The Sandoz Collection by Sandoz Diego Cerveza (best short books to read .TXT) 📖

and select eclectic selection of Selectrics, the kind you plug into a wall, but without electricity they too are dead in the water. But there stashed in the back like a bag of hidden treasure sat a beauty...built like a Buick it was truly a beastie of the best kind...a Sixties era Royal Typewriter. Solid as a Motor City muscle mo'sheen, with that hard to describe heavy metallic brown, maroon, purplish, or as some say, grey, with the Royal placard pasted on front...a hood ornament on the writers muscle car...the authors Dodge Charger...the typewriter.

Now this one has panache. The keys pound down hard, leaving its inky imprint onto the surface of paper. Unlike the ticky ticky sound of the plastic computer keyboard, the typewriter keys have the thunderous impact of John Henrys hammer coming down with a roar on spikes to lay miles and miles of railroad rails.The keys, are guided to imprint the impressionable pages through it's guide. The letters fill the page with the accuracy of a smart bomb fired from a US Naval ship 50 miles away smack dab dead on into the school yard of a small village in Afghanistan.

The typewriter ribbon is also a curious oddity. Without it, there is no imprint, no matter how powerful the crashing waves are on the shores of creativity. It slips and moves through its guides silently, a submarine underwater maintaining radio silence. It moves up and down with a gliding motion depending on whether the letter to be implanted, as a bas relief release of the keys, is to be a capitalization of a letter or not. Lower case, upper case, just in case...the ribbon is locked and loaded.

The carriage leaves in its wake the rooster tail carnage of a writer’s vocabulary. It's wounded diction and walking dead zombie apostrophe's...it's comma's in a coma, it's gritty little grammatical nuances which to a writer, can be a nuisance when on a stream of consciousness flow propelled by the thumping of the space bar, the bang of the keys, and when the carriage reaches the marginal ends...the bell...the bing! for whom the carriage bell tolls...it tolls for me. Then the writer gives the carriage return a smack and the paper, carriage, in unison, choreographed, moves down a line so the words can reposition themselves for repository on the next line of the same page. The silver lever is a gear shift with an invisible suicide knob. The words come faster, the carriage moves swifter, the keys work furiously and soon it crosses the finish line of the quarter mile and the paragraph, the article, the book is finished, and it's ready to go again.

Not once will your Royal machine proclaim..."Battery Low" as it has no battery to batter your flow of words or dam them up, like Hoover and stopping them dead in their tracks until the Japanese Tea Ceremony of the Recharge takes place high on some mountain top in some way above sea level forbidden temple full of monks with vows of silence. That is if you even have electricity to draw juice from.

The computer can be a royal pain in the ass...but the Royal typewriter is a wonderful wordsmithing machine that has never heard of Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Email, Google or Yahoo. That in itself is worth praising! The best part? No Batteries Required. Pull the plug...proclaim your freedom....write on!
<p>


So, You Say You Want a Revolution?
"Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Chairman Mao


"If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow"
John Lennon

Little Red Books hungrily read by hordes of angry young reds. Got your Marx and Lenin confused with Groucho and John? ...right on! It happens in the best of families. And you say, you want a revolution...that’s all well and good, but, ask yourself, do they all work as the warranty suggests, or is the reality that they are a worse curse then what they've replaced?

As a political and social scientist, I register a negative-two, positively, or lower on the Richter scale, and yes, no social scientist degree, and yes, no -ologist attached anywhere in my name, cart or horse, fore and aft, so don't anticipate any salivatory revelations or orgasmic illuminations in this piece, this, this peek through the peephole of history at the paths followed in revolutionary orbit in a rebellious solar system of social issues and rights of the people. I am merely a dumpster diver in the overflowing trash bin of pop culture and clutter that has lived blissfully ignorant and comfortably numb on the Pacific Left Coast and the Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor.

Writers words aren't gospel, although some writers will claim they are the second coming of Jesus H. (Hemmingway) Christ, truth is...forget the words, and realize it is between the lines, between the sweaty sheets of literature, that you'll find the message, as well as the white space between the words...or what a writer doesn’t write but actually omits, that tells the story and pieces the puzzle together.

The old one hand clapping Zen hipster zinger. Either way, that is the chance I take writing this, but, the worse chance you take in reading it. It will look at the power to the people mantra chanting and how revolution, in it's preliminary stages creates a coagulated solidarity, but somewhere, soon after overthrow and the mask of reform is ripped from the face, the revolution and it's leaders reveal themselves for what they are and the peoples message soon gets trampled by the very same crowds who not long before, stormed the Winter Palace..the fever of revolt is usually followed by the fervor of excess and executions, retaliation replacing revolution, and the diaharea of a demagogue’s diatribe turns into a commintern compost of (in the case of Russia) communist constipation.

