Taking The Auspices

THE GREEN MAN

2009-12-04T10:02:00.006-05:00

IN MY SEARCH for more information on The Green Man, a rather obscure movie I saw partially, and have wanted to see again for years, I discovered this delicious link commenting on Britain's father and son literary dynasty of Kingsley Amis and his son, Martin Amis.

A TASTE OF TRENCH MADNESS

2009-07-23T22:47:00.008-04:00

Thanks for keeping up the resistance, Morales. Just know that the busy silence of we who are marked to fall always proceeds the clashing of the cymbals, while those of us who warned the others (now laughing and mocking, hissing and despising our herald) will have witnessed the fullness of truth, not they, and by inertia or grace will be prepared to shield others from the amplified atrocities as they arrive.

That's the extent of whatever hope I have remaining. This country will probably awaken when Europe implodes, but I believe that America is also marked for crisis, a result of having become sadly corrupted and from our national potential far have we strayed.

Don't fear the Marxist-Islamofascism creep, however. Resist it wherever we can, but don't expect any sudden miracles quite yet. People still treasure their fool's gold, reflecting among the dueling mirrors of social consciousness that they've done the math, not quite realizing they've only been using imaginary numbers while letting the real digits slip away...

And allow me this opportunity to insist that I am not naive, no matter what I choose to paint or wrestle into inconsequential line. It's rather obvious by now that I frittered away that excuse six senses and a million miles ago.

BEATING A DEAD HORSE

2009-07-11T00:01:00.002-04:00

Well, Josh, deterrence is not a big headline grabber, but it does change the dynamics of who does what to who and when. And besides, yes, indeed there are quite a few instances on record of someone "successfully" defending themselves and others against intruders, but of course the liberal media avoids these stories, and sometimes even the surprised homeowner is hauled into court to defend himself against charges, while the intruder skirts off. It's an outrage. Criminals use and abuse guns all the time, and yet the system coddles them. Meanwhile law abiders are demonized.

But man, ALL the arguments on this issue are old news, if you've truly been honest in researching it. You know them. I know them. We've each made choices. You have your sense of moral high ground. And I have something just as awesome. End of story.

FIGURES OF SPEECH

2009-07-08T23:15:00.003-04:00

A SENTENCE LIKE THAT deserves more than a well-rehearsed handshake, but sometimes those of us who live for the calming caresses a fine line insinuates find ourselves too infatuated to make the first move...

AN INTERRUPTION

2009-07-08T15:46:00.006-04:00

BUT SUCH IS TIME and perfect timing, off time, under time, in time, time and time again, sloppy time, never time, Miller time, tea time too.

Neat time, time in a bottle, my time, the time of my life, in the life and times of Uncle Joe Stalin, time to shape up, time to get a job, time it all the way to the bank, tell me when it's time to get married the fifth time.

Shallow time. Shag time. Sane time. In the time it took to drive a bus off the cliff on a Seventies cop show, that's show time. For the third time today I needed time. Time to go to the bathroom. Time to shit or get off the pot. Time was when fun just cost a nickel.

Time this. Time that. Time warp. Time tunnel. Time is where the heart is. Time enough to think of a good response this time. Time to grow up. Time to eat and run. Time to suck the chrome off that bumper crop of party time. Time to beg the difference.

Time to cut the mustard. Time to pick out a receiver downfield. All the time in the world. Time to wipe my ass. Timex time. Time to cash a cheque. Time to win the battle but lose the war on drugs. Time it took six women to satisfy each other in a dark room on time. Time to kick the bucket.

Time to write a novel. Time to brush her hair the same way her sister used to brush hers, timing each stroke to the beat of time. Time to draw a conclusion at the bottom of the class. Time to mark a certain number of correct answers to the questions with a number two pencil.

Time to give up a lost cause.

Time to shut down the chicken farms along that river. Time to read the classics in their original language. Time to make lunch bags sing before the children race off to school.

The time it takes to build a universe only to have it collapse in your face is nothing like the time I helped Aunt Mardis rip through a chocolate cake in the olden days of French ascendency.

It takes time to learn to ride a bicycle. Time to reap what one sows. Or maybe not. Maybe that time is instantaneous time, time accurately remembered. Time to sing before she swallows for the last time that nasty pill. Time to harvest a generation. Time to swallow before you hang ten. Time to look before you cross.

By the time it took to dig up the Erie Canal times had changed. It's not about time, it's about attitude. By the time I get to Phoenix many husbands won't have time to take out the garbage. The driver swore to the witness that he didn't have time to stop. Time takes a holiday but time never vacates the premises.

Time laughs at odd moments but time never bargains with leftover sandwiches. Time is that which doesn't kill you. Time kills that child inside only to seemingly reappear later.

Time is a long, cool woman in a black dress. Time is kinky. Time paints by numbers. Time is a disease of the pancreas. Time is a pretty heart-shaped tattoo on Wendy's breast in some window in Times Square. Pi is a variable in a timeless equation.

Time understands all wounds. Time wounds all heels. Time is an asset. Time is a pain in the ass. Time is only as good as your next biological movement. Time is the needle in the haystack. Time is secondary but don't tell her that.

Nothing like a good time in the sack to make time fly. Time has no fear of flying, but Erica and Henry both knew what having a good time was about, and it was not about time, but the enjoyment of time. Grown-up time.

There is no such thing as time travel today, but recordings keep time in ways none of us truly understand past its fetish draw, but time was when a fine time was had by all, double time, life plus time. High time that boy got a job. Time the unfortunate child born without legs who beats a faster smile than you do.

Observe that same child pursue time into measuring itself with old technologies in a world that presumes time can't reverse itself while it can so readily repeat itself dipped in statistics. Time is a two-way mirror. Time is a dirty joke flooding the muddy Missisippi.

Time is nothing but what you or somebody else makes it, except when it's game time, and don't try to tell me about how much time it would take to make the timeless world safe for timelessness because everybody knows it's all in the timing, even though most of us are suffering a bad sense of timing.

There's never enough time to transcend one's station, especially when mobile. Time is far too formidable a friend on feverish afternoons to let stand in the cold rain without knowing that time sometimes stands still.

Without time on my side I perish with the daffodils. Time is a time-honored sport everyone must play in order to graduate. Time forgives. Breaking rules for time is not always a bad time, but does require timing it just right. Time scars. Grab the moment to make time while others bargain, losing time to others, until another time comes.

Time is a stiff upper lip in a compromising position. Time defers to gravity, but for one writer, time is nothing but a madcap schemer bought and sold on the installment plan, money paid back over time, but then two-timing Old Doc Celine didn't live long enough to get mixed up in time, time and time again.

Time is a nightmare to Klaw's girls who prefer time raw and risky than more often than their less time-tortured sisters. Time dresses up for special guests. Time is the major importer, exporter of stolen goods across state lines in situations where time is barely legal. That's time standing in the shadows, losing her shirt to timeless romance.

Time is nobody's business but the rates are skyrocketing. Time is colorless, odorless, tasteless. Time left is time right on time. Time left to itself is useless. Time blows tall buildings to the ground. Time grounds water tables and small asterisks into dust bowls older than TIME ITSELF because time is the wind in the sails of marginality until time itself stops.

MONDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 1955: Relativity Mr. Eliot

2009-06-27T17:11:00.002-04:00

(Every opening day event
is safely defined
according to the board
of heavy commissioners,
who having frequently
engaged in parasitic
intercourse with important
anti-matter details, do
thus proclaim this work
to bless the eyes and tongues
and postage stamps of public
yen with fire and dogma, that
these blessings endure secure
as the new lamp post
in the old land of triumph,
as foretold in the chapbook
of Turquoise Laughter,
found on the bookshelves
of those sleazy sectarians,
the Unknown Poets.)

My god! Those scrambled tenses
Are breathing insects
About to inherit the earth
As the meek ones.
Should we give the order to poison them,
The lie more likely to succeed beyond
Crock derivation, say?
The social instincts and mortal thunder
Track across the skies of deprivation. They
Mock us and tell us paradise
Has ranked us this way.

He comes much later than Voltaire.
With able lunacies guarding
Their classical moons,
In numbers too written
To catch a falling
Sparrow by jet liner.

So doggedly
He comes before us,
Letting us spoil him with a role
Abandoned to grief, walking,
To serve eyes never before ruled.
An expanded version of the likeness
Of man is displayed in his temples
More pulled to powerstare.

A coward without wings
Brings no one change, but
To you who think
Without a padlock brigging
Your brain, to you who think
His work is discriminating,
I say knows the difference in universal
Meaning between sugar and salt
And his birthright.

Give fair attention to the perfumery
He exposes, the sweat, the toil,
The semen.

Missing no link!

Question him if in doubt.
The idiom may be lost in translation.
Condemned to die or forty years
He shall return. When he walks among men,
The obvious is hidden, orphic
Associations and fresh failing crops,
And door alarms.

Left Bank will soon pass away like the rest.
And Burnt Norton will accuse Lucifer
As the author of time!

CASE HISTORY IN SO MANY WORDS...

2009-06-27T13:54:00.002-04:00

nondum blanda tuas leges
et vacuum pectus ab igne fuit
—Elegy 7, John Milton

The real and the unused.
Crust to call it out of work homages,
thus imply, willed as poet the surveyor—
bust subjugationalism, hurry
grave, easy tones as captor as comforter.
Not yet did I know your laws
and my breast was free from fire.
The missing I. The real and the unused.
Behold your applicant as he struggles to strip
the veil of anguish from the master of ceremonies,
characterized by constant papersludge, choices
that lead to detention, standard sophistications,
irreparable materials at hand. But every
mother worth her milk refuses, calls
us heretic, criminal, an awkward position
endorsing belligerent behavior I say's
better built for lazy ones who street it,
gas grinners, cigarette teeth and whiskey eyeballs,
starving, filthcoated tongues
lost in gutter grime and babythick weathered lips
long ago. Celine's boys. Dreaming dogs.
The real and the unused.
Do you really know this man?
Or they called it infantile ascension.
Case history in so many words.
I mustard promise at every passing fancy,
drill skirts through the pedestal inviting
every passing nancy
to cut out my vital stat,
roll it in dough,
unscrew the nerves keeping me out of work,
in homage, and out of the Goethe Institute.
I feel like night, my creeds as complex
as the birth of an incomplete child,
regardless of pace,
breed or compatibility with a dead hero. The latter,
a pneumatic pretense of distinction. As bloody gnat,
I lust to feel burning glacier women who believe in the holy captive,
the real and the unused, naive truth, blanket nerve, price wars,
comparative nostrils. Wah but, such works of true determination
are reserved for the few, rarely an overnight sensation.
The real and the unused.
I, Gabriel Thy,
I, the richard spalding nix,
I, poet of cull verse and friend to all natives,
I, the missing I, complete the roulette parallelogram,
the pickpocket's trilogy terrorizing
self in search of the city,
this corpus christi,
her sand and her silk and her honesty,
assembled in the punished faces of the wedding tree, wah but
Young Man of resembled talents redeeming
the real and the unused.

That was before I read a book on windmills by Kierkegaard.

WHEELING

2009-06-11T13:11:00.005-04:00

With little idea of how emphatically alert
the carrion forces of irony would approach me
in this odd doohickey state of mine,
I was celebrating with moving trucks
and farewell glimpses like signals from another frontier
that I, yes, the royal roving eye
had finally escaped the nation’s capital after twenty-two
scalable years of stifled scream, fish tales, and orgasm,
my formidable punk rock years frothing and frosted beneath me,
punishment enough I had hoped for choosing the prophetic muses
of blathering fifth angel guitar heaps over the deadly aims
of the finely papered greed and arrogance creeps
the city of Washington breeds, imports, and exports
across its continental colonies and beyond, far beyond,
gesture control, this leering lawmaking
jeering jawbreaking city’s major industry,
and by that I mean ONLY industry...

but obviously I had miscalculated the odds—
the shady odds not even a straw hat hombre from south of the imaginary
Mendoza line as legal as lint, can beat. Flattened by repeated failure,
and by failure, I mean absolute and uncompromised failure,
I had become nothing more than an aching suburb of my former self.
I had gone west by God. In smutty nutty wisecracking Wheeling
West Virginia
I soon found myself smack dab in the middle
of the next pygmalion effect.

Allow me to elaborate my first full week
here on Main Street in Victorian Old Town, I saw,
and by that I mean O-L-D, the flaking, rotting, stinking carcass
of a former glory gone desperately poor, I saw myself
perched eighty feet on a bluff above the historical
but now quaint yet periodically swelling, raging,
bank-defying Ohio River down below.

First week here POTUS came to town,
a speech at the Capitol Music Hall,

Floods in Wheeling, nope, in DC.
Presidential motoracde.
punk city, nope, wheeling, tats & nose rings
few hicks, lots of itching though.

[ 2006, Wheeling, WV ]

TWEAKING THE MULTICULTURALIST

2009-06-10T09:36:00.002-04:00

I CAN'T HELP MYSELF in picking up Charlie's theme of inclusion, even though I am alert to the fact it's not the original thrust of the thread.

One of the many ironies of FORCED multiculturalism, and I do know something about the realties first hand, is the myth that we are all the same. Well, if we are all indeed the SAME, why the great push to make sure we test that theory by forcing all this sameness together? And yet when given the choice of aggregating freely under general conditions, we notice the tendency that real (or superficial) likeness does indeed TEND to gravitate together, but not EXCLUSIVELY.

This predilection is seen everywhere; in nature, in human society, and in logic itself. Some may laugh, and call this an over-simplication. I'd agree, but then ask the question, an over-simplication of what?

A FEW SKY GRAY THOUGHTS ON POLITICS AS A BRITTLE LITERARY DEVICE

2009-05-28T15:11:00.008-04:00

A FINE MAN AND DEDICATED PATRIOT named Christopher Logan honored me recently when he sent me a message inquiring, "Do you think I was being too rough with her?"

Damned if I know. She doesn't seem to be backing down, and is remarkably patronizing in her own right. Let's face it. Some people just don't get it, won't get it, can't possibly get it until IT affects them in some personal way. Perhaps a few quotes from Thomas Jefferson, J. Quincy Adams, John Wesley, Bishop Sheen, Winston Churchill, and Mohammed himself will get her attention, but probably not. Because she's of the mindset right now that it is better that 100 guilty terrorists go undetected than one innocent Muslim be given a second glance in an airport line. There's no defeating that logic in these sad, post-modernist, politically incorrect, globalist times since it parallels the romanticism that our own US legal system is grounded in...

For better or for worse, smiley-faced Pollyannas will always be with us.

You and me? We just keep plugging. In due time, we might be prepared to be of even greater service to those who criticize us now...

Q: Thank you for not attacking me but providing me with the information. But your quick turn to the passive-aggressive has not provided much in the form of education. I'll investigate anyway.

Laurie, I'm not here to educate you. One liners on Facebook will never get that done. There is a wealth of information out there just for the picking. You are correct. You must do the investigations, yourself. Take no single source as truth, or at least not until you have determined the source as reputable over a string period of time. That's the best any of us can hope to do. But what seems to be at issue here on this thread is whether or not this question of a global jihad in its myriad of forms is a matter of personal opinion, anecdotal evidence, or mere genuflection, but rather of determinable fact by a tough, keen look at all the evidence available.

Propaganda is very tough to parse with mere cursory efforts...

And I suggest to you that Mr. Logan has the right beat on the issue, Laurie. News that screams forth everyday from all corners of the planet where Islam is actively pursing more territory, more corpses, more power under the guise of sharia, is not a mere blip on the screen. The signage of Islam on the march is everywhere. Signs, signs, everywhere are signs. Perhaps you know the song, perhaps not. But the point is, there's a whole lot more to this Islamic muffin than just some flour and a handful of blueberries.

Gabriel: Information is not knowledge.

Kirsten: This is an often misconstrued concept!. But, to quote: Knowledge is Good.

Bruce: Well I didn't want to say anything but I am glad you know this.

Gabriel: Well dear public, feel free to expose me to what else you and yours might speculate I need to know. The nasty truth is not as mysterious as we've been led to believe. GATHER OR DIVIDE. The whole point of my imaginary punk rock band is to suggest that each one of us must make the play. Bystanders be damned. Ignorance is bliss, twice the fun, bur perilous in spoilage. Our retaliation?

Inherit a role. Allow it to count. Face the music. And realize that this is the only rule by which we know ourselves as intricately as our detractors do.

Josh: Correlation does not imply causation!

