“I am betrayed — always,” he said the second and last time we met to discuss his project.  We sat outside a Starbucks in Danville. As proof he went on to recount a recent coup among senior executives in his company, which ships natural gas containers out of China. He even mentioned his wife. “She thinks I am crazy”, he said with disgust. “She undermines me.”

And then there was the time as a young teenager — from a well-off family during the cultural revolution no less — that he went to confront school authorities because of the ever-filthy dining room. 

This was in a small coastal town in southeast China where he lived in an oppressive Catholic boarding school. He said he was often pulled out of bed at daybreak by the dormitory priest; the academic schedule was draconian; and the food usually frozen. I didn’t quite understand that bit but it was one of many details I intended to clear up once the project got underway. 

Anyway, he said he went to the principal’s door with a dozen other students to launch a complaint about the dining room but when he was finally let in to say his peace the others left the room and he stood alone to take a stand.  It did not go well, and I think he said he was beaten. He was always difficult to understand, and as he said of himself, “I’m not a forceful person.”  His voice periodically fell away and so I was always leaning toward him, or asking him to repeat, or simply watching him with no idea what he was saying. 

When I first met him he asked if I was surprised that he looked so young. He was in his late 40s; I was not surprised, and merely smiled. He added that he was in ill heath and listed several physical ailments, including problems with his rectum. He went into great detail.

But the sum of it all was that he imagined himself a “troublemaker”, in part because he’d been to jail several times, albeit for short terms, because of his progressive political beliefs.  We agreed that would make a good working title for a novel he wanted me to write based on his life.  Frankly, I would never have gone on with the negotiation as long as I did had he not told me several intriguing stories.

One of the best was about the time he found himself on a bus crossing a flooded bridge. The bus stalled. Everyone got out and went to one bank or the other of the river.  I don’t remember the river’s name if he told me.  But in this part of the country, it was the flood of the century, and drew whole houses down out of the surrounding mountains into the vortex. 

And so as he left the bus he noticed an old man, a farmer, in the middle of the river sitting on a roof with several chickens, a duck, and a large snake. The roof, which was covered in grass, was bearing down on the bridge. It became quickly apparent that there wasn’t enough clearance to pass under the bridge and the people on the shore encouraged the old man to try to steer his roof closer so that they could catch him.  He had some sort of board that he used to steer, and he made some headway. In fact, he got very close and you could see the chickens, the duck and the large snake. The old man reached out and several people reached out to him, including the ‘troublemaker’.  For a moment they all held the old man’s arm, and he was about to be saved but then suddenly the arm slipped away, and the roof was drawn into the current and under the bridge and the old man and his animals all disappeared….   

“I was very curious who this man was,” my would-be patron explained and went on to describe how after the river had returned to its banks some days later he went to find out who this farmer was. He tracked him to a village, found what was left of his house, and from neighbors learned the various mythologies in the area along with the farmer’s battle with the snakes eating his chickens and some other ducks he’d had. 

Actually, there were the two snakes but the old man managed to kill one and was endlessly at war with the other.  There were a series of encounters, including one in the middle of the night when the old farmer took his flashlight and went from hole to hole looking for the snake and finally found it, staring back at him with huge yellow eyes and its mouth wide open about to strike.

“It could be a metaphor,” said the troublemaker.  “We are stuck with our enemies even in calamity. And this is why I want you to write my story, to find these metaphors and abstractions in my life and explore their meaning.”

I was anxious to do it and I quoted him a price for nine months work, which was quite reasonable according to the various people I spoke with, including agents, ghostwriters, editors, and other writers I know.  I even said the figure was negotiable.

I assumed money must have been the reason he withdrew, even as he had told me he was the CEO of $220 million company.  But I don’t know.  In his last email, he wrote, “I need to reconsider my plans due to various reasons.” 

It also occurred to me there was some kind of betrayal involved somewhere, either real or perceived, and perhaps I became another on his list of traitors.  In any case, I will always think of him as a farmer floating down a swollen river with all of his treasure and travail, headed for oblivion under a bridge. 

