Last Supper

 

You were half conscious  in your hospital bed

Better now in hospice than in the ICU

Better than the lovely single room you had

Where you were yet tubed and wired

Now your body was free from constraint

The nurse brought your food as always

Not for you she said maybe for me as I

Witnessed a whole meal you could not eat

Except for the sweet small bowl of fruit

I took it up and carried it to you not quite

Able to see me but you knew I was there

With a little spoon I fed you berry by berry

A grape you took into your mouth and burst

A red raspberry a piece of melon you smiled

Each tiny bit of fruit you savored enjoyed

Did you know this would be your last meal

It was as if we were making love there on your

Death bed one last acknowledgment of our

Trust devotion our embraced spirits sharing this

Final Moment of sensuality

--For Darryl

Vernal Equinox, 2026

Excalibur the Film

 Watched this presentation of the Arthur Legend filled with spectacle, wit, wisdom, magic, and mysticism. Nothing like it. Merlin is the shining star in this version of the story. Here is the review from Reel Reviews: 

(https://www.reelreviews.com/home-video/excaliber-movie-review#:~:text=The%20spectacle%20is%20overwhelming%20in,a%20mythic%20painting%20in%20motion.)

There are fantasy films… and then there is Excalibur — John Boorman’s operatic, mud-splattered, sex-and-steel fever dream of Arthurian legend. Now resurrected in jaw-dropping 4K by Arrow Video, this isn’t just a restoration — it’s a war cry. The grime glistens, the armor blinds, and every frame looks like it’s been forged in dragon fire. Boorman didn’t make a polite medieval epic. He made myth, stripped naked and screaming.

"completely uninterested in subtlety. Subtlety is for peasants. This is legend carved in stone."

From the first clash of blades, John Boorman establishes tone with absolute authority. Knights don’t sparkle here — they rut, betray, howl, and bleed. The film’s aesthetic is pure heavy metal album cover come to life: chrome-plated armor, emerald forests, fire-lit castles, and bodies tangled in lust and ambition. It’s Wagnerian in scope, unashamedly theatrical, and completely uninterested in subtlety. Subtlety is for peasants. This is legend carved in stone.

The cast commit like they’re possessed. Nicol Williamson’s Merlin is feral and mischievous, muttering prophecies like a drunken god. Helen Mirren devours the screen as Morgana, weaponizing sexuality and sorcery with venomous glee. Nigel Terry’s Arthur evolves from reckless youth to tragic king, weighed down by destiny and his own flawed humanity. Everyone plays it big — and that’s exactly the point.

For horror hounds and Video Nasties veterans, Excalibur has always had a dark pulse beneath the pageantry. The violence isn’t sanitized; blades punch through flesh, battles are chaotic and desperate, and the film doesn’t shy away from the sensual or the savage. Bodies writhe in candlelight. Blood slicks polished steel. The mystical sequences feel genuinely pagan and slightly dangerous, like you’ve stumbled into an ancient rite you weren’t meant to witness.

The spectacle is overwhelming in the best possible way. Boorman drenches the screen in smoke, backlight, and blinding metallic sheen, turning every battlefield into a mythic painting in motion. The clash of armies isn’t neat choreography — it’s mud, sweat, shrieking horses, and knights hacking at each other like cornered animals. Violence here feels elemental, almost ritualistic. When swords bite, they bite. The film doesn’t revel in gore for exploitation’s sake, but it never softens the blow either. This is a brutal, collapsing kingdom where steel decides fate.

And then there’s the otherworldly current humming beneath it all — the sense that the land itself is alive and judging its rulers. The unforgettable image of the knights riding in slow motion through the mist to Wagner’s “Siegfried’s Funeral March,” armor gleaming like fallen angels, is pure cinema intoxication. Equally indelible is the Lady of the Lake’s arm rising from the water, blade held aloft in eerie silence — a moment that feels less like fantasy and more like witnessing a relic from some ancient, forbidden religion. Excalibur doesn’t just tell a legend. It conjures one, drenched in blood, magic, and divine madness.