Gabriel: Obviously correlation is a more pertinent state of affairs, since to put matters in terms Karl Popper might appreciate, scientists can explain First Cause, but we are stuck with all pending correlations.

Maybe that was Wittgenstein, not Popper, but since they exchanged thoughts with fabulous animosity, the pending correlations in this case are probably nothing more than the dollars and cents of an ego economy - commonly called hubris - rather than the clarity that some uncertainty principle might avail us when the necessary light we might require to accept a generality at the sufferance of a specific is corrupted by political motivations.

In other words, all politics is tainted, and plagued with guesswork, but I am a survivor of my own knowledge, not yours.

Correction: scientists CANNOT explain...well, that unintended typo effectively puts the skid into this thread...

After fielding a few snarky remarks from leftist associates and reading some of the neck-snapping snorts of some rightie cohorts, I feel compelled to state:

Politics is just as irrational and existential a belief system as religion, at times just as pernicious, at times just as comforting, both springing from a loose structure of competing droves. In fact, we know today, there is little difference between politics and religion in its abstract condition or its peculiar habits. Superstition and misconception dominate both. Empty rhetoric imposes and services both.

Faith is central to each, and faithlessness is punished in one form or another at every turn. Some might even say there is no rational distinction between politics and religion, but are merely similar thorns on the same blighted rose bush...

Like Ezra Pound, I cherish the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time.

GT

MONEY FOR THE POETS

2009-05-08T09:17:00.001-04:00

DECADES OF PUBLIC and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward.

Read it all.

VACATION EMPHATICA

2009-05-02T12:26:00.004-04:00

COME TO THE COUNTRY, sail upon a fetching horse, swoon and sing private lullabies with the dazzling song birds perched keenly outside your colonial window, enjoy the friendship only nature in the natural can bring...

Stare, smirk, and draw forth the nostrils. Might I say without embarrassing either you or me fair Shannon that your face in this photo is quite strikingly one of the most nuanced philosophical statements I have read today. In that 1960s Faye Dunaway mold. From one artist's eye to his mouth...

YELLOW SHIRTS (Death of a Prostitute)

2009-04-01T13:42:00.002-04:00

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons blowtorch, crayons edgework
crayons, crayons, crayons—yellow shirts
construct clever angles the still merely coping
find new energy to measure!

The hungry prostitute
followed the also slim dark man
fist first into translation alley

where she opened her yellowing blouse.
There fixated no mounds of erotic flesh,
merely several bright reddish-pink scars
countercrossing her vocal rib-cage,
nary a quip existing.

The man not usually the man
dared not gaze nor acknowledge her story, but
reached past dirty lining of empty pockets in gesture
he expected her to understand like clockwork.
Birds of prey sniffed the searchlight air
as she then pulled up borrowed
orange skirt to reveal

coarse frontiers of rife wiry soldiers rising up past her navel
famous and down around her anus. He recognized her
as a fantasy Greek whore fallen from lukewarm grace
shared by her people before the roadbuilders enslaved
her family of talents and trick questions.

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons freemount, crayons junkmail
crayons, crayons, crayons—black shirts
instruct beneath 20-year warranty shingles
each vendor vows to insure!

The homebound black man,
ear to the cold stones of the slain past
and frequent remorse spit at him
turning away to walk like Sudan
into a book of warm testaments
jawbone empires of the trade
have cast onto his jaspered milieu.

The prostitute
who now called herself Raferti
in honor of a former lover now threading the eye of America
began screaming the foils of rape only her attacker seemed
to hear with one ear besting the cold stones
the street gives rest. “I am a proud Macedonian woman!”
(buffering the dream state of static language)
she pleaded as if meaning was hers to give
in this twilight part of town
where shadows play night whispers
for a cheap grin despite yesterday’s oil
at tomorrow’s market prices.

The raven suitor,
whipped into a frenzy,
required stitches near his clutch of duty
as I came drunk into the picture
spinning a globe relief on my index finger
hiding a nearby rock which he found to fiercely crush the poor
maven’s skull. “White bitch!” he mumbled as he tore away the skirt
making himself a bandana. Soon a crowd had gathered to hear
him explain how he had to beat off the woman who had
tried to rob him of his manhood,
shouting racist slurs
when he refused to buckle to her will. The commoners
in their way pitched fair, impressed by his oral defense,
better secretly knowing the stranger was hardly
an example of local slavery
where sadness schemes free blood
not random violence.

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons motionlure, crayons courtesybound
crayons, crayons, crayons—red shirts
hugging the courier sweeping away jet engine residue
each summed difference makes to another in similar
designs along the surface of the thief’s jaw!

There stood near the well of Bar-Lipscotch
a young Lebanese poet. His name was Gibran,
identical in trespass as another
Lebanese poet gaining fame in frisky Boston
earlier in the century. Young Gibran drew up a drink
of water, not because he was thirsty, but because
he was jealous of the owner of the well, after
failing to woo the daughter of a nearby oil shiek.
Despite his words of humble glory and rich scarlet
the poet had been turned away by her, and the father
threatened to have the young romantic killed if he ever
darkened the skies of his daughter again.

A blue ladder and a pair of crutches sketch the Dali sky
where puffed clouds whirl unnoticeable agents
of peach elegance, detail by detail
into the jaded eye,
but I pay the toll with a word ready
to dismiss all symbols not my own,
should those days ever arrive
under government of one
suffering vitiligo passage with student privileges.
(The scriptures were never this straightforward.)

Gibran the Strong
never fearful of intellectual neutralization,
stopped for a drink of lemonade and swore
he would establish a plan
to overthrow the armchair power
vats of the rich goat-lip, the customary curse
his native tongue seemed to pearl at cost and sell to the peasants
at a healthy profit. Gibran was moved to issue this statement:
“Every man true to himself is a racist!” And then compassion
seeps into the pages. Gibran spits into the flavored water,
and then pours it onto the ground
to rot the teeth of grasshoppers
nearby ill with tape recorders.

He later constructed a response to the itch in his skin,
“Don’t question them
until you see the whites of their eggs and the yellows
of their beds, and then squash the bugs!” Train schedules
were carried out on stretchers but the rain was held up
at gunpoint and then executed gangland style
giving all the newspapers a headline
act it could follow like a bee
to honey I Love You
and Lucy too.

And the band played on
under jock pseudonyms of jealousy and the six-pack foursome.

“Gotta hire an agent so I can fire somebody next fall—”
Hooking up with three hookers from Cincinnati
the guestboy felt relieved at the vociferous news of the hour,
any hour, pick an hour, how about 1:59 PM MAY 9, 1492,
where who cares, then found a rock to stand upon
that he might urinate into the well,
being irregardless and all,
from outside the picket line with pockmarks
any butter girl can love from the inside out.

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons idiotsheet, crayons purposebitten
crayons, crayons, crayons—green shirts
wave upon the football fields the nation planted
picking up the pieces of those meeces we hate
to admire without purposes,
called for economic triage!

Prophets of death and doubt enter the googe,
giving the sign for a delayed steal with loaded bases,
“We don’t care if you don’t like us,”
the metallic ones shout, “We are here now. You'd better
grab used guitars or get used to us. We’re the warring tribes here.
We are LuxMachina! Laws bargained on the letter!”
A young woman saw the poet accomplish these things
and came rushing to and fro, semi-pro and ready to con
him within a state of great anxiousness,
Chinatown at 5th and Germaine,
the beeper number reinstated,
needful of a ritual, settling for tattoo, and distant star
named after his pop family, no new river available
while she disrobed and watched the ink carve
justice without a destiny,
last things first.

“My lover, my flawed poet
of mighty high courts and meek
works! You are little endowed to fight
the strengths this managerial team has mastered
and for the black, red, and invisible masses dubbed
platinum, Bar-Lipscotch, come, let us burn eager
night away!” In a wheelchair of passion the poppies
wilted into whizzing pellets, rabbits and the ruined.

It was time to refinance again—last month's agreement
obsolete, culturally numbed, all true meaning reviled.
so off the wall the signature scattered and was sealed.

Line by line
Gibran was visibly shaken
by the quick arm of events. Revolutionary slow tactics
proved a greater success than even he imagined back in the forties
with Sartre over supper and attention to his thumb.
“I think I’ll gather up all my friends
and put them in my pocketful of fumbles the story never tells.
There’s too much nudity but I’ve never seen enough. And
death cannot calm my energies to wrap the world
in God. I feel like a vowel in a German novel.”

You mean Hebrew, don't you?

This time it’s not so stark a rat’s radio
when a woman of unrelaxed beauty begging him to challenge
the heights of his own highly active faith, rips down her veil
and walks high-heeled over me, still strapped to a vow
to please myself in three notes or less,
and a hamburger today for a gift horse tomorrow,
shifting sands of the seashore national synthetic
blasted by another female-triggered hurricane,
now random naming, a squirrel gathering nuts
for Ezra to sell by the pound duty-free
in a little piggy market

to canonize her as he would see fit. The dirty poet
as pure as an oil gusher in a detonation of spirit
wastes no time in serving scant purposes on the girl,
almost dying with devious torpidity upon falling
against her breasts goosed like pineapples,
the texture of her voice like the buzz of the helicopters in the city
where transitional bombs from one echo to another kept it in ruins,
the sweet flutter of this man's history
was none other than the youngest
daughter of Bar-Lipscotch, the sister of his earlier desires.

Now gentle on this stage,
greenlight splashing off marbled rocks of pain
in the background, center pavilion cloaked in summer wages,
I shake hands with and bow before Gibran the Sole Pursuer,
was pleased, not realizing the old system of cages
is an act too ugly to reveal in this account,
for numbers never lie in the eye
of the beholder on the take.

Ice of names storming the desert vivarium
crows along the freckled river many worship
on one hand and pollute with grim ideas on the other,
as she swallows our withering without support of her family,
and Gibran was soon left to dish up another plate of
raging jealousy. Years after he had first spilled impurities into the clean
well, the poet died from an overdose of good luck, shot in the brain
by another young poet who desired Gibran’s gift of poetry. When
the elder poet tried to explain that what was asked of him was impossible
for him to relinquish, the angry young street poet
blew the backlash of history clean off
the old man’s memory.

“Let’s generalize all the forces of nature!”
oddball phantoms crack and conspire in jest, slowing only to pay steep dues
along the singing alley up a tough mountain completely on track
to visually network olive oil and fly papers
seeded among the top three in the division,
the field of old leaders has demanded. Hawks and ugly birds
took the news early as a sort of package deal the tombstoners
must escape if they want pretty doves at their wedding.
“Only don’t be so generous with the lepers
this time. There’s a cockroach
crawling along my toothbrush, and I want him dead,
or at least a bugler that floats on mouthwash.”

Crayons real, crayons true
Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons comfortskinned, crayons bitterzoned
crayons, crayons, crayons—white shirts
failed to mark the highway spoils
generous to a fault in war,
criminal to a tee in peace,
now a timeout for the two minute warning,
a drill held where even phantoms fear to tread.

RIOT ACT, PART THREE

2009-02-19T11:13:00.001-05:00

Avie darling - would you please quit, and I mean RIGHT NOW, please quit bombarding me with all this third party FB gadgetry. I hate to be a snot-nosed scrooge, but all that junk does absolutely nothing for my dystopian frame of mind.

I ALWAYS respond to email, that is to say, words crafted especially for me by someone I know who is sharing a part of themselves with me to communicate, jest, laugh, fear, commiserate, mourn, sneer, enjoy, you name it, I'll claim it, treasure it, commemorate it.

But while I do occasionally break down and respond, and even initiate one of those damnable FB gadgets (out of a nagging but false sense of guilt that I am the one being difficult), I really prefer the literary vices to ANY and ALL of that other virtual pomposity.

Yep, I'm a hard-prick bibliophiliac. And prefer my own kind.

This is your FINAL warning, dearie. I'm drowning in the shallow end of this pond, and will fight back with the most earnest of tools. Now SMILE when I say that. I just did.

Best wishes otherwise you silly goose,

GT

Also known as the sincerest of fools...

TIME OF THE SEASON

2009-02-15T21:13:00.005-05:00

Hey sweet cakes, when did I EVER love you? Beheld you with a certain ill-prepared fondness perhaps, but love? That's an overused and far too frequently misappropriated word. And besides, aren't you Our Lady of Perpetual Crisis? Just ragging. But you can be a lady sometimes, I know, I just know it.

Wassup?

On our end of things, we've relocated the studio out to a large historic horse farm on ten acres in a stretch of the good life I call the throbbing nipple of Sweet Virginia. Five miles to Maryland. Ten to West Virginia. Some 60 miles outside the spin of DC. Awesome place, this farm. Will post pictures at some point. Still trying to sell or rent the city condo. Will sign with an agent this week I think. Suzy Blue brought out the papers this weekend, but we have yet to discuss the finer details.

So tell me, how's YOUR wretched deal going? Haven't heard anything new about you and the kids since Clyde swooped in and snagged the old man. Did you guys patch it all up? Was it all just a bad dream? Is this memorex or a badly scratched 78 RPM, thick and unbreakable? Is the Black Hand of Injustice really black, or is that just the shadow of doubt I read about in the tea leaves of the nightly news?

After a rough patch or so near the beginning, things are going okay for "The Chaz" up here. He just got his motorcycle humped together again yesterday. Allan & family have been up here a couple times with Paige now being observed and penetrated at the National Institute of Health. That's a sad case of mistaken identity. But for the grace of God...

All in all, it's been family reunion tour of sorts for us. Not a bad thing, given the circumstances, the timing, and the hare.

Unfortunately, the grace of transitional power is not the only sensation that's left the building of late, as we are still strung out, and will be hobbled until the condo situation is rectified, and we shift our primary household out here in the fastest growing and richest per capita county in the nation. Despite all that, this definitely feels like the right move at the right time. The two loved ones seem to cherish it here even more than I do, but once I am together again with my books to surround and protect me (nods to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel), I shall embrace the Blue Ridge winds with equal force.

Well, stick it to me, dear. It's the way this game is played. It's true, I never tell you ALL my business. But again, I'm sure you've held out on me as well...

Just thinking about the plural of gravitas...

GT

THE TROUT AND THE FLOUNDER

2008-10-08T18:35:00.003-04:00

YES, LIKE MILLIONS OF OTHERS, I watched the debate last night between the two "major party" nominees for the US presidency last night. The entire event was a Nashville snoozer. Enter Obama, McCain, Brokaw. Exit. An embarrassing snoooozer. Just plain awful political theatre. But this morning, just before opening my eyes with full awareness, my brain did its own version of the shuck and jive by churning out a quick metaphor consisting of a rather short string of bizarre images, tossed together with no particular connection to my own political surface sensibilities, but indeed rich with Jungian and Freudian innuendo and provocation.

First scene. I was standing on a balcony overlooking a rather frisky river. I seemed to pose no particular function in my presence there on the balcony for the first few dreamscape frames, but was statically admiring the choppy waters and the lush green forests hemming the river's edge on all sides. Only then did I notice the fish. Whole schools of fish, shiny silvery flounder in fact, the river thick with these oddly shaped flat fish. Subsequently I noticed, standing to my right just a few feet away from me, was none other than Senator Barack Obama, his white shirt rolled up to his elbows holding a long cast reel, and not being a fisherman myself, the reel was of no special distinction to me. Out the corner of my eye, I could see that Michelle Obama stood a few feet further away at the far edge of this deck balcony. She was encouraging her husband, cheering up his fishing skills, but neither of them seemed to notice me standing just three or four feet away, a stranger in the mist. Suddenly I became aware that I was clutching a long stick in my hand, not quite but nearly as formidable in length as Mr. Obama's shiny reel. Remember, this is that sort of dream, where quick non-sensical edits are the norm, so without linear thought I find myself probing my branch stick into the water just at the point where a large baited flounder and the Senator's hook were converging. In a flash, the end of my stick was tangled in his rod line. Both Obama's immediately sensed alarm, and turning glared solemnly at the culprit. I was speechless, of course, but gained enough composure to soon begin an apology just at the moment the scene shifts.

Scene Two. I am standing in the main room in a cabin, perhaps the same cabin owning the balcony I'd just been intruding upon. There is a fiercely glowing log fire in the aged brick fireplace off to my right. Directly to my left on a stand is a large basket of fish. I first intuit that these fish are not flounder but are trout, fattened rainbow trout perhaps. As I gaze around the room, noticing the kitchen is oft to my far left, Just beneath a window along the wall is a larger table attended by two shadowy figures fussing over another large basket, but no, this time it is a large kettle of fish. Suddenly one of the shadowy figures turns around, and I see a woman. It is Cindy McCain. It is then that I recognize her husband just as he whips around, rushing the basket of trout near me, and leaning in, flashes that grin, that infamous bearish grin of his, while grabbing the basket of rainbow trout and hurling the entire undressed lot into the flames.

