God's Mills

I just found out my (2nd or 3rd or 4th?) cousin Lilo Beil is now (this week) a best selling author in Germany. Her book is called Gottes Muhlen, i.e. God's Mills, i.e. "The mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small" - also one of my favorite ancient (Greek?) quotations.

Here is her book description half-translated from German by computer:

Friedrich Gontard, young, well looking, melancholischem view, is Kriminalkommissar and the clearing-up of a child murder in the südpfälzischen province is assigned. It is the year 1957. The Gontard still traumatisierte by the war dips into Pfaffenbronn into a Mikrokosmos, which seems to lag behind as in a time journey ten years. The young man from education-civil Frankfurt house here everything is not free and open enough. The tendency in the village brews itself together. The murder the outsider Otto Straub is suspected. More is here not betrayed

hurray

hurrah

for lilo beil
my 2nd or 3rd or 4th cousin
everyone should go out and get
Gottes Muhlen
it reads in German
but it reads
well

lilo also wrote a story
about my great-
grandpa
he
was a butcher hawked
wieners in Chicago
& fled Germany w/ wife & kid
after sticking his
in the maid
- how
could you not wanna write
something about a guy
such as
him.

hiphip
hurray
for lilo & my fodder's mutters fodder
great-grandpa Rudy Knapp
300lb.
wiener-broker, Chicago's finest.


* I saw the above Picasso in MOMA (NYC) last week. One of my all time faves. It's called Harlequin.

Captain Tony's

I was in Key West not long ago, and I began drinking at the Green Parrot. It's a blues bar and the jukebox is full of blues songs, and I'm not really a blues fan - some of it's alright, but it gets old pretty fast. Anyway, I'm in there alone and I'm drinking Heinekens as fast as I can because I don't know anyone and I figure if I drink fast enough someone will get interesting or I will get interesting, and my mind will wander away from the blues - I was feeling a little depressed at the time, but more than that I was feeling edgy - don't ask, I made a mistake. So I'm gunning these beers back to get my mind off everything and it's starting to work and I order another and the waitress finally says, "Hey, where you putting these?" "I'm dumping them out in the toilet," I say. She gives me a hard look. "Carry on..."

A while later I'm at the Half-Shell on the wharf. I'm feasting on conch soup and oysters, sitting amidst license plates. The walls there are full of license plates, i.e. specialty tags, with clever witticisms and innuendos on them. This to me is if not the height, at least a tall mogul of dumb-shit American diversionary indulgence. I scanned the plates for the best/worst one. I decided I would never wanna be a passenger in a car with Ohio plates that said "HOP IN." But it was right over my head. It was just plumb
wrong.

Here's a poem I got out of that night. I ended up at Captain Tony's Saloon - the original Sloppy Joe's, where Hemingway used to mill about. I ended up drinking rum with Robert Frost's great-nephew (he's a kayak-outfitter in Key Largo, soft-spoken, funny, egoless, one of the better ones - never even bothered reading his uncle's stuff - says it just doesn't interest him - me neither - Frost can pound sand for all I care - I can't think of anyone who I don't like better than him), and his jail-bound buddy who wound up balls-naked in the Garden of Eden later that night and got thrown out by the scowling tarbender for continually forgetting to put the complimentary washrag under his ass when he sat on his bar stool - it was more than a little disturbing - he was the only nude in the (clothing optional) bar, too drunk to remember the washrag.


(+) 428 Greene Street ~ see: Underground Voices Poetry

Killing the Eagle

I wrote a story called Killing the Eagle. It was published in Underground Voices a few months ago. But there's a strange story/coincidence behind it.

I wrote the thing in December of 2005. Two weeks after I finished, the real Road Dog - the symbolized eagle in the story - Road Dog died in his sleep I think on his sofa. He was only forty. No one saw it coming. Not even his girlfriend who (I heard) just sat there running her fingers through his long hair and weeping while she waited for the medics to come and whisk him away.

There's a whole page and DVD and pics dedicated to him on the website of the bar where my story actually happened.

Here's the link. http://www.natsden.com/

Killing the Eagle you can find here. http://www.undergroundvoices.com/UVPowersMP2.htm