merged with Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Co. in 1905, becoming The Cadillac Motor Co. In 19019 it became part of the General Moors conglomerate. From its earliest years it dominated the American luxury car market, and its oomplete interchangeability of precision parts became the foundation for the mass production of automobiles. Its V8 engine, developed in 1914, became the standard for the American automotive industry. The "Caddy" is recognized as the premier American luxury car.

    Charles Tanqueray distilled his London Dry Gin in 1830. "Gin" is a shortened form of "genever" (derived from the Latin "juniperus," juniper). It had been a popular Dutch beverage at least as early as 1585, when it provided "Dutch courage" to English troops supporting the Netherlands forces against Spain at Antwerp, but became especially popular in England after stadtholder Willem became king William III in 1689. London dry gin is made via a double distillation of grain, and botanicals (especially juniper, coriander, angelica root, and liquorice) are added in the 2nd stage. It is the highest selling gin import in the US and became the best selling gin in the world in 2016.

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  6. After Benedictus XVI resigned the papacy in 2013, 76-year-old archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope. He chose Franciscus as his papal name. He had been archbishop of Buenos Aires since 1998 and a cardinal since 2001.

    In 1934 William Lightfoot Schultz founded the Shulton Company, which introduced Early American Old Spice as a woman's scent in 1937. The following year men's Old Spice shaving products followed, and eventually the women's items were phased out.

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