Senator McCain then returns to the kettle still on the table and begins gutting each fish, also rainbow trout, with an unseen knife, one at a time until I begin to notice the strong fishy odor which seems to be emanating from the fireplace, but, of course is probably the overpowering stench of guts that McCain is now creating, and awake. To my amazement I detect a strong odor of fish rot as I immediately begin to ponder this dream, and continue to suck air into my nostrils until I am positive no real fish odor exists in the room. It was all in my head.

Very odd dream. But believe me, this story, while part of a sleeping dream state, was a very real event. I have recreated the arrangement of images and impulses as I experienced them to the best of my abilities.

To even attempt a rational interpretation of this very vivid experience today would be too exhausting. I shall return. Perhaps after the election.

HYSTERICAL REALISM

2008-09-24T14:35:00.008-04:00

A MASTERFUL AMERICAN writer and novelist was found dead in his California home by his wife last week. His name was David Foster Wallace. His universally acclaimed magnum opus, a 1100 page tome published in 1996, called Infinite Jest was an immediate sensation. The novel was set in a tennis academy and a nearby drug rehab centre in a parodic version of Organization of North American Nations, or ONAN, where traditional calendar years were renamed after sponsoring companies to become “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” and “The Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland.” The novel centred on a lost film cartridge called “Infinite Jest” that is so entertaining that unwary viewers lost interest in everything else in life.

Wallace's death at 46 by hanging was ruled a suicide. He will be infinitely missed.

2005 Kenyon Commencement Address by David Foster Wallace—May 21, 2005...

IF ANYBODY FEELS like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

LEAVING TRACKS

2008-09-17T14:26:00.001-04:00

Networking to the stars. Or more to the point, here I am, come and get it!

View my page on CreativesDC

REST IN PEACE, RICHARD

2008-08-18T00:07:00.005-04:00

ALBANY — Richard Handley Waller artist, poet, and lover of music. Submitted by Tom Hedrick,

”What if you had been a child put to work in a cotton field near Roanoke, AL, and ten years later you found yourself in a room with the Emperor of China? It happened to me, but I didn’t have the slightest idea who the man was.”

This was the lead sentence to the autobiography Richard Waller was working on before his death. It also reflects on the extraordinarily interesting life he led.

Richard Handley Waller, 81, of Albany, GA, died of heart failure August 8 at Phoebe Putney Hospital, after a long illness. The body will be cremated as per Mr. Waller’s express wishes. He will be interred in Roanoke, AL, next to his beloved Mother, Father and Brother; Ethel George Waller Hedrick, Handley Saunders Waller and Thomas Eugene Waller. Mathews Funeral Home in Albany, GA is in charge of the arrangements. A graveside memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. (CST), Saturday, August 16, 2008, at Cedarwood Cemetery in Roanoke, AL. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Albany Symphony in memory of Richard Handley Waller.

Mr. Waller was born in Roanoke, AL, grew up in Newnan, GA, and served in the U.S. Army in Manila and Tokyo in Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Headquarters. While he was in the service, his family moved to Albany, GA. In 1954, he received a BS degree from the School of General Studies of Columbia University in the City of New York, where he lived for twenty years. He returned to Georgia in 1970 and was retired from Lawyers Title Insurance Corporation. He made his home in Albany for over thirty years and was well known in the community.

Mr. Waller was a world traveler and enjoyed the art and architecture of the many countries he visited. He enjoyed his retirement in Albany and was a member and past president of the Georgia Artists Guild; a staunch supporter of the Albany Symphony; and a member of the Albany Writers Club. A talented writer who was not afraid to express his opinion on matters he cared about, Mr. Waller also often injected humor in his editorials and poems. Many will remember his letters to the editor in The Albany Herald’s “Squawk Box” and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Also a talented poet, he was the author of two books: ”Beethoven’s Brain and Other Poems”, which was used as part of the ticket sales for the Newport Music Festival in Newport, RI in 1995 and what he considered his highest achievement; and “The Famous God Said Sonnets.” He also composed music and lyrics; played the violin and the guitar. Always creative, he won awards as a talented painter and photographer.

Mr. Waller had an inquisitive mind, and was constantly reading and studying music, art, writing, religion, and, in later years, mastered the computer. He liked to point out that on his paternal great-grandfather’s gravestone is carved these words that also describe his life: ”He did what he could”. His wit and his e-mails will be sorely missed by his family and many friends. He loved to share his knowledge with all.

He was born a Baptist, but died a Universalist—one who believes that salvation is extended to all mankind. A life-long bachelor, he is survived by cousins on both sides of his family, Wallers and Georges, and by many nieces and nephews of his step-family, the Hedricks of Albany and Atlanta—some loved, some unloved; and, the feeling was mutual. He is also survived by his beloved cat, Prunella.

Mathews Funeral Home
Albany 229/435-5657

WHOROSCOPE

2008-07-04T23:08:00.003-04:00

Today, as I quietly seethe at the state of my nation on its birthday, I also sneak a peek at the Libran Sheep zodiac posted on Facebook. This period seems excellent to fight against infections of the genito-urinary system. You'll benefit from the powerful support of many stars; they'll come to back your efforts up, to help you in your ambitions. You'll show remarkable practical sense and will know how to defend your interests. If you've problems, you'll succeed in solving them easily. Your professional life will be sufficiently stimulating; you'll work with dedication and motivation and success seems assured.

POEM FOR ZOOL

2008-05-16T08:01:00.000-04:00

WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS KILLING DONE?
We speak with the language of war. We laugh with the language of peace. Knowing that all life is born of crisis, punctuated by brief periods of solace, we also know that after all is said and done, we shall never cheat infinity, nor shall we extinguish the mark of a single thought.
—Gabriel Thy

HEALTH DIARIST FEARS WORST

2008-05-08T09:23:00.007-04:00

TROTTED OFF TO THE ORTHOPEDIST yesterday concerning my alining right knee. After x-rays and some hands-on twisting and gnarling of the damaged limb, the doctor fears that the cartilage has been torn. Medically speaking, the "cartilage" is actually known as the meniscus. The meniscus is a C-shaped piece of fibrocartilage which is located at the peripheral aspect of the joint. The majority of the meniscus has no blood supply. For that reason, when damaged, the meniscus is unable to undergo the normal healing process that occurs in most of the rest of the body. In addition, with age, the meniscus begins to deteriorate, often developing degenerative tears. Typically, when the meniscus is damaged, the torn piece begins to move in an abnormal fashion inside the joint.

Because the space between the bones of the joint is very small, as the abnormally mobile piece of meniscal tissue (meniscal fragment) moves, it may become caught between the bones of the joint (femur and tibia). When this happens, the knee becomes painful, swollen, and difficult to move.

This tearing of cartilage in my knee will probably lead to my eighth surgery. But first, the doctor has put me on an anti-inflammatory medication, and if this doesn't recede the symptoms, then it's off to the MRI Center.

Damn, I just can't catch a break since I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism two years ago—one ailment or health condition after another.

MEMORY IS A SCREAM

2008-05-06T20:29:00.036-04:00

MY FIRST MEMORY IS OF BEING on my back in a hospital bed. Never one to rely on the shoddy recall powers of certain family members who seemed to lack the same zing I had for remembering where I put my yesterdays, very early in life I displayed a precocious curiosity for the push and pull of life's levers and diligently stocked my own memory bank with notes and exercises geared to maximize my potential—so I am rather sure, as sure as a consistent list checker can be that I am a mere two years and months old during this first of seven surgeries I have undergone to date.

Actually, there are two strong memories that have chided me over the years from that two-week summer stint at Brunswick General Hospital where I had my left testes surgically dropped from inside my groin to the exterior scrotum sack, a process most boys experience within the first month or so after birth, naturally, without surgery, but my two danglers were apparently somewhat reluctant to show themselves. The condition, which also affects male fertility, is called cryptochidism.

This is 1957. I am basking in my own private room. Brunswick General is not a military facility, so I remain at a loss to explain both the private room and my seclusion in a civilian medical institution. Perhaps my grandparents are footing the bill. My own daddy is hardly a thrifty man. In fact, he is well on his way, even taxing gregarious United States Navy standards to their vanishing point a few years down the road, in putting the word "drunk" into the phrase—drunken sailor. But that's of no concern here. I wouldn't be expected to sort out all these details at my age. Responsibility beyond my years did roar in upon me rather early as childhood dynamics tend to go, but not this early, at least not that I recollect. That would come later—with the siblings.

My problem, a traumatic hit so startling as to abruptly sear its passage into my memory, so that I can reflect upon it in my mind's eye just like it was yesterday, is being left alone for the first time in my suddenly quite conscious life. I am an only child at the time. My mother would birth seven children in seven and a half years, and must have been pregnant with my first brother even then, as I was secretly being prepared to undergo the scalpel in anticipation of growing a pair. But for this strategic moment in the life of a child, I am still the oscillating focus of attention for a small army of adoring adults and doting teenage girls, including my mother's own three much younger sisters who would spoil me with "favorite nephew" affection for the rest of their lives.

The toddler is lying in a hospital bed staring up at young mommy and daddy, 22 and 21 years of age, respectively...

They are telling me they have to leave, but that they will be back the next morning. Yes, as a precocious two-year old, nearing three probably, I understand their English but I feel only the compulsion to reject it. I do not wish to be left alone, and I'm not about to let them slip out of that large beige-walled room without a fuss. It was not totally dark outside yet, but within the room, the light was disappearing. Commencing to scream, I continue to wail without conscience until I am told that my granddaddy would be there to visit me in a couple of days and was bringing me the toy boat he had promised. But, as mem'ry serves, nothing would stop my bellicose screeching, stretching no doubt the tissue of my young pink lungs to the bursting point until after they had left my line of vision.

I had done my job. I had let them know how much I cared about them. Or else I had let them know how little I appreciated being abandoned to a strange place all alone and terrified. There wasn't even a smiling winsome nurse around to help guide me towards the light of an inexplicable future. I seemed to sense that I was simply too young to be left alone. Didn't they know that at least one of them could have slept in the room, in that chair over there in the corner, keeping me company, until the fear and trepidation of being abandoned by Nyx, the primordial goddess of night, had passed? Apparently not. Or else this young couple perhaps still in love with each other, or perhaps the party life, had better things to do. Free night off without the snotty-nosed kid. I could only imagine.

But sure enough, an undetermined number of days later, Granddaddy popped in by himself, and I basked in his bombastic personality. Granddaddy was alone with me and he had a brand new toy boat, blue in color, just like he had promised, and I recall quite vividly us walking the few steps hand in hand to the private bath inside my room, filling the tub with water, and floating the boat and me on the wave of magnificent play time antics only Spud Woodward was capable of generating.

It seems odd that this second memory—as keen as the first one days earlier, which was probably a fragment from the evening before the surgery— is not associated with pain of any sort except abandonment, a problem I still suffer in many ways some fifty years later.

My fourth and fifth years were ripe for pneumonic pickings, most of a more pedestrian nature, but we'll leave those for another day.

THE SECOND COMING AND MALCOLM X

2008-04-22T14:21:00.025-04:00

William Butler Yeats on far left; Malcolm X on right

THE FOLLOWING TWO POETIC stanzas were famously penned by Irish poet and scholar, William Butler Yeats. It's no accident they seem to be of particular interest today.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I've often considered these past few years since September 11, how this particular Yeats' poem strikes the mind as glaringly prophetic—in that most compelling sense of the word—prophetic of the current and 3rd wave of Islam. For us, the Camp of Islam is lodged in crucial context as the "rough beast" we see pitting itself against civilization, although elsewhere, Yeats portrays the antithetical Messiah as the royal Oedipus, ‘an image from Homer’s age’, who lays down upon the earth and ‘sank down' soul and body into the earth.

1st wave: Battle of Tours, 732.
2nd wave: Battle of Vienna, September 11, 1683.
3rd wave: New York City, September 11, 2001.

One can imagine the Irish poet balancing Messiah who, crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky, soul and body. What if Messiah and Oedipus are the two scales of a balance, the two polar ends of a seesaw? What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other profane; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of the balance, the dip of the scale, and so date the coming of that something?

Frankly, the Oedipus motif is not as far-fetched in terms of the Islamic relationship to Abraham and Yahushua(Jesus) as it first seems. Islam would kill the Abrahamic father, and usurp the redemption of the mother church, and long blinded by its own egotistical forces unable to see where it has erred, has earned its own destruction in the full accordance of time, victim of its own beastly rebellious nature, thus losing access to the global redemption of ancient prophecy.

A few contradictions do rise to the top of this analysis, however. The puritanical Islamicists, as a death cult, characterized in their own words as "loving death while the West loves life" could be seen as despisers of this world, and lovers of God. On the other hand, this posture is merely a well-honed tactic by which they crucially calculate aggressive actions in order to subdue and dominate the whole world through these specific tools of terror and warfare.

An outward resemblance to religion and godliness, but nothing but raging lions inwardly. This description nails many a soul past and present, great and small, around the world, but it seems to describe perfectly the last stand of the last beast of religion. And we appear to be the witnesses against that last generation.

"There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully," Malcolm X declared in a speech in November 1963. "Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That's a good religion."

In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem by three men who shot him sixteen times in what is generally surmized as retaliation for his late distancing from both the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammed. His last words? "Let's cool it, brothers..."

In prison, Malcolm X adopted the creed of the Nation of Islam (later known as the Black Muslims). Among the group's core beliefs is that God had visited Detroit in 1930, in the form of a man named Wallace D. Fard, aka "Mr. Farrad" (whose teachings were disseminated by Elijah Poole, later known as Eliljah Muhammad); that God created humans 66 trillion years ago; that humans were originally black; that their {black) civilization ruled for most of those 66 trillion years; that black scientists created animals and the moon; that whites, a race of devils created to torment blacks, were created by a rebelious black scientist named Yacub 6000 years ago; that God granted whites control of the world for a limited time; and that God would deliver blacks from their bondage and destroy the white race, possibly in the year 1984.

Malcolm X, [born Malcolm Little] [aka El-Hajj Halik El-Shabazz] (1925-1965) American activist, member of the Black Muslims (1952–1963), founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (1964) [noted for his espousal of separatism and Black pride, for his conversion to orthodox Islam, and for his assassination in Harlem]

FLOCK AROUND THE ROCK

2008-04-21T10:16:00.007-04:00

Sue and I plan on getting to the Saturday night show. Is that the one for you? Of course, I have Open Studios that day, and again the next day, and am on doctor's orders of no alcohol, plus now my latest whack, my right knee is popping, is swollen, and is painful. And to think I am soon moving up to a studio with a third floor walkup...

This will be my last 9353. My rocker friends can't pull themselves away from their own egos long enough to lolly over to mine, so it's time to prune the branches. Frankly, I'm forcing myself to attend this show because Norman (a la Martine) has come out to a show of mine. Wait a minute! I've already gone to see his band play. We're dead even by my count. But I will stumble over to this last show. Because I said I would. Club scenes require hard drinking in my vernacular, and I can't afford that particular luxury anymore. Those days are just about over for me, as you've no doubt understood me to say in print several times before.

Seriously. Bruce and Kathleen have each promised to swing by sometime, on the heels of numerous invitations. Eventually, the song and dance phase freezes over. We each are forced into bold choices. There's no animosity here, just cold hard decisions required by the frank limitations luciferian time presents us. And I'm really tight with the reciprocity angle, so out with the pruning shears. Face it...

Life is a bucket of stones slowly crushed into sand by experiences that herd us into stereotypes we both embrace and despise.

Yes, this is my Kaaba story, and I AM sticking to it.

THE AIR AROUND GUY DEBORD

2008-04-02T14:58:00.002-04:00

From: "Sam Hutcheson" Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 20:38:38 -0400

gabe's been around as long as i have, for the record. if not longer. back in the day, spud was a contributing member, even.

as i recall i'm entering my 6th or 7th year "around".

s/

> Holy shit. It just crossed my mind that I've been subscribing to > this list
> for, like, five years or something. How sad is that? >
> Hutcheson's been here longer though..... >
> Reuben

Then Gabriel:

Ah yes, the founding members remember.