Sex is always such an interesting topic, but what's left to say.  What's left to know....  And then along comes Esther, sounding like she's with a cabaret audience...  The rest of her offerings, on her website for example, are not nearly so compelling, but this adds something.

The Rushbot insists that the majority of Americans agree with him.  It's always the majority that hates the president, longs for guns, fears healthcare, ridicules sequestration, bucks the debt ceiling, dismisses immigrants and gays.  "The majority of Americans feel this way," is always his mantra. "It's just the state-run media and low-information voters that don't know that."

I'm suggesting a moratorium on public opinion. (This included). A stoppage for two weeks of everything.

But also, what about a new show for reality TV. "Four Amigos". The Rushbot, Hannity, Savage and Levin. In diapers. Behind glass. In an infant ward. Four adult-sized cribs, each with mobiles and suckers. And then we can watch the amigos be with each other.  Of course, there's an app to hear them live. Or you can just watch. Any time of day. They don't have phones, micro or otherwise. They have only themselves to convince or destroy.

How would the conversation change. With something other than Obama to talk about what would they sound like?

This is worth looking at, if you haven't seen it orbiting the Internet: A blue speck in the great nothingness: An old view revisited (my title) The old view is of the earth from Apollo. The revisionist view is simply a reminder that the earth is finally fragile and the arc of the story is from me to we.  We're moving from I-earth to We-earth.  Slow as that is.  The actual title of this is, "Some Strange Things Are Happening to Astronauts Returning to Earth."

Here is a corrected version of a wikipedia entry that I was unable to edit online. I was also unable to reach a talk page to suggest proper changes.  My hope is that at least search engines may find this.  For those interested in the case please contact me at macnamband@mac.com

Doug Clark (serial killer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Douglas Clark.

Doug Clark
Background information
Birth name	Douglas Daniel Clark
Also known as	The Hollywood Slasher The Sunset Strip Killer The Sunset Strip Slayer
Born	March 10, 1948 (age 64) Pennsylvania
Conviction	Murder
Sentence	Death
Killings
Number of victims	7
Country	United States
State(s)	Burbank, California Los Angeles, California
Date apprehended	August 1980

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For other uses, see Douglas Clark. Doug Clark Background information Birth name Douglas Daniel Clark Also known as The Hollywood Slasher The Sunset Strip Killer The Sunset Strip Slayer Born March 10, 1948 (age 64) Pennsylvania Conviction Murder Sentence Death Killings Number of victims 7 Country United States State(s) Burbank, California Los Angeles, California Date apprehended August 1980 Douglas Daniel Clark (born March 10, 1948) is an American serial killer.[1]
Clark and his accomplice Carol M. Bundy are known as the "Sunset Strip Killers". They were accused and subsequently convicted of a series of killings in Los Angeles. Clark, a boiler operator in a Jergens soap factory, previously worked at a San Fernando power station, but was fired due to a high rate of absences and threats of violence made against his coworkers. After his marriage failed, he met Bundy in 1980 and began living with her.[2] According to Bundy, Clark's relationship with her became physically and mentally abusive, and he also began paying less attention to her. She also claimed he began to share his violent fantasies with her.
In June 1980, Clark, by himself, or with Bundy — or Bundy with another lover named Jack Murray whom she had known for several years — made their first kill.[3] The majority of victims were prostitutes who, according to Bundy, Clark killed during or after sex. Clark has always denied he killed anybody, although he admits to other crimes. He claims he had been having sex with prostitutes for many years and had no reason to suddenly begin killing them. Bundy told police investigators that Clark was striving to fulfill his fantasy of killing a woman during sex and feeling her vaginal contractions during the death spasms.[1] In one of the murders, in North Hollywood, Bundy bought a young prostitute for Clark's birthday. Bundy's story was that she was in the back seat of a car, Clark and the prostitute in the front seat, and while Clark was receiving an act of fellatio Bundy placed one of two identical guns the couple owned in Clark's open palm. Bundy claims Clark then shot the girl in the head. Clark's story is that he was in the back seat, Bundy in the front seat, and it was Bundy who took one of their little silver guns out of the glove compartment and shot the girl in the head.
In one of her most improbable assertions Bundy once claimed Clark told her that if either of them were apprehended, he would take the blame in the hope that Bundy would be allowed to go free.[4] Clark has always claimed that shortly after they began living together he began to loathe Bundy and endlessly berated and humiliated her. On one occasion Clark and Bundy allegedly saved the head of one of the murder victim and stored it in a freezer for use as a sex toy.[5] They later put it in a hat box and left it in an alleyway.
After his arrest in August 1980, Clark acted as his own defense, insisting that he was being framed by the prosecution for the murders. In fact, almost all the evidence against him at trial came from Bundy who initially claimed to investigators that she only knew about the murders through Clark — except for the murder in North Hollywood, which she admitted to having been an accessory.
But there were disturbing parts of the case that were never resolved. For instance why did Bundy kill Jack Murray, a married apartment manager who she had known before meeting Clark. Bundy shot him, stabbed him, and cut off his head — to make police think it had been the work of a "Manson like group". Clark has speculated that Murray was perhaps becoming skittish as Bundy's partner in the murders and killed him to protect herself. Bundy would claim she murdered Murray because he had asked her to arrange a sexual liaison with a 13-year-old girl that Bundy knew and who had been sexually abused by Clark. No forensic analysis was ever done of the bodies of Jack and the prostitute who had been beheaded to see there might be some similarity. Bundy claimed she knew nothing about the beheading of the prostitute, although she admitted finding the head in the refrigerator. And finally there was a piece of bloody scalp found in the air vent of Jack's van. It's not clear whether that was ever analyzed to seek a match with any of the victims.