Revolution is an internal family affair...like incest its best kept hidden away in the closet of the trailer. It's a social fabric that has torn, and in time inbred, ready to come apart at the familial seams it seems. It's a case of weird Uncle Hector fucking his 13 year old first cousin dressed in a sheer see-through frock behind the barn, why? Because he can, and the resultant child is a mutant, born with three heads similar to a freak farm animal on display at some roadside rattlesnake farm in the Southwest.

Revolution is not like war where the factions are delineated by a "border" and participants from outside the "family." Nope. Revolution is a good old fashioned down home brother sister fuck. Which brings me to my point about keeping a revolution hot and juicy and alive after it's initial success...it needs the social version of KY jelly to keep it aroused to achieve what it craves....a social orgasm of formidable change of epic proportions. Don't be confused either, nor mislead with the term "civil war" ... no war is civil and when two same family sides parry, it is rebellion...nothing more, nothing less....

Those who know me have referred to me as a Tom Joad Zen socialist, tinged by the effects of years of reefer madness and staring at Diego Rivera murals too long in the sun. I have no idea what the description actually means, but, is as close to the bulls eye as anyone has come yet. Could be my Motor City Detroit blue collar union/strikers childhood, and being kidnapped and raised in the rustbelt by a pack of Teamster wolves in the urban forest.

I do believe in an ongoing evolving heat seeking humanities socio-economic revolution of every society and every strata of a society, its arts, it's social programs, it's philosophy, and of course it's layers of literature. Anthropological archeology to be studied by the studious of the future. Actual armed revolt, you know, that serious takin' it to the streets kind of shit, revolutionary rigormortis sets in, despotic degeneration eats away at the flesh of the righteous rebellion. Revolution walks with the limp, and becomes a flesh eating George Romero zombie, cannibalistic, eating itself and choking, doesn't keep revolving as it should...a planet on it's axis, a planet around it's sun, the hands of clock moving to count off the hours of the day. It stops. The sign post ahead...The Twilight Zone.

This patchwork piece is merely a reflection of revolutions, Communist revolutions primarily...although the French and the Americans had their own bout of exuberant excess in laying the foundation of popular emancipation. These, the communist’s editions of Revolution 101, were not necessarily successful in the long term, nor models to follow in the short term, but rather behemoths of unimaginable lumbering longevity.

Each revolution was camp followed immediately by the whores of paranoia, planning Prozac retaliation against those pesky isolation ward voices heard only in the head of the head of state that were interpreted as a street corner preacher preaching reaction. The walls of Jericho had nothing on the foundation these revolutions, as the process of the delirious deterioration of human rights began it's handling of snakes and speaking in tongues, which created the lack of ideological anchors that were designed to hold the ship of revolutionary state safely in the harbor of the societies reformation. In other words....it all went down the crapper.

Revolution takes a number, and gets in line. A 19th century peasant women with a babushka thing, you know, a rag scarf over her head, she has bad teeth and she needs a shave let alone a bikini wax, as she stands stoically in a Ukrainian bakery on a Saturday morning in random order of rebellion.The Russian Revolution is regarded as the undisputed World Series of revolutionary events as pastry...it is also the model of how things can go horribly wrong and it's guided missile of social reform can be misguided from it's inception immediately following a faltering overthrow.


The 20th century industrial age, no inhibited Hobbits inhabit, however it is a dream catcher of Wobblie workers of the world ready to ignite and unite. Revolution. Pinkos. Commies. Socialists. Bolsheviks. Anarchists. Menshaviks, Trotskyites. The Age of Aquarius it aint, nor was. Its roots were deep in the socialist soil of the prior pre-horseless carriage century of steam and turbines....The Red Revolt is the flashpoint where the Utopian garden of Marxian Eden turned into a compost pile of rotted leftist leafy matter left behind by Lenin's leaflets eventually mutating into the homicidal stain of Stalinism. Say what you will about Hitler, Stalin with 20,000,000 purged and killed, made Hitler look like Ghandi by comparison.

Tsarist Russia (Tsar? Czar?) was not just about priceless shining bejeweled chandeliers and fabulous eggs by a flamboyant Faberge...they were however two of the three-dimensional symbols of the growing tsunami that was swelling into a giant wave of resentment of the Rus people for the Rus leadership. The Tsar may have been the thorn in the side of the Russian people, but the people were about to become a royal pain in the ass to Royal Russia.

From the Steppes to the Tundra...it was a not so pleasant peasant land of ox carts, antique farm tools, modern day serfs, according to Bennett, abject poverty and subjective taxes..all tossed into a chipper shredder that was bleeding and crushing the populous like so many of Steinbeck’s grapes of wrath. The workers ate stale bread, stolen bread, when they could get even that, while the royal family, would fastidiously feast on wild beasts, wilder game and choice meats. They lived an openly opulent lifestyle, wrapped in obscene luxury, wanting for nothing, as the masses starved, wanting for just the basics. In this political setting, a blinded Tsar Nicolas could not see the forest