Twas a hot summer evening curtly described as 7:53 PM EDT on June 20 1996 (aw shucks, imagine the marbled loveliness had I subscribed a mere four days earlier), that I, one Gabriel Thy signed onto this now fabled list, then called simply THE SPECTACLE (truth in advertising I suppose). But I promptly forgot about the possibilities of becoming the mountain because it wasn't until August 9, according to my unscrupulous records, that somebody who thought he was having trouble signing on began and ended complaining about computer problems, and the great divide between Windows and Macs.

I responded:

LOVE THE ONE YOU ARE WITH...

"I fought with my twin, that enemy within, 'til both of us fell by the side..."
Bob Dylan

Another month of quiet on the nothingness backburner droned on until on September 9, when, as life would have it, another fine pilgrim popped into place noting surprise that he'd received anything from the list he'd thought clinically dead. That person was none other than Laurent Oget, responding to a seed named Heidi who claimed to be having trouble loving the one she was with in complaining about certain uncertainties of the sign-up process on a unsettling list where the writing and the riddles had yet begun to strike their mighty blows for freedom among us.

But lo and behold, suddenly, in a gust of curious whispering, wistful activity was now thrust upon us!

Five or six notes in about five or six days from a pool of about five or six people (now that excruciating details hardly matter), were swapped, followed by another lengthy spell of silent days and lonely nights. During the last few truckloads of late September another three or so notes got passed around. But I soon needed a swizzle stick to mix my fantasy sunrises as another spell of absolute, uninterrupted silence, dead air, spectacular timidity, whatever, came rolling in off the lumpy horizons of who's busy now. Records show it wasn't until the very end of October and early November, 1996 that the list finally grew into its motivational wingz...

Looks like my old friend Sam made November 5, his debut as one of the "first wavers" in crackling response to one of my own rather feeble repackaged jokes about two kinds of people. But December and January were also virtual lockdowns in nothingness withdrawal technique, with February 1997 accelerating to a trickle. The pantomime past burst into the long-awaited noise in March, as the second and third waves rushed the beach head with footprints enough for a snapshot in three-quarters time. The rest as they say, is history.

Making a list, checking it twice,

Saint Nix

LIKE SPOTS ON A LEOPARD, CHANGE IS RARE

2008-03-31T20:28:00.007-04:00

Unfortunately, the same general observation holds true today. Note the comments below, taken from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for what light he sheds on the area in 1916 and 1917. For all his fascination with the nomadic peoples, Lawrence, in his own words, remained a proud and obedient English officer.

He had not much positive to say of the Palestinian farmers who lived side by side with German Jewish farmers who had begun to settle in the previous two decades.

"A fifth section in the latitude of Jerusalem would have begun with Germans and with German Jews, speaking German or German-Yiddish, more intractable even than the Jews of the Roman era, unable to bear contact with others not of their race, some of them farmers, most of them shopkeepers. Around them glowered their enemies, the sullen Palestinian peasants, more stupid than the yeoman on North Syria, material as the Egyptians, and bankrupt."

MUSLIMS ATTACK A VOLTAIRE PLAY

2008-03-30T12:07:00.001-04:00

By Andrew Higgins, The Wall Street Journal

SAINT-GENIS-POUILLY, France—Late last year, as an international crisis was brewing over Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Muslims raised a furor in this little alpine town over a much older provocateur: Voltaire, the French champion of the 18th-century Enlightenment.

A municipal cultural center here on France's border with Switzerland organized a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire, whose writings helped lay the foundations of modern Europe's commitment to secularism. The play, "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet," uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance.

The production quickly stirred up passions that echoed the cartoon uproar. "This play ... constitutes an insult to the entire Muslim community," said a letter to the mayor of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, signed by Said Akhrouf, a French-born cafe owner of Moroccan descent and three other Islamic activists representing Muslim associations. They demanded the performance be cancelled.

Instead, Mayor Hubert Bertrand called in police reinforcements to protect the theater. On the night of the December reading, a small riot broke out involving several dozen people and youths who set fire to a car and garbage cans. It was "the most excitement we've ever had down here," says the socialist mayor.

The dispute rumbles on, playing into a wider debate over faith and free-speech. Supporters of Europe's secular values have rushed to embrace Voltaire as their standard-bearer. France's national library last week opened an exhibition dedicated to the writer and other Enlightenment thinkers. It features a police file started in 1748 on Voltaire, highlighting efforts by authorities to muzzle him. "Spirit of the Enlightenment, are you there?" asked a headline Saturday in Le Figaro, a French daily newspaper.

A debate on Swiss television last month degenerated into a shouting match when the director of the Saint-Genis-Pouilly performance accused a prominent Muslim of campaigning to censor Voltaire in the past. The two men also have traded insults in the French media.

Meanwhile, the name Voltaire—and the Enlightenment tradition he embodies—has frequently been cited by pundits across Europe commenting on the Danish cartoon furor. That controversy has triggered violent clashes in Pakistan, Nigeria, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, leaving scores dead. It has led to the arrest of nearly a dozen Muslim journalists who re-published some of the drawings and has driven the original artists into hiding.

Sunday in the Pakistani city of Karachi, about 50,000 people, many chanting "Hang those who insulted the prophet," rallied to protest the cartoons. The protest, held a day after a visit to the country by President Bush, also featured chants of "Death to America." In a video broadcast Sunday, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, also denounced the Danish drawings, saying they showed the West has double standards because "no one dares to harm Jews ... nor even to insult homosexuals."

"Help us Voltaire. They've gone mad," read a headline last month in France Soir, a daily newspaper.

Editors in France, Germany and elsewhere have explained their decision to reprint the drawings by pointing to principles enshrined in a statement often attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire said something similar, but the phrase was coined in 1906 by a biographer of Voltaire to sum up the French writer's views.

"Fanaticism," the play that stirred the ruckus in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, portrays Muhammad as a ruthless tyrant bent on conquest. Its main theme is the use of religion to promote and mask political ambition.

For Voltaire's Muslim critics, the play reveals a centuries-old Western distortion of Islam. For his fans, it represents a manifesto for liberty and reason and should be read not so much as an attack on Islam but as a coded assault on the religious dogmas that have stained European history with bloody conflict.

When Voltaire wrote the play in 1741, Roman Catholic clergymen denounced it as a thinly veiled anti-Christian tract. Their protests forced the cancellation of a staging in Paris after three performances -- and hardened Voltaire's distaste for religion. Asked on his deathbed by a priest to renounce Satan, he quipped: "This is not the time to be making enemies."

Jean Goldzink, a scholar who edited a French edition of "Fanaticism," sees in today's tumult a repeat of the polemics aroused by Voltaire in his lifetime. "It is the same situation as in the 18th Century," Mr. Goldzink says. "Then it was Catholic priests who were angry. Now it is parts of the Muslim community."

Voltaire, the pen-name of Francois-Marie Arouet, peppered his writing with irreverent barbs that riled the Church. He described God as "a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh," and wrote that "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Mr. Goldzink, the scholar, says Voltaire mocked all religions but had some sympathy for Islam, which Voltaire described as "less impure and more reasonable" than Christianity and Judaism.

Banned from Paris by France's Catholic king, Voltaire moved to Geneva. He quickly irked Swiss authorities, who burned one of his books. He then moved to a chateau a few miles from Saint-Genis-Pouilly and wrote a "Treatise on Tolerance." He later campaigned in vain to reverse a blasphemy conviction against a French noble, who was tortured, beheaded and then incinerated -- along with a copy of Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary."

Accusations of blasphemy attract mostly yawns today in mainly secular Europe, though they do sometimes excite the dwindling Christian faithful. Monty Python's 1979 film "Life of Brian" was banned for a time in parts of Europe. More recently, "Jerry Springer: The Opera," which portrays Jesus as a homosexual who dances around in diapers, drew protests from Christian groups. Still, it ran for months in London and was broadcast by British state television.

Some devout Muslims are trying to revive taboos against blasphemy, and there are signs of growing self-censorship on matters even tangentially related to Islam. In January, the Belgian town of Middelkerke cancelled a planned art display that featured a fiberglass model of Saddam Hussein submerged in a fish tank in his underwear. The Czech artist, David Cerny, describes his work "Shark" as "a reflection on dictatorship." Officials say they worried it might upset local Muslims.

Herve Loichemol, a French theater director who produced the recent readings of Voltaire's play in Saint-Genis-Pouilly and Geneva, says he wasn't trying to provoke Muslims but knew from experience his production might anger some. He pushed ahead anyway. Banning blasphemy "admits private beliefs into public space," he says. "This is how catastrophe starts."

In the early 1990s, Mr. Loichemol had proposed staging the play to mark the 300th anniversary of Voltaire's birth in 1694. Islamic activists objected, among them Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim whose grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist movement in Egypt. Mr. Ramadan wrote an open letter in October 1993 warning that performing Voltaire's play would "be another brick in an edifice of hatred and rejection in which Muslims feel they are being enclosed."

After weeks of debate, Geneva authorities dropped the play, citing financial reasons. Mr. Loichemol, who lives near Voltaire's old chateau outside Geneva, denounced the decision as a revival of intolerance. Mr. Ramadan, who has become one of Europe's most influential Muslim intellectuals, has since tried to distance himself from the campaign to censor Voltaire, saying he admires the writer and has taught "Fanaticism" to students. In an interview last year with the French magazine Medias, he said he was in Egypt when the play got canned and "was not even aware of this affair."

Last spring, Mr. Loichemol decided to take another stab at reviving the play and persuaded Saint-Genis-Pouilly to include it in a program of cultural events, along with Flamenco dancers and a lowbrow farce.

Mr. Akhrouf, the cafe owner and activist, says that in early December, he got an agitated phone call from a friend who had just received a leaflet advertising the event. Mr. Akhrouf found a copy of the play on the Internet and started shaking with rage as he read the portrayal of Muhammad as a fanatic.

Shortly afterward, he attended Friday prayers at a big mosque in Geneva and talked about his concerns with Hafid Ouardiri, a mosque official and veteran of the earlier anti-Voltaire campaign. They drafted a letter to the mayor demanding the play be cancelled "in order to preserve peace."

Mr. Ouardiri, an Algerian-born former leftist radical, came to France in the 1960s and says he used to chant the 1968 student slogan, "It is forbidden to forbid." Now a devout Muslim, he says he champions "the need to forbid." Algeria and other Muslim countries, he says, were colonized by Europeans "nourished by Voltaire."

Mayor Bertrand considered dropping the play. But after talking to aides and voters, he decided to stand by Voltaire.

A meeting two days later to defuse the crisis got nowhere. Mr. Bertrand, flanked by officials from France's security service and other state bodies, quoted a section of France's constitution that guarantees free speech. Mr. Akhrouf and Mr. Ouardiri pleaded with authorities to try to understand Muslim feelings. Mr. Akhrouf broke down in tears. "I was very emotional," he says.

The night of the reading, riot police took up positions outside Saint-Genis-Pouilly's cultural center. An hour into the performance, the mayor got called out of the hall because of street disturbances. The mayor says the mood was "quasi-insurrectional," but damage was minor. Police chased Muslim youths through the streets.

Now that tempers have calmed, Mayor Bertrand says he is proud his town took a stand by refusing to cave in under pressure to call off the reading. Free speech is modern Europe's "foundation stone," he says. "For a long time we have not confirmed our convictions, so lots of people think they can contest them."

He does have one regret: He found the play, five acts in archaic verse, "deeply boring."

FRIENDS COME...

2008-03-24T16:51:00.005-04:00

Avie - did you check your MySpace blog comments this afternoon? Well, let me say this to you because when I read anything written, in a book, in a magazine, in a comic, in a blog, in a stone tablet, I ask myself. Hmmm, do I do that? Am I guilty of that? Is she, or he talking about me? Does it matter? If not, why not? Et cetera, ad nauseam...

Of course, like any hot-blooded Dylanista worth his own sense of wayward mystery tramp, we all think Bob Dylan has written directly to us as individuals for the past forty years, and you have even picked up on the phenomenon—with your praises of many of the notes I have sent you the past couple of months.

But let me be clear. I DO NOT think you have come on too fast, nor am I afraid of boldness and directness, or anything we have or have not shared, but I will tell you that those early heady days of Facebook jollies were just that, a newness, a folly, a guilty pleasure, a time-killer when I was home sick for weeks on end, a journey sure to end on an anti-climatic note, an odd take on reality, a complete waste of time except for the enjoyment we created.

I can kick ass with the best of the headbangers, but I'm more comfortable with a book or a philosophical treatise. You should have noticed by now that I have abandoned most of those Facebook apps that are nothing more than will-o-wisps I can blow away with the might of a well-sculpted paragraph, and prefer reciprocity in that arena to the pokes and superpokes with their respective one word iconographies in play.

Believe me. I'm not trying to strike a pose as a superior being or some nonsense like that. I had fun when I was having fun. But the bubble has burst for me. You and a couple of other friends welcomed me to Facebook with a bang. I thank you for that bit of personal ego stroking.

But I spend hours every day in study and in writing, keeping my blogs at operational speed. My radio station has been running on autopilot since September. My need to paint, and show, and sell them suckers doesn't get enough properly structured and vested time as it is, what with the symptoms of this broken down thyroid I carry in my throat, my bulging waistline, and creeping age all toss me, mostly sinus and skin allergies to the cotton clothing I wear, fatigue, tremendous aches, pains and head smog, all leading to a generalized exasperation in struggling to do all that I want to do without attaining anything of value much more than the rare passersby making a two-minute web visit for any of it.

But I press on because the alternative is absolute stone cold unassailable darkness and loathsome failure.

We almost never entertain in our home, and rarely go out once we make it home after returning from our daily grind. I am simply more jealous of my energy now that my own death seems closer to me than when I first launched The Scenewash Project in 1996, as an early pioneer. Point is I'm a haunted individual, not all joy and vigor as many see me I've learned. There's the public Gabriel that the underground music scene loves or loathes depending on one's sense of punk, and then there's the private Gabriel, lost in this world, unfruitful, weary and disappointed, thwarted by the dualing zodiac signs of the Libran sheep, if one is of a mind to believe THAT yack.

And since you never take up any of my offers, two issued to visit studio, which drew silence, two to gallery shows, both of which you wanted to attend, but didn't—I don't hold any of that against you—I just don't know how to accommodate you at this point.

But I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last week during our snowy trip to North Adams, MA. Pictures on their way.

Cheers, beers, and steers, and maybe you weren't talking about me at all, but...

Thanks for the Revolting Cocks,

Gabriel

BERLIN GALLERY HARASSED BY MUSLIMS

2008-02-29T12:05:00.007-05:00

A BERLIN GALLERY has temporarily closed an exhibition of satirical works by a group of Danish artists after six Muslim youths threatened violence unless one of the posters depicting the Kaaba shrine in Mecca was removed, it said on Thursday.

The Galerie Nord in central Berlin said it had closed its "Zionist Occupied Government" show of works by Surrend, a group of artists who say they poke fun at powerful people and ideological conflicts. Four days after the exhibition opened, a group of angry Muslims stormed into the gallery, shouting demands that one of the 21 posters should be removed, said the gallery.

"They were very aggressive and shouted at an employee that the poster should be taken down otherwise they would throw stones and use violence," the gallery's artistic director Ralf Hartmann told Reuters. The Muslims objected to a depiction of the Kaaba—the ancient shrine in Mecca's Grand Mosque which Muslims face to say their prayers—which gave a "bitingly satirical commentary against radicalism," said the gallery in a statement.

To his credit, Hartmann has said the gallery was working with German authorities to improve security and he hoped to re-open the show as soon as possible.

"It would be unacceptable if individual social groups were in a position to exercise censorship over art and the freedom of expression," said the gallery in a statement.

That's very sad news. It's about time some Western artists stepped up to the plate on this issue. This is a very serious issue, like most of them raised here at Jihad Watch, and since I am in the arts myself, a humble painter in Washington, DC, I know that few artists are tackling the Islamic problem with anything more than total silence.

In fact, just the opposite position rules. 95% of the art being created today in this most political of cities, and I speak from the underground art movement, is frivolous and redundant, lost in fairy tales and harmless charm, and anything remotely "controversial" and it's not anymore because how many times can Christianity or homophobia or the president be attacked in the generic way that artists depict their hyperventilated disgust with religion, sexual mores, or politics, and it still be new, iconoclastic, or controversial? But with all the world in flames and blood, hovering at the brink of financial crisis, most of the "ruthless honesty" work is anti-American at worst, anti-war (lofty) at best, and nothing is ever presented that even hints of global incrimination due the jihadists and their copious allies in shepherd's clothing.

