Thai Coup Haiku and more

Inspired by yesterday's events, and by some Hockey Haiku circulated to me by my brother, I present Thai Coup Haiku:

Not a shot is fired,
PM Shinawatra's gone.
But the more things change...

One night in Bangkok
Makes a hard man humble. Now,
Pass me some pad thai.


The Hockey Haiku my brother sent were excerpts from a book by his colleague, described as the "long awaited marriage of Zen poetry and bloodsport." My favourites:

What's so Wild about
Minnesota? Ten thousand
lakes fill up with tears.

Berserk hockey dads
have different agendas
Coach has a shiner


These haiku reminded me of the haiku I composed when we read The Odyssey for Pharos Book Club:

Polyphemus' eye:
A niche for my hot poker.
Fruitless blind fury

My foolish shipmates
Release Aeolian gales
While I dream of home.

Fair Penelope
Beacon of fidelity
For twenty years. Wow.


This started some one-upmanship between my brother and brothers-in-law. B wrote:

In my hopes and dreams
I'll never be so clever
As my dear friend Islam

-damn...

I replied:

Too true, Fat Bastard.
Push yourself from the table
Before you explode.


My brother F immediately punished me for that crack:

Insults come quickly
To a cringing scrawn tapping
Computer keys

M, my other brother-in-law, could not be outdone by us youngsters. He shared a series of Bardic haiku, though sonnets would perhaps have been more apt:

To be or not, now?
An existential question.
But we all die still.

Tomorrow is a
Curse to an ambitious king
Whose candle gutters.

Filial love is
A salve to tyrant fathers
'Til their daughters die.

Star-cross'd lovers
In a comedy of errors
Tragically too late.


I tried my hand in the same vein:

Ask a pound of flesh
At your peril. Sly gentiles
Might just call your bluff.


M delivered the ultimate retort:

Ask a pound of flesh
At your peril. My geni-
tals weigh more than that.

More than a little forced, but funny all the same.

The Lessons of 9/11

Jon Stewart riffed on the rhetoric of today's anniversary in an interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Gyllenhal was promoting her new movie, Sherrybaby. She was lamenting the poor turnout to advance screenings in LA, versus the great turnout in NYC. Jon Stewart says, "That's because people in Los Angeles haven't learned the lessons of 9/11. See, people in New York know that if you don't go out and see Sherrybaby, you've let the terrorists win."

Technorati tags: Jon Stewart, 9/11, Sherrybaby, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Good Cheese

My apologies to the handful of regular readers who have checked-in lately and found nothing new here since G's seizure. By the way, he is fully recovered.

I had an interesting exchange recently with my brother-in-law, M, who dispatched me to review the Caravan Farm Theatre's recent production of Macbeth in Armstrong, BC, renowned cheese-producing region. He planned on using my review as part of a larger piece on summertime, outdoor Shakespeare productions.

The Caravan Farm Theatre productions have traditionally taken classic plays and adapted them to their local setting: the ranchlands and mountain valleys of interior British Columbia. The stage facility is rural and outdoors, rustic and friendly. Their adaptation of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard to The Apple Orchard was notable for its local color and wit. I was looking forward to a similar adaptation of Macbeth, complete with the horses and pipers hyped in the promotional material.

Instead, the company staged a faithful production of Macbeth with some contemporary stylistic flourishes; I was quite disappointed. I did enjoy the outdoor setting. The horses and pipers were deployed to good advantage, though no mounted skirmishes were used. And as the sun set, the sky darkened, and the wind kicked up in the trees producing an ominous and foreboding natural backdrop to the darkening tone of the play.

I accused the company of Bardolatry, a term my brother introduced me to. It could be defined as: the irrational belief of Shakespeare's works as sacrosanct and inviolable.

M thought I was being unfair: "Had they done what you expected, however, that wouldn’t have been Macbeth. [...] it would have been, say, The Pathologically Ambitious Cheese Farmer from Armstrong."

I loved the expression "cheese farmer." Of course, there is no such thing. But the phrase conjures an image of a man in springtime busily sowing rows of cheese chunks, nursing their subterranean growth through the summer, then unearthing beautiful perfectly formed rounds of cheese at harvest. A satisfying thump on the rind shows they're ripe and ready for market. That's a good cheese!

Technorati tags: theatre, Macbeth, Armstrong, cheese, BC