Arrow’s 4K release makes the film’s excess even more glorious. The greens are richer, the firelight burns hotter, and the infamous gleam of the armor is practically blinding. It’s a reminder that fantasy wasn’t always safe, sanitized, or franchise-friendly. Excalibur is swaggering, operatic, and utterly unapologetic — a mythic epic that swings its sword with conviction and never once asks permission.

Witness the legend reborn in breathtaking clarity — where armor gleams, forests burn emerald green, and the sword still waits in the stone.

March Winds

 It is a cold, windy day in Druid Hills. The contradictions of springtime sound out in the wind chimes, are visible in the bending trees and flower petals scattered. New life struggles into existence as winter rises up like the dead after days as hot as summer. It is a time of intense feelings, of passion experienced and recalled. The equinox approaches. 

This morning, as I have coffee and sit at my laptop near the window to the screen porch, the faces of the dead appear to me, those who departed in this past year, in 2025, and those untimely deaths all the way back to that of my grandmother Miller who died of a stroke at the age of 63 when I was 16. She is buried in the Jewish section of Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.

Bonaventure

Here are the people with us now only in spirit:

Darryl,

Chicago

Grandma Miller

Grandma Noble

Bakes the Cakes

Julian Baird

Jake Waldrop, New Orleans

Joey Daab, San Francisco

Katie, Darryl, Mom

Lee,

Tybee

Mom and Lee

 

Half Ghost:

Jack the Photographer

The creation of Evil

 

Well, almost every culture and gathering of people from the days of Mesopotamian cities, of the love story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, has had a concept of evil. I want to focus for now on the Judeo-Christian concept (or notion)...To use Darryl's witticism, the Birth of a Notion can be used to describe what I'm after. 

 Jesus suffering

When god created the world and got around to creating man, in a lovely garden of flowers and animals we all assume were male and female, he forgot that poor Adam would suffer loneliness. Could that be the first instance of neglect? Any way, he took one of Adam's ribs and made Eve. So humans became like all the other animals except for one rule. See yonder fig tree (apple tree?). Do not eat from that tree. 

Me? I think evil was created then and there by god himself. Why? because in a life of immortality and no other rules, who could resist the temptation to eat what had to be something miraculously delicious? Besides, there in Eden, Satan dwelled in the form of a snake. Why was that? Why did god put Satan in Eden in the first place (wasn't that also evil?)? 

Do you wonder what the world would have looked like had there been no tempting snake, no woman seduced  by Satan, a strong Adam refusing to eat that apple (or fig)? Take a look at the amazing Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, painted in 1500. 

 

  

Bigger Picture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights

But they did, so no immortality, disease, and death to everything in Eden. Worse, sin meant biting insects, disease, famine, war, sufferings... 

Not until the birth of Jesus did anything change. (Well god did wipe out all of humanity except the family of Noah at some point). There are varying details, but in most versions, the story goes like this: god gave his only begotten son through virgin birth to the world. The son grew up, gave sermons in such places as mountains; he healed the sick and fed the poor and hungry, and was taken after the complaints of Jews, and the indifference of a Roman official, by Roman soldiers to be tortured and nailed to a cross until he died a slow, painful death in front of his mother and friends. 

Giotto:

Judas Kiss

I was brought up in the Episcopal Church and I heard the story from numerous sources. I read the 4 gospels written around a hundred years after his torture and death. Never in any version I heard could I make sense of why this horrible, cruel death of betrayal and rejection relieved mankind of its sin. How does his torture and brutal death redeem anything? Doesn't the cruel death simply show that people are still evil, that kind, loving, socialistic sermons are still being rewarded with money loving, selfishness and hatred? Why does this cruelty make Eve's falling for Satan's temptation and Adam falling for Eve's OK? And if it does, where is Eden, immortality, and pleasure such as existed in the Garden?

It is all nonsense. Today, millions of people dress up, drive their showy cars down to the church to ask for forgiveness, and to chat with their friends. It is as if evil doesn't exist. For wealthy, white, nationalistic people this is the best of all possible worlds. The suffering of the rest of humankind is of little or no consequence. 

Amen