But what can be expected otherwise? The art world, unlike the more recently abducted halls of lower and higher education, has long been the high-browed bastion of the liberal cognoscente, and today's system of wine-tasting galleries and its stiltifying air of mass dementia is now vigorously geared to the Left.

Scandal is often the fast track in the whirl to "make" an artist, but history probably proves that this model holds only if breaking "preferred" molds.

Let's hope Berlin doesn't bend knee to this Islamic thuggery. It will only encourage more outrage. Don't we all deserve better than this?

NORTH ADAMS IN FEBRUARY

2008-02-25T17:06:00.006-05:00

I. February

The season and the song are gone,
a witness in the window despairs,
rocks in her shoes, quotations, the blues...
counting by odd numbers, the wild hairs.

Missing the exuberance of biting Massachusetts chill,
boots in bright snow, mortgage at the nape of the hill.

Ours was a quick visit. Driving into icy nights,
and ink-stained maps, stowing away in New York,
embracing the inn, next morning's sun.

Back into wintry gears of the renegade,
we made our way into the lands of former textile glory,
past Great Barrington, a picture perfect town
no Hollywood set could capture, past
myths and old rumors of Alice's Restaurant
pitched a few miles in low county Stockbridge.

Snowline and map legends urged us forward,
up beyond the old brittle city of Pittsfield,
rusty industrial center of an old patriotic land
still wiping the nostrils of a certain strain
of American brave named the Berkshires.

Money had been here, and money was still
a welcomed citizen, born of mountains and streams,
horns of plenty, the rugged spirit, the artful eye.

It was obvious as we pulled into South Adams,
and a few miles further into Adams proper
that south county had given way to its poor
relations, and the songs of old mills now silent.

But bold Yankee country to this bleak southerner
was more than a romantic notion and a geographic
marvel bejeweled in the frosty hands of nature...

That those two words, Yankee and Southerner,
could still make themselves viscerally known,
not as antiquated charms in the haze of memory,
but as real challenges in the cost of living debates
patent services soon revealed one wink at a time.

II. North Adams

(to be continued)

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ

2008-01-30T19:44:00.000-05:00

by Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth—Europe died in Auschwitz . We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

THE PAINTER, HIS WIFE, AND SOME PAINTINGS

2008-01-14T08:57:00.000-05:00

POTENTIAL SHOW AT AROMA

2007-12-07T16:47:00.000-05:00

Yes, I mean no. It's not a confirmed done deal, but as we were all standing at the CP Metro, Dana said it was as good as a done deal. She said this with confidence.

Late, it was after one when we left. In bed by two. I was up at five. Awoke from bizarre nightmare, couldn't get back to sleep.

I too, am energized, given the fact that I am dragging butt. My head feels like it NEEDS to explode for clarity and relief, et cetera. No energy to suffer Georgetown tonight, sorry. Inertia will keep me in studio working, but it's pretty nasty out there. Was sleeting about mid-day.

Bought some varnish today, some paint, and a few more canvases.

Hope to hear from Matt soon...

If not, I'll be seeing Dana probably Wednesday to pick up paintings. I can't believe I bought that second one. One for Sue. One for me. Poor for the holidays. Scratch our tentative holiday getaway to Massachusetts.

Oh well, Dana deserves.

Gabriel

SHOOTING BIRDS

2007-11-16T09:44:00.000-05:00

Birds of prey
eat bugs of gray

Birds of doom
for you make room

Early bird catches the worm
if late he makes you squirm

Shoot a bird if you don’t mind
a sure sign to heal the blind

Birds of a feather flock
Together they destroy your clock

Birds of prey
eat bugs of gray

Birds of doom
for you make room

[ 2006, Wheeling, WV }

WAR IS HELL

2007-11-16T09:41:00.001-05:00

But then, I am no military expert. As the facts
themselves reveal, it can be said
I know very little about
almost anything I aim
to declare.

Just ask the silence...

[1995, Washington DC ]

THE WHEELING YEAR

2007-11-02T07:01:00.000-04:00

Plunging into the proud once bold steel spokes of Wheeling
on a boast, leaving self-identified low-brow intellectuals
thick on their heels, disciples of mediaplex back home
to guzzle odd beers, to call forth warm meals,
shutter fashion clues and scatter candle wicks,
cascading ambitions, creeping years and shell-soaked
beltway snobberies if not outright fears
only the duty-stoked people of paper bountiful
& class swearing beautiful can celebrate or poke
without laughing out loud
(Must calibrate gross weight or reluctantly take a dive...),
to increase their distance from the nothingness crowd
lost to brutal calories and raw educations
that rarely matter. Sometimes freedom
of choice is just a cigar.

The boy scout giving good turn a bad name
squats two seats away from the shadow's flame. To this end
I am greeted by
icy gray broken asphalt gristle patched with frosted gray cloud cover,
stuff of gray twigged mountain peaks and frisky billboards, soaking up
mere strands the soot life left to the rights of man in sixty year exodus,
sealed in a book mapping tough cookie Norwegian painter Edvard Munch,
(recently purchased in Washington and also found in local library, with lime)
to his destiny of soul-watching inched in regional nee personal strife,
the contact spy, the imperfected feeling magus,
the mystic's eye bent to March Madness
and the gnat gusts of George Mason's run
smack past the heavily brokered UCONN largess
predicted here on this page at patriotic halftime
with the same breath as "Pop Mike, Pop Mike" fun
veers the seer from Connecticut Avenue to Main Street
invoking play by play off the curve, via broadband, the long hike,
the voice of God dead or alive voting one sorry syllable at a time
with these heavy feet, with these heavy heavy feet
chanting "Long live the Mountaineers!"

Early thoughts among leafless trees recall jobs lost on a dime,
mantles of black gold from ancient burial grounds that fed
the former veracity, stolen with a few strokes of ink and power
of law but that's sparing a crime, spoiling the climb (social)
more shame in responding to a coal miner's lament
however sublime. Ignorance is egregiously polled,
and tallied like a certain hour where uncertainty takes hold
but will never sop these wet K Street cement trucks
with an exchange value that will surpass the damage of
wasted years looking for evidence of American life elsewhere
among the stark solar systems and pigeonholes of our enemies.

This rambunctious exile with single wave of arms deal
might have dropped anchor in Cumberland, M-D
some many miles franker (with escalating gas prices) still to the east,
instead, in exit from the nation's capital in the land of Nod,
brave hardly but where art thou hididen in tattered cards,
revealing seven maybe eight convalescing spirits,
as thy wholesome West Virginia Left Bank energies
emerge among fading old mills and abandoned
century old cigar warehouses,
nail factories and one fairly new hockey arena
skimming along the once mighty Ohio River
banks and bards, shanks and shards
like some Indian giver (that old tale)
ignorant of industrial bed safeguards
perfectly, perfectly American...

and I too, have come to recapture Victorian Wheeling metaphor,
ripped from ancient headlines in the days of Zane and Fort Patrick Henry
speaking the spectacular language of oldest and largest—
magnificient suspension bridge still in use, American Legion Post #1
recalling the 1940s, the unvarnished glories of the Capitol Music Hall,
where thy current president—Bush II—delivered another Iraqi hoot
hosted by the Wheeling Chamber of Commerce such as it is,
(commerce by all indications is not the city's strong suit)
before whizzing past in the familiar ironclad motorcade
black to the gills, in tight with street throngs of mere dozens
confused but supportive of Orwellian nation-building doubletalk
(a mere handful of detractors showed up with predictable signs)
hurrying to greet proven Pittsburgh past any sad assassins
hiding in the vacant ruins of the stunted and the shade
just two short days after my own arrival,
recalling former feasts of this harsh Steeler Nation
now in fester.

Victory to explore this old house of Wheeling,
home of some thirty thousand souls nested in the airy hills
to examine the lost fortunes of free elections and free speech,
to score on the fading linebackers godwilling for minimum of one year,
axiom by axiom in a tutelege of the expatriate, I am after all, a city boy—
saith the tainted poet, painteth the awkward painter...
Drawing upon the strength of history wanting a chance,
success and sure loss of dead weight left in the District of Columbia
where special populations prove numbers are anything but...
(absence of voting rights, questioning the dance)

But just as the petty thief draws near,
there is visionary hope in new places, new perspectives, new choices.
Infrastructure—civic, civil, and yearning awaits.

[ 2006, Wheeling, WV }

MORTIFIER II

2007-11-02T06:50:00.000-04:00

As in a quick call to battle arms,
the season to the helpless
never seems right. Nor flush
the snares of dog pile charms
do much for the victim's
keen hindsight.

It's not so much that language is dead
past praise and heckle and anybody's guess,
but we haggle over price and strength
of our mountains emotionless. . . .

As the first verse is repeated for good measure.

[ 2006, Wheeling, WV ]

MY ONLY BOOK REVIEW

2007-10-16T08:53:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's true, nearly two years after its publication, and despite the dissemination of forty or so copies among a few friends, family members, and strangers beating off the night, I have come to accept the fact that I write in such a powerfully dull way as to render this special class of improbable bibliophiliacs completely and utterly devastated to the point of unleashing their inner mute upon the very grains of sand upon which I stand. Now, I have not given this book away to just anybody with a cap size or a big gulp to spare, but only to those who pleaded, cajoled, and, if cool beans are a good source of protein, threatened my well-being for a personal copy of this collection of visceral sweat and tears, bloody for the twenty-five years it stewed in the making, usually a signed copy, and usually accompanied by some petty insolence that they loved poetry, or some such glad-handing gush as that.

The heartbreak of the silent rejection, notwithstanding, my book, The Silent Cull & Other Mechanical Ideas, Collected Poems 1980-2005 is not your usual book of poetry, but is four hundred pages of seething political arrest, and I use the word "political" and "arrest" in all their usual connotations plus a few more that I insist are both political and arrested within the pages themselves, banking on subtleties of style and insight that are only coming apparent to the ill-prepared general public in these, our own spectacular terror-driven chaotic times. Well-minced words are a swallower's delight, and this book rarely portrays paradise, or other romantic follies of the past or future tense of mankind, but in its own galloping way tackles the physics of time and thought itself.

But this blog entry is not about describing the book. It has been aptly described elsewhere.

Here I wish to fan myself with those few words of praise, or words of any kind that have wafted my way in the context of this inpenetrable book. The following paragraph was sent to me by a local artist, a young painter of some early renown, still in his late twenties, named James Coleman:

I really like the book man, I read it out loud to Christie at night when we go to bed, they say the baby can hear it and its good to read to him, but I dont know. I really love it man they say if you reach one person, blah blah blah, well thats me. I can sit on the roof and smoke a cigarette, lay in bed at night, damn i would even take it to the beach. It flows it pulsates, it moves me. Im not kissing your ass, I have no reason to. Just wanted to give you an honest opinion, and for whatever reason, it speaks to me. When I read it I feel like I did when I was in college smoking opium and reading boulbelaire or at the coffee shops reading dylan thomas, thinking I should start a fight. What I am trying to say is that at this point in my life your book works for me. Great job man, Im not a literary figure or even a good writer but just wanted to tell you. If I see you and I am drinking and tried to tell you all this, you would think I was full of shit.

What can I say? For all the silent pretenders haunting my crude ambitions, this single boast is just about the most stirring string of thoughts an old poet, fat on the failures of inertia, far past his gameface prime, could ever hope to absorb.

Thanks J...

WORLD OF MOUTH

2007-10-09T02:19:00.000-04:00

I. Avenue of the Americas

Who killed the hippie prep post-paranoia
preamble program where kitchen prophets
diddled themselves to famous quotes,
humpback quotas, and honorable prices sucked off
the mainstream poisoned ingluttonous, proud to be American
pubic? Was it Delilah Day strutting around in Great Plains
of economic theory gone sour like toadstools anonymous some mediocre
Prince of Peace was fed right before bedtime,
incensed, begging for more and more frequently with gutter regards
to her thousand and one Iranian tales leaning on the elocutionist’s
thug-tight polish sausages still unkempt but at least
Europe wails on about tiny hotdog explosions
and the absence of Mr. Monroe’s lost doctrine Cuba defies, Afghanistan
survives.....oh say can you see Beirut as revelation in the flesh,
endangered pigeons dancing in the eyebrow of Khomeini like sweat on
a burning Bush left to shake down the nations,
floods of panic warriors taking to the hills to defend
k-rations and dead ideals—
no new ones available.

II. Safety First

Did every new model doff Costello Elvis eyewear, uranium flags
sewn by prisoners of groundhog conservatives composing
fly-away pinstripes and swearing off fashion
for fifteen full and pepsident minutes until the xeroxed
Andy Warhol coughed and made it ‘real raisin’
enough for all turds of all race rats and cat classes from Cleveland
to Willacoochee, from DuPont to Berkeley, from La Crosse to Corpus
Christi, from Vincennes to Window Rock, from Boise to Times
Beach, from the Columbia Pipeline stealing from the rich to give to the rich,
from dead sunglasses and bricklayer entry level pocket positions
to call on the name of our holy hardware to save us
from the Law of Spic and Span Soup Flies? Incorrigible navy buoyancy
tests failed to shock the 80’s into an alternative issue,
so a new Neo-Manic emerges for the year 1991, for a blast,
whipping out scab groin vexation, irritated fort
albino annoy boy sandles forked exchanging kickoff boot fingers
and skinhead scissors that touch the spine of every real American band, braids
for starch to scorch brotherhood hypocrisy with gangslang goulash ‘stop
on a nickel nuke.’ The cities are purple
now ripe with renaissance resistance, cool cocks for kingdom’s cum,
AIDS an irony blanket, a bingo butcher passed around like
a snooky smile baby kangaroo. NYC has pissed one more
rat factory cursed infection, harDCore Washington—
the murder capital of America where bloody black as night and black power
have merged into one long filthy look into the confusion coersive
power drips sloppily into the sludge bucket decency secretes as remnants
of thy will be done, thy will be done.…

III. Buckhead and the Symbolic Mode

Why did the FDR lock up all the yellow bodies he could smell a scandal
hidden beneath five thousand years of eating raw fish and turning
out sensual art for the masses to mourn? Was Huey Long really
the enemy of the old cripple or could Ezra Pound spell
“encyclopedia” in forty-three languages and conjure up images
sick and disgusting to Mussolini’s headwaiter, St. Elizabeth’s no
prison but just a stopping place to feed the whales,
hunter agony curling the breasts every beauty bounces beneath
the best literacy test available in nightowl zones, corporate zions
offering zany dough illusions, nimrod solutions,
virginity restoring money back operations while
the punks go off to college to crucify
everyone but themselves…who
killed off purposes? Who authorized
this moron-anarchy, capital publishing,
stay-at-home-buy-’em-in-the-bleachers Ted Turner America’s
Cup Runneth Over sold by Soho into Egyptian slavery, walk
don’t talk or stare-at-my-supple-body nurf axioms
anyway? Jack London and his klondyke
pussy widowers and northern territory aristocratic devotion
to the weak and petrified? Why do the rich get richer
and the poor get more numerous? Is this really a poem
or can this page be classified as the answer to the eternal
quiz show dilemma, do commercials really sell soap?

IV. Creative Loafing And Other Tax Deductible Weather Patterns

Boho is dead! Poetry is dead! Ditto the poets!
…their mouths are full of boiled salted peanuts, ears of cob-roasted corn
stuffed in auto-eroticistic voices in from mainland factories,
broken excuses the sparing questions stiff, pockets in handle—
carry on Jack Nimble, piss
your unfettered mind away in cheap detective stories about man and god and war,
piss your unbuttered ambition away to rewrite the bible for MTV, piss
your Nielsen numbers away and tarry with the Ramones
in marchfest thimble standards, refusing to party hardy
with Il Dulce and Sicky Wifebeater where Mentorism
is rampant in the minds of the mindless, dark ages, and neon cages,
John Cage, John Cave, Nick Cave, and no cave, living
for the bookstore; Henry Miller! my old dusty friend! the stomach’s
losing out and I can’t seem to borrow, the new craving for passion pit
panache prize yarns and cystic fibrosis cushions my latest act
of imaginary sedition beggars not worth the cotton I’m wearing,
but then I read a fortune cookie yesterday that said I would never
think another thought without first counting the cost
orgasm brings to the homeless who steal a glance at the White House, but
then we all can’t be married to our work & know better than they (the safe),
the passive worth of strangers who serve
and will be served on a silver platter plateau
than those who steal zero from itself. First silence, then the flood of agents,
then postmarked bodyguards for the worthy famous filibuster sleeves
populating the risk of record vinyl, oy
Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, hip Corso
“where have all the visions gone
long time America?…”
slip it in dear—
part it here, don’t forget the mustard, erase words
ugly pimplexiproblematicist in heavenly heat quacking
candid fear of fornication offering complications by proxy
or pale comparison to last night’s doubt
and the cruisers
who snatch their talk boxes
and pump them half-full to fool talent
scouts from the Bronx, pretty
pink tourists carrying the card & earring vendorships
laughing in high bank notes left in grandfather’s will be done
and attaché unions of the newly post-Kerouac free,
the wise and sexless. Author’s Note: What I mean is—
that special creature who sees neither male nor female,
nor considers the game itself a matter of faith.