Sentenced to death in 1983, he sits on California's death row.[2][3] Bundy plea bargained and, in return for her testimony, received a life sentence. See also

   "You could say that, Matty — you could very well come to that conclusion — but I couldn't say that."
   The eerie refrain of Francis Urquart (pronouced 'Irkit'), with his signature smile, the infamous FU, Ian Richardson's right wing, great white shark, ever on his way up, and less for the sake of power, as compelling as that is, his wife always reminds him. No, he's in it more for  the game, being an addict of mischief, the way some small boys take the finest pleasure in burning up small animals.
   But what better portrait of evil incarnate.  And how precise his strokes, from bemused to infuriated in an instant, from wise to churlish in an instant, as though his character has no foundation, which of course it doesn't.    
   He accompanies his evil; he doesn't lead or follow it.  They are a brace and they look at each other with that knowing ironic look.  And so the asides to the camera, because of course we are the accompanying evil.
   "You might very well think that, Matty, but you know I couldn't say that."
   It is also the powerbroker's cliched way through the thicket of non-denial denials, and the euphemism of 'on background only.'
   I mention this by way of contrast to the less refined FUs 20 years later, in America, one of the Texas GOP delegates, perhaps, one of those who last July voted on an educational platform to deny the teaching of critical thinking skills.  That you could say is Urquartish, but without his cleverness. He would have disguised the whole thing.  Or Florida Gov. Scott, reversing himself on Medicaid.  Or John McCain with some of his reversals.
   There are countless examples these days on the eve of sequestration — which sounds so much like a word that means, "the next to be castrated." But who is FU's equal these days in America? No one. We don't have a character so sophisticated, or interesting.  Ah, but what about Ted Cruz? He has that look and pedigree.  William F. Buckley was a kind of FU, although more pompous than cruel.  The real FU would have done him in, found some adultery or addiction and forced him to cower.
   Maybe Nixon would be the equivalent.
   Now we have only the likes of the Limbot, Boehner-boner, and the Koch heads.   No match and yet just as calculating, just as evil. Which is not to indict solely conservatives.  After all, there was LBJ, and you could argue that Bill Clinton  in office was the most Urquartish of all.

