Sherry Chandler

Derby Saturday dawns wet, at least here in Bourbon County where Big Brown was sired at Claiborne Farm (longtime home of Secretariat). I don’t know whether Big Brown is a mudder but I guess I’ll back the filly, Eight Belles.

I’m now following the Encyclopedia Brittanica on Twitter. Does that make you smile? EB compressed to 140 characters. However, since the widget below told me Danielle Steel is a poet, I may stick to Wikipedia.

I now officially give over this game of 100 word posts. If you like my truncated style, I will be tweeting in the right sidebar.

May Day, Beltane, time to wind the colored ribbons around the Maypole or, in George W. Bush’s case perhaps, to wind the Mission Accomplished banner around the tower of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Five years ago today, Mr. Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq. Today, I suspect he’d like to do a little witchy nose-twitching and make that banner disappear. Said Dana Perino, “President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission.” Load of text for one banner.

The mounds were, among other things, burial sites for important clan members. The VIPs were both men and women, some as young as 12. A mound excavated in Owen County in the 1950s contained remains thought to be those of a shaman. Four of the man’s upper front teeth had (probably) been pulled (probably) to accommodate the modified wolf jaw found in the grave with him. Speculation is that wearing skull, skin, and the jaw, the shaman was transformed into a wolf spirit during religious ceremonies, when the clan was high on something like tobacco, smoked in carved stone pipes.

I’ve been reading a little paperback, hardly more than a pamphlet, put out by the Kentucky Archaeological Survey . The booklet deals with the Adena people who lived in Kentucky about 2,500 years ago. These semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers were the moundbuilders, ancestors of the Native Americans who were here when Europeans arrived. Their life sounds idyllic. They lived in small clan groups, grew gardens in the summertime, wore copper jewelry, and wove brightly-dyed fabrics made of plant fibers from milkweed and rattlesnake master and the inner bark of the cedar and pawpaw trees. They used engraved stone to print complex decorative designs

Cabaret! I have nothing intelligent to say about Cabaret. All I have is gush. It’s as beguiling and dark in 2008 as it was in 1972, and, more’s the pity, still timely. No ingenue is as gamine as Liza Minnelli, no emcee as impish as Joel Grey, no idealistic young Englishman as beautiful as Michael York, no ending as tear-jerking and no daughter as evocative of a fated mother as Liza singing

Female (Warner Brothers, 1933) is a precode film featuring Ruth Chatterton as the owner/operator of a large automobile factory who has claimed for herself all the privileges of a male tycoon, including sexual predation on the help. She uses ‘em and tosses ‘em aside (or at least sends ‘em off to Paris to study art), interestingly enough to the tune of “Shanghai Lil.” A great romp for most of its 60-minute run, Female forces our free spirit to succumb to the quiet masculine integrity of George Brent. Boo hiss! But it was 1933. And I don’t really believe she’s tamed.

Exhausted with serious literary pursuits, last night I indulged in a generous glass of merlot and episode 5 of The Outer Limits. “The Sixth Finger” aired October 1963. It “starred” David McCallum. I had such a crush on him, and he starts out pretty cute here as the Welsh miner whose encounter with the requisite mad scientist turns him into this egghead of the future. Script by Ellis St. Joseph (a pseudonym if ever I saw one) was good for laughs and, while I understand the domed forehead, what is the evolutionary need for Spock ears and a bulbous nose?

I. J. Chandler, 1942, with his son’s Percherons, Daisy & Dodgen.

My grandfather, I. J. Chandler, had a buggy horse named Dan. Old Dan was a pacer known for his speed. Occasionally, Dad-Dad would take my grandmother, Lizzie Shupert Chandler, for an overnight visit with her uncle on the Sparta – Glencoe road. Sparta was a thriving depot back then and the railroad ran south from Glencoe. When time came to depart, Dad-Dad would load his family into the buggy and indulge in a long country farewell until time for the train to pass through. At just the right moment, he’d let Old Dan go and race the train for the crossing.

Paul Muldoon is round of cheek and belly, bespectacled, with a Harpo-esque mop of graying hair over a pointy emoticon nose. He stands at the bottom of the amphitheater in black shirt and trousers, tan jacket, a tie the same orange as the cover of Moy Sand and Gravel. He speaks and reads softly, in spite of the lapel mic (that is sometimes irritated by the crossing and uncrossing of his arms), in staccato phrasings, a hint of Irish lilt. “My poems sometimes just end,” he says. “Had I finished that last poem? I think I had. Who’s to know?”

This photograph was taken looking westward with my house creeping up behind, though I can still outrun it. The train you see in the distance is traveling northward. Once it gets to Cynthiana, it follows the Licking River through Harrison, Pendleton, and Kenton Counties over the Ohio River to Cincinnati. It’s a freight train. The last passenger train, other than expedition railroads, ran through this part of Kentucky in about 1972. I was in graduate school at the time at the University of Kentucky. I cut classes to ride the last train to Morehead State for a Richie Havens concert.