V. Aging Where Exposed to Temporary Eye

across the sober horny husk of Jersey night
sour rhythms snap a vulgar breath in two on orders from my feet
and I recant the last mile of hard nail poetries—
there is no breeze catacombs offer
to return the gesture & who is there
to remind me of social stares? Finally the fix of friendship
buries its own in the same hole seabreeze whores love a token chance
in the midst of a crowd of strangers petrified green too cold to bark
enema grips or nothingness sores plucking their lungs
from fairy tales great and grim
left in our daily bread paychecks and variety packs
of wolves and fanny plantations, oh Ginsberg go home!
eat a damn spicy onion from Georgia, not the sweet one all
have been waiting for, for those days are tucked away for now¬—
our feet hang on a line
a quote we commit as our own salvationary process
no new innovations can caress
no new insights into kaddish are made available
by the tiny presses
that liken us as to their own,
furnaces well-stoked with mindworker autojerk crowds
lip their motives
and I bow in recognition yet move circulatory
on past open doors closed to drafts, because!I refuse to confer, blood…
blood, blood, blood cells attacking
hair fashion pugalists
hung out on a dare
missing major poet tripping Denver says Rothschild, his mammon-saint,
this holy August. I hitchhiked all the fucking way
to Big Apple Momma Sucka My Explanation cos I am punk
just to chat seriously about coping
with this emerging generation of wild-haired cats
hung out on a bet, not yours but you know who…yep
who took all our Jobs and spoke to us in whale! Holy granoli
Americo-Russo whale!

VI. I Am—Pronoun City

no new purposes in this wertimer clan
the old issues not stale enough to use
as newspaper headlining spunk
fishwrapper glorified shipwiper stunt & punt quarters
no new intellectualisms
junkies or jeepsters, clunkers or keepsters
death rates by opulent characters
hung out to lie cockstill but hardly sure
to sacred students
crab telephone users
resisting another strike against him and her
mayhem in fashion-wave restaurants
bills toppling yet another pay t.v. eros
rights to America banned
episodes fragile famous poet busy
tired removed costly insiders only
need apply
necessary credentials shaved & groomable beards know
who I’m complaining about
with American
Express card you baffle me
now that you knocked off a few salaried
positions, gave speeches to the adoring zealots
now you don’t have to but you do, so don’t
tell me you’ve done it all when all you’ve done is
crack parking zones with Chrysler
imperialism.

[ 1983, Washington DC ]

SCANDINAVIAN JAZZ

2007-10-08T11:11:00.000-04:00

"There are some people one loves best,
and others whom one would almost always
rather have as companions."
—Henrik Ibsen

Throw away that awful ticket stub I said. None of us
here need that can of starch. We know by heart
the meaning of fuss. Baby and the Pacifiers
are playing a gig at the Bistro to start.
Roaring inclinations.
Singsoldier.

We worked out long wars, healing our oyster eyes
with the sweaty breath of evergreen night.
That Lebanon dirt. Manic contours
agreeable to random odor,
magnificently kite.
We knew we couldn't write about
it so we danced.

The proud crystalline swans of our age,
obscuring shades,
sex and stereotype,
wars and rumors of wars,
strikes, balks, and numb nuts,
say hello every sort of way,
wrapping like a nursing maiden’s delicate hands
around the seat of our desires,
our strategic pyres,
in place of inspirational jeep: glances
just aren't enough glands.

II.

She handled
my buttocks and its karma,
so tight and competitively elite,
as I cracked the bloody march.
New Wave Morals.

Immediately I loved her, pledged
a plowboy's pitch acoss the pink passage
into backyard frenzies. I mulled eloquently
to myself, caught in a whim of fashion,
if I might ought caress the knotted warchest
she portrayed. Her boyfriend's face
I don't recall.

Baby, the pacifiers,
and our wormlike mirrors
responding like thoroughbred
strangers caught in the loosening moods of dawn
were mere constructions of belief.
I worried about my nature to be
direct and innocent. It drove
me to silence.

We never traded namesakes alive.
My boldness froze in cockmassacre
and toes, I twisted & smiled
acres and acres of wilted smiles
planted deeply tapping
her punk nerves sponsoring
my soaring terrain.

Her ravishionary spherical absolutes
aroused my superior being,
those victory moon bavarian breasts
(honorarium of the beasts...)
provoking the shape of things and substance,
my superior being shy,
companionless.

I danced. She rubbed her baubled paws
again along the fine tight lines my crib
drew against hocus evening shadows,
showing there can be no pretense
denying afresh the vital statistic,
no silly discourteous cocktease
stranding scalps and flirting
humor, hunger, hoary
religions that the idle
refuse to prosper.

We easily could have
made each other blank members
of a riper version, gambling
on last night's cruise into sane
Richard Hell's visitation,
a vanity cruise highlighting
winning girls wearing nothing
but furs,
idols and onan. We became the idea
and did.

And I felt our mutual flash,
hornspun and cursive,
realizing the mediocrity
a poem of words
offers—splash—
beginning of the world
tigers and baboons
thunderbirds and the dung beetle
biting off more than a scientist
can chew,

open clash,
the meaning of her friendship ritual.

She and He
Rocking to and from
in pop style punctuated punk
continuing to
rock to and from
her unannounceable tokens
sheer succulence
well pronounced
shocking my demands on reality,
to and from, rubbing
my arm, now as important
as any zone
I could hope oversimplifyingly
would release me. Graceful
dancer bombardier
balancing virtue
and free baggage. Likelier
choices bait our laughter.
Especially in a gig
of young punk artists
rocking.

She felt herself.
Above the arms of her date.
The three of us knew the heathen pains
of fate which haunt
heaven and the pawnbroker's
pavilion. And
white hawkish sweaters
bulging through nervous nicotined
smoky husks
in the Bistro late hours.

EVIDENCE OF NEW YORK ALREADY

2007-10-08T10:58:00.000-04:00

A form of rural perfection, Avondale
Estates, Georgia, hitching a ride to meet Ginsberg,
the Big Apple gizzard, it’s a scorcher, my balls sweaty,
hair down to my chin blondie, no Avondale mistakes,
no women to crack my halo or burn their bras,
hugging, sucking, tucking rugged red clay
construction sites bare to eyes without scruples,
New Worship cornerstone erections in latter days, oh thanking
nine heavens for seven elevens and the beliefs of Hippocrates,
and a beveled glass art-factory, original, vaginal, marginal cool
Georgia State Highway Patrol office, town of Avondale
protected from itself by gunpowder deterrents, thanking
God of Billions, the courtyard sports manger silver lining
flagpole, vacant of colored cloth, yet commands slaves
of the Texaco Star, guts holding down the fort,
stocks and bonds and spies, oh thanking
the Amoco Boy—our unwilted concern
while I beg to swallow cold fountain water kept
safe in your keeping—heard on the radio, the Heat God
killed eight suffering unair-conditioned zekes in the state
of the Cracker last week. Then I left the road one more
time before setting sail with my nearer to thee Eagle Scout thumb.
Left to get a Big Mac and dry fish sandwich. Left
me with fifteen cents and only 873 miles
to Manhattan where I hoped to share my book
of dead poems with a famous asshole.

[1983, Atlanta, GA ]

YIKES! MY TAROT CARD READING

2007-10-08T10:47:00.000-04:00

You are The Hierophant
Divine Wisdom. Manifestation. Explanation. Teaching. All things relating to education, patience, help from superiors. The Hierophant is often considered to be a Guardian Angel.

The Hierophant's purpose is to bring the spiritual down to Earth. Where the High Priestess between her two pillars deals with realms beyond this Earth, the Hierophant (or High Priest) deals with worldly problems. He is well suited to do this because he strives to create harmony and peace in the midst of a crisis. The Hierophant's only problem is that he can be stubborn and hidebound. At his best, he is wise and soothing, at his worst, he is an unbending traditionalist.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

DEAF PAGE

2007-09-27T06:28:00.000-04:00

Oftentimes we cry
When they capture the smell the unborn skeletons
Smell as they lie in placement, too subtle to object
To the reasons for delivery.
Hurry sweet fragrance before I pass into sleep
At the cut of their knife, before they chain me
To a nest.

Twig by twig
We build a language, answering
As a rule the call to exception, a fig
Leaf or two, or
Isn't he big?

They took us as fools
And pried us free of our questions.
Someone we knew?

Soapy skinny dipper Deborah sober.
Unconcerned prankster.
Don't you see that she blushes with conformity?
Manager of the year?

I love her and them, dare I choose
Or should I if my mantra
Is wrong? Kangaroo said it.
Xerox sighed then replied:
Lists are for opium users
Who forget that mercy is a gift of
Failure.

[ 1982, Atlanta, GA ]

CONTRAPUNTUS AMERICA

2007-09-27T04:19:00.000-04:00

I. Some kind of joke
The year is nearly unimportant. Zinc is in pattern,
but I can only purchase my thoughts on even numbered
days. Poor, acquainted more clearly
with a poor folk’s rag theory
than with the possibilities awaiting
to be chosen, I swear on a stack of paperbacks
I ain’t no fucking prophet…
but a walking man walking,
walking without bail and rolling on past
damp December, born into debt,
a free state, and a slap upon
the cheek…
born to choose, born to hesitate,
free to lose in storming screaming success,
my swelling head tossed off in oft repeated duress,
and designated on some long lost Monday
to openly investigate.

Standing straitlegged slowly trusting
flagged caper hornstone corners of civilization spry
beneath mystical but outdated electric streetlights,
I glance briefly at an old bank’s perpetually
still digital clock, no Big Ben but my party-line
glands assure me neither am I,
knowing sugar sweet well there is no time
to lose, nor time to gain before the sign of the whale
registers its final pleas, its aim to seize
our weakening eye. With an addict’s frazzled wisdom
I stray eagerly to my left in search of the missing kingdom…
but tonight there’s no answer blowing in the breeze.
So I grunt and gesture with a shrug to my right, no saints
squirm there this time for me to unabashedly offend—
And fear staggering the city waves chaste throbbing membranes,
a flesh-scarred sky’s the limit, and good taste obnoxiously spawns
cactus-eyed vendors winging unabridged versions
of security said solid, safe, and sound, mockery
advertizing plain the new plastic rosary,
dutifully opening mixed oral bags
of sleek promises…

for the influx of staring strangers to see.

But reliable inside sources,
alias the missing link to downtown centers of faith,
have warned warm the wires of each thicket brain
that back in the gymnasiums, where these mongrels
eat and sleep, their closets are packed full, and
their children can’t weep. Bombs still burst in air,
crippled marriages identify our modern stare,
this sublimely decent thing called the love blind
chills us helplessly into statistics we can’t keep,
below or above these rats in the heap.

Past irregular self-annointing, some distant star
dying happily ever after, calls after our illicit kingdom,
junior high language suicide squeeze, pimplexiproblematicisms
at work, tourists who rob you, rape your wives and daughters
and sons, distorting the shapes of seasonry.

We live in our own ashes,
Elmer’s glue, crockery, satisfaction,
strength in numbers, baseball fevers and career
goals of seventeen, twenty-six, forty, twenty-two,
twelve, thirty-three, sixty-five, and one hundred plus one,
the age of consent times the age of pure reason,
career goals, blanket insecurity, student loans,
Eden punchlines, or don’t you get it?

By the vastness of our viscera, we were sitting straitlegged
and reading a book of tall sayings.

We’ve been given an inheritance—
horizontal hangups, vertical revenges
oblong fantasies, firm nothings, horns of
plenty firepower if little else remains.

Tortured teenage codes string and amplify
tricks the tribes roll thinking each one of us
brave new worlders or fast track miracle workers
willing to beg to be or maybe not be born
or put to death, typecast for the camera eye
in sweaty bedroom recoil, sunshine victims
of some heartless exchange, hanging limp
along some prairie pirate’s dense fog

like ivy-spined surrogates on dangling red hinges,
and then out goes the call into the gunshy sprawl,
advantage windows grow dark for revolt
so that others can snottily bolt across
airwaves and minds and habits
of the next great gall, the generational stall..

The year is better left to experts.
Bread is without leaven.

II. Just shooting blanks
Miners vote on a new contract burying new hopes,
the beer and peanut years in full swing. Microchips & glib smiling
innuendos rake across drunk on purple mountain’s majesty and cope
in dimly lit plantation halls of liberty wiring sick hunger’s mope
this night of origin, rags and stain, but lewd whispers are begun
again, again the whispers begin to spin planetary Cain,
and the poets wither behind the scenes,
grow crass anticipating the sun
without names to call their own quiet men into reign.
No one knows us better than the eyes.

Let us undress,
in vague rooms undress the issues,
before the scornful but bulging flies
of them repressing and unjustly revealing
nothing less nothing. Let us cleave unheard of
to a more explicit syntax of behavior,
apochraphally vital to the performance
from inkblot to living score.

The holy remain holy.
(The ugly remain ugly.)

"!#%&*!!@?...*&#$&?!!!" Typewriter quarrels
of the List Generation pop pop pop pop
invalid as flapper skirts and whey, as they become
the Make Me Famous Right Now Generation, a cash crop
diamond duster storm hailing romance to new recruits
on laser beam technologies with hope in pocket series grift,
yet we still clamor in the riots of self-incrimination,
fall daddies, makeshift straw babies, and tons of
critical mass on display here and there
if not everywhere the bell quit tolling.
.
Egg on the face is America’s new centrifugal pay,
slops the chemical preacher, our new oral robber baron,
digging tunnels at sky wages to build superhighways of moral decay,
utter relief the failure to consecrate him pope of the new plot.
"We are the Blank Generation!" snarls punk Richard Hell.
“No—we’re Generation X! No—the 13th Generation,”
script others out to grab a pissful of job benefits while it’s
still available to young energies soon gone the way
of the two parent family.

The poet stands on ceremony to greet the four horsemen,
germ attitude left on vagina leaf doorsteps,
vanity fizz, ostrich cocks squirting
all over the faces of freedom
in Great Warrior hypes,
word blockades, bush brides half-busy,
cube juices, perfidy in the talkshow toiletrooms,
permanent sunglasses, icebox follies, and river ram rookies,
to greet not with a handshake but a suicide pact—
stiff cumbersome shapes oozing last night’s wrestling elsewhere,
bottomless crotchpots, intellectuals for hire, unavoidables,
Vichy drownings, culture mice and blue moves,
we of carriage amass. The poet stands on ceremony
to question the audience, but

where is she tonight Bertice Berry?
the latest shore Sir Walter Cronkite?
and Monroe’s Doctrine? Will Blake’s reservoir?
is that bra Oprah wears made here in America?
where in this mix and match morality is Custer, is Malcolm?
or Little Orphan Annie’s favorite paradox? And
where is Castanada or Bob Dylan—
when you need them most?

And all mysteries marked old science burned in market
squares, reveal wastebaskets filled with spunk,
ladders stored inside a blue trunk,
and lessons learned according to the whistles
of collard greens, undeniably brutal.
Each one visited, each one verified,
leaves you with this realization:
Just one of many darwin, darwin,
build me a ship
to harvest the horny ones who wear
a rusty hook in an upper lip,
fished between mad rushes through sermoned turnstiles
and holiday pay. Sitting, picking gristmill nose,
my feet fidgeting below the antique davenport,
the subject of malediction was deep and forty plus two months
dry, but I knew the impossibility of never aspiring to try.
Deeper into despair I dug, deeper, deeper, deeper,
hoping for a holy hug, a keeper, a keeper,
as beautiful as beauty can excel,
a sleeper, a sleeper. And then
it happened oh so suddenly,
like a twinkling in a cobra's eye,
a weeper, a weeper—I became a leaper of crass mockings
when I saw she was a sweeper, wearing those plum red
stockings with the reign of terror, seeping, seeping
pantomine from her sheepish toes a rocking…

"Loose parables are the worst on the market," smirked the loan officer,
just before denying his own role in ridiculous matters.