Vinny had just gone to see Stand Up Guys.  "Loved it," he said sitting in his new wheel chair. "Just loved it."
   I hadn't seen him in such a good mood in ages.  "I am Alan Arkin," he said, adjusting his oxygen.
   "What else is new?" I asked.
   "Just got my 'I-Cremation'."
   "What's that?"
   "Special deal. Pay now; you don't have to worry later. Everything's taken care of.  You fill out an online form: where you want the ashes spread: sea of somewhere, top of a mountain, the backyard, in your old out basket, or get this: they put a lil'-dab'll-do-you in envelopes to your family and friends on the very next Christmas.  Or on your birthday for years to come.
   "So you never go away."
   "Well, isn't that the fear: A few months later no one remembers you were even here much less gone. Plus it goes with my I-Phone, my I-pad...  My 'I'.  Forget this 'we and our' shit. I got my I."
  "Gotta go," he said and rolled off down the street.

The world war was over, but by how many days I didn't know.   The streets were filled with debris. As we walked among the bombed out buildings, I worried about the danger of collapse.  We finally reached the hotel and went up to the apartment on the second or third floor.  It was the most gorgeous Mediterranean day, blue and warm.  There was a woman and her family walking small dogs; the dogs looked like Dobermans, and small enough to put in your hat.  The woman wore a long Russian coat and a fur hat.  I had a brand new, yellow tennis ball. I was going to throw it to the dogs but then it occurred to me I should ask her if she would like to throw it herself.  I asked. She was not as thrilled as I would have thought. But after a moment she smiled and reached out her arms.  I let the ball drop.  A year earlier she caught it and threw it toward the bay below the town.  The dogs gave chase but the ball went into the water and they stopped. The bay was full of activity: boats, balls, swimmers, people on boards and strange rafts with cabanas, and killer whales sounding. The Bay of Naples, by Vernet. Who knows. At first, the water was absolutely flat. We went out on a surf board, the boy and I.  Everyone was relaxed.  What if we're under one of those whales when it comes up, I wondered.  The wind picked up.  Just then someone, an authority I knew from somewhere, expressed the possibility of disaster and advised us to go back to shore.

The old man's head popped to the surface of the hot tub. The night was pitch black but the stars were dim and unelectric. He retook his seat on the stone bench under the water.  Lately, he has been saddened by this film, Amour.  He is a filmmaker himself and if he had been offered that script, he would not have considered it.  Not on your life.  Not even for a moment.  As beautiful as the film was.  As tender as they were to each other.  He was overwhelmed by the idea of such an ending.  Meanwhile, the night was strangely unfriendly; the moon, wordless.

They said today was the end of the world. I was half way down the fourth floor at 850 Bryant when I remembered.  Suddenly, the linoleum could not have been more sinister; the flickering neon light in the corridor was no white light.  
   A woman was looking at the 8 by 10 framed photos of cops that run all the way down the hallway.  You'd have thought she was at the Jeu de Paume, hand holding wrist behind her back, leaning in, looking this way and that. 
   I was on my way to pick up the week's arrest logs.  As I passed, the woman said, "you should see the reflection in those raybands."  I stopped and went back.  She was in her 30s, blue bandana, beautiful, voluptuous, from an island I felt, painted face, glassy eyes, long earings full of totems. I peered at the photo, but wanted to see her more clearly. 
   "Look real close," she said. "See it?" 
   "What," I said. 
   "In the reflection." 
   I looked long and hard. I could see there was something in the reflection, but I couldn't make it out. The image was too small.
   "I can't see it," I said.  
   "Yes, that's because they don't want you to see it. Things happening there they don't want you to know."
   "What?"
   We were close together now,  just outside this picture of two cops looking at something. 
   "Murder," she said. "That's what you're missing: murder." 
   She looked at me and back to the picture. I figured she was a forensic. I went and got the logs; 15 minutes later I passed her on the way out.  She'd moved to another photo: another cop wearing raybands. As I passed she said something, I couldn't make it out.  I paused my step. She knew it.  "You don't believe in anything," she said. "Too bad for you."