III. The new gladiators
Forced perception seen galloping,
turf course on the course of analytical geography clicking,
memoirs of Mesopotamian mapmakers interceding,
Each-factors lobbing soft curveballs against false
summer leagues, clay heroes, Earth-ghetto,
Government property, convicted mercies,
catechisms still warm in the oven,
stern but frivolously exposed. Painkiller street
versions working faintly kicking up dust and deliverance,
mere swings among cliffs and men minding the store,
booking recommendation, audibly secure. Swift,
nautical excuses milking witless the full court presses
and the pure in fashion. Triggered by current events I endured
this frying pan reflection with the ease of a Great Sham Pain Whore,
grabbing gusto from cheap lists, checkout counters, black thickets
of rabble and ruins, and I won’t say I never got burnt
or charged a woman with equality.

(When circumstances change,
usually so does the hand that feeds them.) Galvanized
doctors scuttle the dead and dying rich in revealed range,
hooking centerblock experience windfall, chrome river beds
and sex sweets simmering on the back burner, surf bitters
sent off on waivers to the crowd of generic ritualisms,
battle ax comfort, prototypically. Are still the poets dead? Caught
in the kitchen rush or pillows they trust?
Am I? I am—American Punk.

Am flying basement brittle,
born toy deep below windless bedrock walls,
loopholed behind Miss Nye’s ivory white picket
fence with pimpled vow spelling out breath withdrawal
symptoms, swearing on myself as the preacher
of procrastination, predestined powdersprings
of mirth. Yo! American feeble, I'll lay
it right here for you—I’ve traded
my bible belt for a spiked water spout, pampered
steel, and absurd corrosive wordslinging on the half-shell,
not pearled oysters like the sea king, but shysteristic shards
from the dark, shattered windowpanes reduced to broken nails
airwave hell has pounded! I stagger into your neighborhoods.
I fear no evil. Danger Zone is the marrow, my bone. Danger
is poetry dancing in the nude in spite of the weather.
Words are only words, purpose is only purpose,
and life is only the value of a dollar? Liquids or solids?
Conversion or vice? Best laid plans of nuclear fission or ice?
I am one who has bargained to dismantle language,
the earth’s crust, sanctuary or bust! You there
neatly dyed in the polymorphic suit
have no monopoly on public prejudice, the nest, or the brute..
Nor do I, a white nigger sold on the welfare time stings.
But isn't it okay to do that in that space only?
(When circumstances change, usually so does
the silent serpent dancing.)

By the vastness of our viscera, we were slumped down in bedrock
and whistling a tune to the enemy. After cursing the opening
stage fall into Piccadilly’s eternal pocket, a loose economy
of patches, rashes, rigged ashes, and a day at the races
we cornpone preachers illegitimately have borne,
and after a handful of carnal conversations
with every trisectable phantom we bleed ripe and rosy,
I felt bundled with bald omens gripping campus
corpus the very base of my throat. Relentlessly
educated and clever to a tee, teepee, and piss,
they in codified glee teased me for lack of natural speed,
the sterility of this secret once known as my seed,
even to the ox-point configuration of my wondering
if scrubbed in suds of motion perpetual,
might ancient tree tigers spring the molested eccentric
from here. And the more I wondered, floundered, blundered
for le mot juste, the more I exposed some new cheer,
a sudden reversal to revere, I would die a near death,
killed cold caught living the ultimate sequel.

IV. Lipstick stains on demand
Stones coat the industrial lips of desert dwellers,
encyclopedias the outboard teeth of the urban devout,
one thing certain, another quite sure, with or without a celestrial shout,
the answer to an off color riddle is a joke to kill time
ill in its innocense still clinging close to American soil
in bremstralung search for the algorithm of flowers,
primed for another confessing, another blessing
in disguise. Truth in advertising—
Angels can’t french kiss.
Stony goats ploughing
the city, raise whole fig cities
well-spoken, and billy
goats gruff.

Countdown to creation in a bloodless dream,
from freckle to dimple to raids on an echoed melanin
scream! War orphans giving brain jobs until the gurus flow
like tap water, strategem shanks oily, vigor evaporating
from applied lakes and likes of youth, its constant sentence,
irreparable articles of clan, standard mystifications,
capital gains and losses deductible on tax day
blitzing the eager populace—

both the naughty and the nice! It moves right along, profunct!
It proves right nor wrong, profunct! We’ve never known
such maniacs as are stepping out tonight! Inform
the settlers along Perception Coast! Welcome! The Apocalypse
arrived! Test the Wisdom of Our Ages! Science the foul boast!
The beast of the west strikes in combat the best of the east.
I glance at my watch, tear it off my wrist, and sling
it into the fireplace to watch time fly. I lift
my glass to toast the rally,
the tally of the lion and the lamb…

Look to names.
Discover the science of naming.
Thou Art Identity, pure scatterings beyond proof.
Extension of thought arrangement, syncopating magnetic
snorts scorning the stubborn who enslave decency, capsized
by unannotated gust time after time in rural crisis,
quotients unresolved, contrived interpretations
the natural vacuum of sanity, moral gravity—its purse.
Polar explorers. Deep Space interlocutors. Asians.
Textiles. Marijuana. Mantle cracks. Crab claws.
Crab canons. Some others. It’s natural to be picky,
but can we afford it?

Our pavilion sky full of holes. Daily howls
ev’ry torquing wind, and still lost, the new leader. Yet near
the imaginary borders of the laws of grievance, gossip
of the groundhog is heard: Abandon with care!
Abandon if you dare! Abandon the false bridges
surfacing here and there! Take note mild peoples—
through the hustle of hysteria such maniacs are gaining ground,
their shadowsuits black with the ascendant
soot of these times…Extreme examples are easy to appraise.
Young woman found murdered behind the poet’s house,
her breasts lopped off. Unnumbered unappreciated boys of noise,
appendages stuffed down their throats unable to cough. Poisons
like appliances in every household via the public works,
and yet the reality is clear to those questioning chaos.
Systems are not at fault—weak people are.

Yet, we hold these truths
to be self-evident, embracing yesterday’s clay pigeons
the pig and the horse suffer different betrayals,
different raffles of the soul, and still survive
America’s whale busy purifying
the belly of Man.

V. Pentecostal tilings of symmetry
Crude nihilistic memberships are dying in vain,
drying up, strung out, near blind, culture moles digging disgrace
near the edge of fallow smoky canyons, fast lane epitaphs
carved like focal point pock marks along castaway
sandbox minds, taught in tune, initiating
the ruse of roses never rising from the schoolgrounds
where rude encyclopedia henchmen improvise a flair for inertia,
ironclad alibis, and pray the maxim of death for ware gain,
whispering bitter nothings to a nothingness crowd
of fractiled etymology, knots in the family tree
an affrontary to the wet harridan pulling
at some shrill vice-infested despair,
a full-time job no First or Second or Fifth Amendment
can protect from the flippancy or the unfair flipside of regret.

Spitting into songs of the textbook ocean,
the switch is made as she slings off her dirty blouse,
popular semantics, and skilled treasons against ancestors
just to dive beyond the salt licks her genomic wounds
manufacture in a fit of common failing.

Rich in veins of cobalt kick,
marigold bronzed breasts heavy in holding patterns
glisten as the polite sun welcomes
her stable heritage, the broken symmetry of an oral history
evaporated on a whimper and a scowl
as she cups the left mound in geological stare of indifference
pulling the nipple in passage from time
to space to what’s happening theatre
and the surplus of poets from the missing homeland.

The farceur of fame jiggles the lock becoming the only
preditor to seize her, rape her, eyes of glass now telephone poles.
I am hiding near the trees. Against the orange cliffs. Yet I hear her,
breathing hard like the winds of approaching war. She sucks
rabidly, standing waist deep in the burnt
Pacific, her prized parcel of promise
in her hands but not in her mouth.

She lifts the other fan to her expanding pinched lips,
soon strictly well-endowed, a product of milleniums of misery,
memory and the angles dark sky must embrace to survive,
her fingers lightning talons of revenge. I am the intruder. She falls
backward into hooks of icy water, solutions of surface tension,
scaling arms, balloons, flags, sentiments, in surgical precision
as pillaging grey seals fly off the rugged corporeal coast
of the Isle of Modern Man’s Fatal Flaw
as observed by me alone before I am struck self-conscious.
Rumors are true. I am neither poet nor pilot yet have no choice
save to sneak a little closer, a little closer to the edge
where to strike the bargain of loneliness
with sampled voice is to strike a blow
for Our Lady of Contrapuntus.

She is ancient, numbers fail to register her complaint.
I am quite young. Not quite a virgin.
Discharge came unusually easy for me, watching the hag,
my psychological deficiency preventing normal orgasm
unless excited by strange and gospel experiences. I never
ejaculate with my wife, even unto raw, bloody pulp,
but I love her despite my ailing loins.

She farts along thy escalator,
ranting more nothings, but scarcely aloud.
And be warned—company policy invents the turn
of the century as a chorus of clock rats exploiting
public transportation rise up through the cracks
in the system they believe defiled them, humming
a hymn to frontal lobotomy, fully automatic.

Even unto the end of the world.
Obligating no one to spare him,
a gentle steed is seen strolling green pastures—
the city of Washington with nature cooperates
as steady reminder that power in the mainstream’s
a slick chemistry and wave function few can manage
over time without heat at steady interval
and periphrasis. His name is Lom, the bard of old news. Erudite tattooes
slip into the mind saying, “Long live intergeographical solidarity!”
I laugh, identity stripped, crawling inside my skin, worms in toil.
“I am the victor! I am the scholar of my crimes!”

Vivid explanations and kisses unfurled,
flags hiding the limbs of functional anarchy. The end.

Welcome wild citizen! You have just ebbed. It says so
here in the newspapers. Enter familiar rubu. A walking fare walking,
posed as functionary, thinking of excuses for seeking shelter
in the deadly rain, rain to row row row
your boat, I am with sistrum, and borrowing
the loose mouths of twelve thousand unpainted virgins,
neither male nor female, the question of the hidden scale,
who sing…no no no no no no no no…we protest against
this swindle of bones. Vultures feeding on stars and stripes. But then
who would have guessed that old Henry Miller, limp cock
in hand, would remember the limping scorpions
hitchhiking across yellow deserts, offering
bizarre flogged, sterile, franchised explanations
coupled with pity wampus wedding expectations
of a generation fickle and prostrate,
fondled beyond all recognition,
decayed blurred frankness
the new master race,
the state…

Castrating pawnbroker peace an election day disposal,
savage purple the color of their eyes! Spirit Misers.
Unstamped caprice. Voices that need attention—
(A very slow thing to conceive, never mind
the inconveniences. They are said to be
temporary and forgettable.)
Here lies a gifted reader.
Here lies a civil servant.
Here lies an ancient myth.
All rise to Sane Revolution!

"Sane?" the Great Crowd grubbed in vain.
Facing the radical Middle Class mingling in makeover,
we know rainbow truth is easier to swallow than weaponry lies,
and we suffer clear hope that all this America trashing will stop on a dime,
okay with you this time? Clear it with the boss, whatever it takes,
the season, the reason, better than one thousand lakes
of irony, of skin, of skirting the fickled flames,
the shoe is on the other foot this time, the brakes
are set, so embrace the flower, forget the roots.
America the Quick has forgiven you.
The poet takes off through the alley—
lunch is probably on the table. Bologna and onion
sandwiches, a Macintosh apple, a Black Label beer,
the tongue of near champions unmoved by promises,
fear, of a better life in the country where chaos theory
speaks louder than words on cold poorly lit soapbox or page.

Meanwhile, I squat starving, naked, hysterical, once removed,
cheering the baton unshifting bravery twirls as it’s passed,
as it’s passed from me to you, as it’s approved
by me by you until each spectrum of prophetic light
peers forward from the sixteenth note of our past
to right each wrong in homeward flight. Amen.

[ 1982, Atlanta, GA ]

DEVIANT CUBES

2007-09-27T03:46:00.000-04:00

1. If Albert Camus Had Taken a Train
Dead on arrival. The announcement shook the cold audience from their lethargic gaze. Still hiccupping for comic effect I returned to the dark alley to cover my tracks with stiff kisses. Snow is often poor evidence in this part of the city by order of law. Dirge slander prevailed over the rising costs of blueberry sympathies, prices were scalloping, less similar to the mollusks than the verses I used to sing in Presbyterian school to the potatoes all rotten my ex-wife liked to fix two meals a day, thrice on Sunday. Violin music had ceased to amaze the child in each of the misguided hipsters filtering in and out of our house still claiming to be interested in the same pasty things as the sober. Petty interests in common house pets came first in the squandered lives of these new urbanized aristocrats. Misplaced affections in my book. Vowels and pronouns in hers. Rodent fashion splashed heavy gray green bile, or is that thick gangrene bile (the light is fuzzy here in the taxi or maybe my eyes are simply taking a five-fingered discount on daylight savings time). Puffy zetetic faces spank this tree giving shaded responses to analytically buffed sophistication, and frankly had produced nothing but cracks and wise acres among this bull generation of raw couchspeak junkies. Because a mass upheaval across the globe would center these writers no more or less prepared to correct the sanitation problems facing them than an appearance on the Jeopardy Show during Tournament of Champions’ week could provide, a select few of them joined the local Guestlist Gestapo, went undercover into the nightclubs of each one’s own promised land of little return on their investment, and broke into happiness. But it was all a joke somebody said. Nobody really smiled. Yes, they would win points as bullies and defenders of the amorally elite, alas, becoming the worst opportunistic sort of chivalrous cheesetasters, but I bolted, hired a planteater, and left the fluids to fend off the fleas themselves. Even a vacation to the heartbeat of Somalexia proved a miserable failure. Lot’s wife, renamed Bra Lynx, for marquée value, changed back into flesh and blood chattering some nonsense about the salt of the earth, smoked oysters, and a nauseatingly competitive game of canasta. As a final splash of artistic flimflam and a vigorous distaste for symmetry of any breed, her Betty Rules blouse was ripped just above her left breast, some say for show of course while others chalk it up to sheer coincidence and a matter to be discussed at the weekly Me Too meeting. No clue as to the culprit though. Some literary cowtow from the other side of the lunar tracks had licked her there in the rip for three weeks straight, she smiled without ironing boards. The inspector sent her straight to Sisyphus.

2. Man Ray Eats A Sandwich Without Mayo
Looking for law and lawn in all the wrong places cannot and should not be compared to reading Dostoevsky on a summer’s day hoping to learn something useful enough to turn a dollar inwards via capitalistic coup, unfortunately for our heroes in transition. The lips galore move in a salute to Assassins Anonymous and the work they have done in the urban areas south of Detroit, a hapless ruin. Only Sophie Glass and her boyfriend Jackfred Wilson dare stir slightly the limbs agile photographers keep. (Enter past tense with gusto.) Every aisle thick with scores of rag gossipers on high horses broke rank regardless of the lack of ventilation in the tunnels. Finally in a call to arms, Sophie thought she alone heard a loud shriek like a message from the other side. “The word’s already been given, and you’re not getting it again!” Anticipation slurred the speech of all those who broke bread with the fishmongers on strike. The bluff was not taken. Anticipation dropped off the edge like Columbus should have, said Sophie, forgetting that her glass ceiling changes into diamond almost anywhere near Tom Paine she tries to shake down. Concluding their mutual witness of such namby-pamby plethora, Sophie and Jackfred shattered the dark silence with a rapid succession of sleazy infrared shots. Again the audience gasped in harmony with the pitter patter of visual demands made on each one of them as justice prevailed in the form of New Legislation made into Flesh and the two ventriloquy photographers hacked through the vines of cozy confessions this New Law required, no questions asked. Remarks of this type and talent would surely redeem them from the tight provocations their spouses dutifully employ as a mechanism for financial equality, thought Sophie in a more serious mood. Certainly at the very minimum, for household maneuvers. Sounds good? Wrong! A twig snapped and she then remembered her own husband’s final words on the blur just before she shot him completely nude, stiffy, all four and a sixteenth inches in paw straddled over a picture of Sophie Glass as a young child. Betraying her professional cool she would use these words against him posthumously in a court of law. “Kafka my darling, I need to use you, abuse you in every way, so please don’t stop talking and writing to me in your own chosen obscene way…please don’t lock me out you bastard!” They buried him in a small justified plot without fanfare, and the wife and boyfriend, greeted by a farewell gesture in court, received nary a token of affection for there was none save for the magnificently catered spread next door across from the kennel where life was cheap and these killer sandwiches were cheaper.