   On the last Tuesday of every month, the San Francisco Historical Association meets at the bottom of St. Philips Church in Noe Valley. There’s always a presentation. Doors open at 7 p.m., but the talking and the lights don’t die down until after 8.  Non-members pay $5.
   At a recent meeting, to celebrate the Golden Gate Bridge on its 75th anniversary, there were perhaps 50 people. A lot of singles, a lot of threes. Men wore safari hates, berets, bald heads and baseball caps heavy with pins from this legion or that. Women arrived in heavy sweaters and scarves and with looks of expectation. There was hardly a person under 50. Next to the sugar cookies and the two-buck chuck were the door prizes, including a 49er pennant and a vintage Giants pennant, along with The Great San Francisco Trivia Game.
   “Has anyone seen Richard lately?” Someone asked out loud in a New York accent.  Whoever Richard was, no one had seen him. Someone else said they thought he’d been ill. “I just hope he’s okay,” they said. “You never know.”
   At Association meetings personal history is as important as communal history....

We all sit down to dinner a little nervously. The drama has been foretold and now the couple is finally here, after a long drive up the coast.  They sit together on one side of the table. He's 18; she's 40.  They seem comfortable, with each other and with the thought that they are being judged.  We've been warned that this is a tremendous scandal and that the boy's mother cannot even speak about it. 'It's beyond contemplation,' she's been telling friends, 'the young man's life is going to be ruined. The woman must be mad. How selfish could a person be? What must her husband be thinking' As the bread basket circles, I am reminded. Once upon a time I was in those shoes.  And the woman was just like this. Blonde, separated, with a daughter, a complete romantic, and reckless, a stunning blend of transparency and secrecy, with pale blue eyes and endlessly sensuous, endlessly adventurous, running off  this way and that, forever awaiting the Hodgkins disease she knew was coming to kill her.

Mark --

I'm about to go speak to the crowd here in Chicago, but I wanted to thank you first. I want you to know that this wasn't fate, and it wasn't an accident. You made this happen. You organized yourselves block by block. You took ownership of this campaign five and ten dollars at a time. 
And when it wasn't easy, you pressed forward. I will spend the rest of my presidency honoring your support, and doing what I can to finish what we started. 
But I want you to take real pride, as I do, in how we got the chance in the first place. Today is the clearest proof yet that, against the odds, ordinary Americans can overcome powerful interests.
There's a lot more work to do.
But for right now: Thank you.

Barack

I asked him what he thought of the film, "The Innocence of Muslims," this ludicrous film that turned out to be a trick on the actors as well as the audience.
   He was incensed. Actually,  I was a little surprised at how angry he was. At 18.
  "It's stupid," he said. "It's like what you see on Saturday Night Live. It's a skit. Nobody would believe that. Only the most ignorant."
   I said that wasn't true.  And whether or not it became, metaphorically, the fire or the smoke in the Benghazi riots that killed the US ambassador wasn't the point.  People across the Middle East had reacted to it,  and some were deeply offended.  That's not a justification, I added. But the point is that it was a propaganda film, which had its desired effect.
   "Well, he said, "they're ignorant. They should be able to see through it."
   I reminded him of the reaction against the cartoons satirizing Muhammed.  We had ring side seats in Morocco that year.  He shrugged.
   I urged him to see a documentary of the life of Viet Harlan, the reluctant Nazi film maker, whose film Jew Suss, won the Venice Film prize award in 1940.  Moreover, the film was seen by 20 million people in Germany, and became a Nazi anthem.  Goebbels closely supervised the writing of the script and the production.  He was looking for a propganda film that would help prepare the German public to endorse the Final Solution. Which, of course, no matter how you tell the story, they did.

     Game lost.  The team was flat; the kid was flat.  The air was dead.  And it all ended just as it started 10 years ago.  Out in the breadbasket of California, out in the grapes of wrath. And the same old truth: the ones that want it the most, get it the most.  And once more it was the Latinos who wanted it and the white kids, going off to college, nothing pressing on the mind or the wallet, didn't want it so much.  They had hope not drive.  Even after the harrangue they got at half time.  
     The kid had one goal late, off his head, into the upper right corner.  And almost another seconds later in the same place.  But that was it.  No great runs.  Nothing to compare with the day before, when the winning goal was his, when the whole field was his and as the game went on he just got better and better.  But no way to do that two days in a row.  And so that was the last state cup.  
     And the last trip to Turlock and Ripon and that whole cosmos of motels and games and more games, in summer and winter, all that driving, thousands and thousands of miles, at dusk and day break, up and down the 'meth highway', with everything at stake and nothing, and at the very beginning, with the Mission Black Panthers, those kids overwhelmed in their shorts.  
     And now as we come back into the MacArthur maze, it occurrs to me that this is the last time.  Now it would be busses and planes, on a college team, intense, impersonal.  Far away. We would not making any more trips like this. 

And now a word from Fr. Coughlin’s reincarnation, that good-old-boy by a previous hook-up, that master of sleight, the meister of foul, God’s voice on oxycontin high— El Rushbow, who today had a pronouncement—and he’s saying this just as Sean Peyton —Peyton, the lesser — is up in the wood shed on Park Avenue, and just as Gregg Williams is being heard on youtube telling his players on the eve of the Jan. 14, 49er game about how 'we’re going to fuck people up' and 'kill Frank Gore's head', and how we never apologize for the way we compete. 

     All that’s happening and the Limbot has a revelation, which is that sooner or later liberals are going to use this, and a lot of other stuff, to ask that professional football be forbidden. You watch, said the bot, the liberals going to try to shut this game down.

     Don’t we know it. It’ll be called “Occupy 280 Park Avenue” (15th Floor). There’ll be “sissies” as far as the eye can see. And you know what? It’s all the same people who believe in the “Magic Negro,” the people in old school who were in the drawing room taking violin lessons while the rest of us were out on those infernal fields pounding the sleds, and now all these years later the sissies are back, and not just trying to impose socialism the way it is in 16th Arrondissement, but trying to ruin the very thing that makes America great. 

     How? By making a big deal over the name of the game, over a few times when for a few bucks somebody put the lead in, and now these liberals are saying that’s weird and obscene, and unsportsmanlike. Not to mention the lawsuits from what is it now, 120 former players?

     These crybabies who claim Roger GODdell and his ‘fascist’ predecessors were hiding the evidence that the game was becoming more dangerous, and the helmet manufacturers knew all along that even with improvements, there was no way a few people weren’t going to be hurt, or maybe even killed. 

     Well, buddy, that’s the price you pay.  Don’t ever apologize for the way we compete. That’s the cost of living in the greatest country the world has ever known. And don’t you call that "social Darwinism."     

     That’s what the Limp-bot is saying: This Bounty Gate business is all a creation of The Washington Compost, The New York Slimes, and the state-run media. This is just another sign of the liberal intention to extend the nanny state to every part of our lives, the NFL included…It’s just like those people who believe in the Trilateral Commission and that black helicopters control the world.

     Now el Rushbot completely misses the irony that actually he’s the one who has politicized Bounty Gate, and of course you can always find somebody to say they targeted people over the years, but no harm done, and that’s the way the game is played, and if you don’t like it, don’t play it. 

     You can always find players to say that, but there's a lot of other players — even besides the ones who killed themselves or joined a lawsuit — other players who don’t think it’s right to go after opponents for money, who wouldn’t want that done to them, and at the end of the day they realize you don’t get to play this game for a long time, and the truth is you may have to live a lot of your life on what you make in those few years, and sure you want to make a great play and take somebody out if you can. 

     But not with a cheap shot, not for money, not to help some craven idiot of a coach named Gregg Williams. 

     As I was saying, I’m with Rushbow. He played football, right. He knows all about the game. He’s no sissy and he’s not political. He’s a Spartacus if there ever was. He only calls it as it is:  the NFL’s a production. What’s important is the brand. What’s important is that we never apologize for the way we compete.

The work of Billy Collins.  Interesting as well as pleasurable, although not heartwarming.  Not quite reassuring. The first may be the best.  It's all a caption for days when it seems everyone, just everyone, clerks of the court, the face across the table, everyone is angry and unsettled, done in, and now leaving home or husband or wife or sensibility and sense, and for what?