3. If the Shoe Fits
Tables and tables of tables and tables of tables of tables tend to forget to properly package the birthmark of their creator. This oversight will be rectified in the next edition by the egg plagiarist fat with knowledge only an actress requires. Please remit this coupon, he adds, with full payment. “Get it right the very first time,” prunes a sassy Gertrude Picklesimmer, an old friend and a recovering gene along the lines of Epidrome the fanatic. Ethiopian cuisine draws her in for a late night haranguing, her favorite activity, clothing optional, teeth required. In another chapter, curtsy Jane Getz, the Amway doll with unimpaired bust from East Anchorage realizes in a fit of high seriousness that the thoughtcrime she’d committed during her afterdinner phase taken in L’hotel Egmont was simply not curable by enforced comparitive thinking classes, if she was to remain an American Doll (unrelated to the Picklesimmer neurosis.) Quickly, she fell to the grass, pulled off her panty-hose in two swift movements and tossed them to the young Republican standing by in a selfless gesture for party unity. She gave out a loud sigh, and with her exploding right hand smeared her lipstick across her pretty face, her pushy left hand tugging at the rope she had obediently placed around her thin orange neck. “Oh forgive me father for what I am about to forget.” Then, withdrawn, she joined the stereo people, who took her life savings and doubled it on the troubled market, bridging the gap between the moderate liberals and the far-right wing tapdancers of the Reagan years still crying out for a fresh look into the morals of those less crowded by the ennuendos of the straight & narrow electorate. All that’s needed, dictates the Leader-at-Arms, is a simple majority of those who have the right to vote and swear that you’ll vote with your pot bellies this time, Kid Scissors, and yes…“you, George, may sit at my right hand, and you…”

4. Persuasion Is No Longer Possible
Dead on arrival! Thunk. The Plague Syndrome. Fear. Ugliness. Filth. Sterility. It seems we wait for crocodiles to defile us, suck us into the Mississippi while both Twain and Truman sprout buffalo wings in hopes of a superior, more incestuous vision to supply our air fragile economies with invincible Whitmanesque nurses, naughty to uncoil our moated homespun turmoils wielding killer drugs and boy killers and further relate them to the Final Quest…getting laid in a grave six feet over or under, multiplying the fast game of infinity by zero and dust over idea. Rationality gives no suck to thirsty camels. Neither beckons them homeward. Should we survive them, a brittle postulate hardly seems a hardy substitute for love in a two-way window. Here came the Beatniks with not a single plan to boil. Then the Hippies home of the shaggy truth in revolution. The Discognitos where sweat said it all. Then the Punks where boredom and displacement took a place at the table with the rest of our problems, unmasked. Then the Preppies (always primping close by whilst all the others storm in uninvited) proud to be rich and beautiful and well-spoken for. Then the skinhead revival where hatred and gentrification meet its maker. Then rush in the angriest of the angry, the Rappers, civil unrest the Messiah. Then the Ravers about nothing nothing at all. And this parade of the horribles just in my lifetime, tracing merely the high profile movements, topped out, each genre pilfered ozoning subgenres like anything else doping a molecule to spare. Change, eh? Here they came in thunderous herds to lay blame at my feet, and I welcomed them as a variation of myself. As contrapunctus night steals the hit playlist the swelling rhetorical voices all suggest the same fluctuating plot, the same arguments of straw woven into myth and mirth similarly disposed, seamless and useless except as a fashion quirk projectory flying loose in the machinery of the next breath and acceptable on that gut level in private until watching the Eternal Clock the staid gentlemen of the silver-tongued coif just laugh into a gold box guaranteed to mock us concerning this sanity of despair. The enemy.

5. Turn That Goddamned Television Off, Snotty!
The wars in Africa have passed into the streets of our nation’s capitol right up my doorstep. Riots are eating up all the quality time spent with our children, our flowers, our bitterness. Contact sports traded a hundred and forty-four thousand future draft choices of the free for instant contact death. Ringing in my ears! Reclusive, guzzling beer, awaiting my murder, humming the hymns of great speckled confusion. Yes, I’m sick and I’m tired. Proof is the existence of having to defend the fact that I’m not brown and beautiful, nor white and rich, nor yellow and well connected, nor blue and better off, nor green and cuter still, nor purple and well-hung, nor pale and a whiz kid keeper, nor any other multiple choice identification rite I can’t inhale because I’m just a poor freckle from a town far away where red-winged blackbirds reign upon the bloody marshes of a dull gray past. Dead on arrival! Ringing in my ears! This icon, this city of Washington tucked away like a puckered nipple between two states is the center of my attention span, the bloodshed of boys, and I shall fear no evil, though I walk through the valley of inconvenience and misunderstanding a glass darkly. Astonished I lie down in black pastures to annointeth my role, to scour the enigma off my soul. I choke on my resistence. And jump head first into deep waters to pluck out a thumbless axiom. There is no comfort. To survive I must so choose, and I would then call my publisher if I had one, to rub myself raw, to loosen myself from sterile explanations. Soon comes the resurrection, the comic moaned. I will just kiss my wife gently on her wrists. And pray that America wakes up from her synthetic nightmare in time to realize that street violence belongs in the mind, not on someone else’s pillow case. “You must be able to enjoy the phallic.”

6. Help Wanted
Thinking is plural. We often do when our mirrors fog. Scores ago, in the quaint southern town where we first roamed the wild plains of youth in crass innocense, a young Aunt Charlemagne once scolded us, slapping our collective face, for an expression we’d just muttered without zip code or return address. In preparation for what we later grew naturally, a masquerade if anything sweeter came between us. Aunt Charlemagne was eight years younger than her sister, and less a threat to our ambitions as a kid without wings but this isn’t news. we admitted to preferring the sting of flesh when perpetrated by the younger sister; in fact we became attached to the violence young lash in their early twenties could foster all for our sake in the multitudes of shapes and thrusts of uncertainty principles everywhere anytime to the clue of making of the fodder of joy. Of course began the impossible task of finding that enchanting angular, gripped and primed, ripe for the plunge into theory and advance, who, inspired by control, feels no hounding shame in dominating le masculine urge with whatever is the most accessible tool available to our struggling leather saint and his epistomologic quest back to the founder of his words. This is news we said.

7. Out To Lunch Naked
I recanted publically. But this repentence tasted of kerosene and five unidentifiable culprits laughing behind grotesque clay statues of stool pigeons in drag, still figgering on three icy fingers their dormant appearance to contrive. About forty seconds earlier, which seemed like forty looks, she had asked me to unhook the strap prize of her feminine apparrel. I complied without question except those few which lingered like injured love tigers silently against my tattooed chest. My graceless blurtations spinned calculus webs glory spat back into the wind no wedding bells could seduce, by golly intrigue enough during that honest infidel period of my own due process. I intuited precious unspoken dignity when a single scrapbook neanderthalic blazing emphasized a year, like sun time, like gestation, like God in heat. No underexposed image would ever be too painful, ever too explicit, choices could never be too exacting. In this accelerated culture it’s uncouth hurray to deny our vulturous past or that its predicated smell of shame was that of fire, odorless, tasteless, but raging in gymnastic marble color, vast unmentionable hues of pit and passion. Only my credentials can whisper its name—burnt cosmos. After her fruitbox heaviness secured its diplomacy, a dress of bulb-white linen fell to its gifted position upon her kindling fuss, a flesh frothing with evidence of crude conviction, of unpublished zest, lasting heat.

8. Bring Us Another Round Of Abelard
Then there was this other game turtle. She in her early eyes dark with nuance, stretched like a vanquished dancer among gargantuan fates making breeze her garland through mahogany-silk hair and other dazzling inspectables. I pulled at the arbitrating cloth, brilliantly keen in brave foul textures of the sexual armistice. The fair. The frantic. I immediately compared these symptoms to those I’d experienced with quick lather & ecclesiastical bubbles when dare I remember how fear touched herself there among the sweaties. Tightly I drew at her dress until the static pressure flushed both of us, gazing into her aura, unphotographed wormholes of beauty crushed into shapes and color escapes, clutching with a long-fingered paw my prepared destiny, my meager knowledge, my Himalayan heart where monks have stormed. She kissed me about the pointless cheeks, and grabbed my hair, then my unproven mouth, each probing tongue wet like childbrain songs long since dormant. Finally I exhaled, and reached for her marshmellow clowns with one numbing touch. I had to go for the reckoning, had to press for that unknown limitation, neither expecting to give nor receive any sweeping social advantage, only impulse. “Enough!” she sharply directed, and I quickened to a freeze, embarrassed by her familiarity of the rite. Her anger tasted of its own 120 proof. I dismayed and shuffled from the now chilly room, never to return until I had come of age.

[1996, Washington, DC ]

COOL

2007-09-27T03:42:00.000-04:00

Done orally, done
I trust no one, which means
I trust every pun
To narrate beans.

No smoking.
No matches.
No naked lights.

Talking e.e.cummings
(Girlboys may nothing more
than boygirls need...)
And freedom is a break
Fast food.

[ 1982, Corpus Christi, TX ]

NOT YOUR FATHER'S NEW MATH

2007-09-25T15:59:00.000-04:00

Part I. Memorizing Each Postulate By Morning
I am a panic of NONE.
I am a race of NONE.
I am a language of NONE.
I am a religion of NONE.
I am a law of NONE.
I am a God of NONE.

I am a panic of ONE.
I am a race of ONE.
I am a language of ONE.
I am a religion of ONE.
I am a law of ONE.
I am a God of ONE.

I am a panic of ALL.
I am a race of ALL.
I am a language of ALL.
I am a religion of ALL.
I am a law of ALL.
I am a God of ALL.

Part II. Crossing the Equator With Dirty Weapons
I am a panic of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a race of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a language of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a religion of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a law of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.
I am a God of 40, sixty-four million, over thirteen billion served.

I am a product of HERE AND NOW.

[ 2007, Washington, DC ]

YESTERDAY

2007-09-23T10:46:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's gone to sleep
waiting for her husband to return from the plant
where soot finds its way into his very dignity
clothing his shame in layers of insult too twisted to recant.

Yesterday's alone with child
sitting in the backroom of the artist's studio
where he will pay her to reveal her very dignity
painting her memoirs in colors her husband wouldn't know.

Yesterday's grown to hate
all men and women who killed her husband and child
with cathedral bells buying and selling her very dignity
knowing nothing could ever be reconciled.

(Many years later)
Yesterday's shown no favor
declaring the artist serves no one from inside a jail
where neither mind nor beauty can save its very dignity
blaspheming birth as eternal blackmail.

U.S. VOLTAIRE

2007-09-23T10:41:00.000-04:00

My country tis of thee
admits the Army shielded wild Barbie,
offers regrets to the French, reports the WASHINGTON POST
sometime in the 19 Eighties. Lurid tales we seek as truth. Late
blooming never the sole criteria for liberal v. conservative failure—
lying wide-eyed tribute on Federal district sidewalk,
some sunbleached sign of the elephant,
Reckoncharmers sigh, chalk up another marble, another
favorable position, another power lunch then a movie, maybe
an opera built for three. “Who needs the French?”
a bald-headed Bronx cheer indulges in politics,
the American way of democracy retracts yet another remark
now sold as antique jewelry to Easter chicks. An obese femme,
garbed in African swank wearing three wristwatches on each arm
waddles with her two sophisticated poodles, one named Adverb,
the other No Way, each tugging at its chic fluorescent
(check for spelling and decimal point errors)
lime leash, no shifty stereotype here, just eyeballing
the obvious. Sensing a sneer I duck
into a clothier’s for a fresh pair of socks,
and a swim. Mine stank of summer
syntax. War famine was next in line.

“Why apologize with regrets during a great afternoon like this?”
goofs some vital standby officer of chimera, blowing sweat
through a polished bugle, a bugle he found in a garbage bin
outside the Pentagon fringe, and lapping in the express lane
at an ice cream cone, dual unnamed flavors, the eyewitness said..
“It’s not like it’s the end of time!”
says another, posing with a cardboard zipper,
bound for political access,
ever the angry gay blade strapped for cash.
Name must remain anonymous and rash
during our lifetime due to a computer foulup, a crash
or a chip off the old block where we rolled drunks for rock
bottoms and banquet foam, but fate in a handbasket is cruel
inking sad where they fell prophecies the way it explains the rule
coz if’n I read my cards correctly, foul play’s not even considered
an alternative lifestyle to those breeds, nor of troops,
and three squares configure scales too fussy
off the calloused side of the thumb
to blame Dick’s dog. Or Tom Paine.

This is America the Beautiful Swan type—
Juggling outside chances the ugly and faint of bosom reject
this effort at grip, open cells and prickly pears, the perfect girly
woman waiting & knocking on wood for the perfect agency to invent her
peeling to reveal another strata, another compass, another grim
act of nature striking pose off nuclear physics and mortuary skim
poised to strip down the hungry Brass Madonna’s wet clothes
and heap fixes of a linear paraphenaliac’s basic whim,
quite sure broad’s the bored way straight to the center swim
upstream even less funny to that green collar’d fraternity crate
looped within those smoking porkbarrels squirming close to the edge
locked in greed-conditioned theocratic boardroom halls gull gray
pun free spinning within an enriched whiskey culled earshot
of others grinning just like them. Where am I? unbuckled
shouts the penny-wise pope, pouts this poet looking trickled
in this momentary picture of modernized rot without
a bull’s eye shot at decent wage or freedom to decay?
“Show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a dollar!”
This I heard a bum in the busy street to holler.

Jazzy corporations sing of their due
far more frequently and sanctimoniously
than revealing their own larded backyards
girded with jargonistic creeds,
painting the bones of the working breeds
set free by a law whose spirit’s in shards
never to open a door for the beauty of fair gain
where responsibility evasion suits up bringing bitter rain
the tears of whole industry cuts.

Escaping to alien sands
to other sites as working class soldiers toss crumbs to children
in hopes of a better day.

This is America the Ugly Duckling hype—
Felonious jungle gyms set in concrete, shrieks & blood, billions
of half-baked beans, energy levels, kilowatts raised on special G-forces
bilked to protect her shining shores from feigned foreign invasion
a trick of fate which seldom shakes the rich guard of daylight,
and wicked lines around city blocks fumbling for hot checks
and balances in nothing but heinous expenses, flesh floating a kite
chasing pale the rider stale. But the foray descends as nocturnal
homes in flight beneath shrill wraps of free lunch gain
produce social overbite.

[ 1998, Washington, DC ]

WAR ORPHANS

2007-09-23T10:37:00.000-04:00

In Greece range many goats and peasants, old ruins
slide seductively up next to you, your tour bus seat
wet with the perspiration of tourism’s ego,
and they whistle down your neck, inviting
you in for a closer view, a bottle of brew
and a native look into your purse-string
mentality. You remember not
the peasants of your own dry, arrid backwash,
as you sneak past Ptolemy’s submarine intelligence
and sail the high Mediterranean cheekbones
of a beauty which will never be yours
to sell or inspire. You claim powers
separate but indivisible. You caress
a sweet lamb’s woolen sky
a moment at a time, you tell yourself—
and then off into the next war you race.

Rome is a lion’s den of passion, and there is none
whose impeccable beauty matches it in all of her body,
where genius and vassal alike marched headfirst into the eye
of her borrowed king’s sun. Bartering for a love
you had read about in the film industry trades,
no choice was yours but to puff up your sex toys
mouthing lewd colors, and fall into
the same paragraph Mussolini
wrote Ezra Pound in a fit of angel tenure
stalking slow explanation with nine hungry prisoners
to feed—Copernicus and Galileo and their crippled sister,
people carrying people to the rope of regret.

To fly to fair London where English is still spoken,
you spare your very finest silk underwear odes. The clock
reminds us there of social stares where poets play
guitar and the children can’t weep. Iced tea
and words like export, involvement,
and the king’s divorce, provide the stranger
the wide gulf most manic voyages through instinct
bled back through ages Blake, Wordsworth, Auden
forgot. Cool safety is a damp trial in the pit
of drizzling pomposity, ambitiously full of
fresh opinion armies where Johnny Rotten
would spit the fat sickness, repayed
by urban privacies and a charming public laity,
fiscal socialist agonies the sulphur of St. George.

Tradition is bought pennies on the dollar, witnesses
gathering on the White House Lawn wet their pants
in Murder Row relief, outlining your latest hit list
no longer the sounds of Roberta Flack or Marvin Gaye,
but of takers of the routine shortcut driving the herd
deeper into the jungle, brain waves and assault weapons
spraying powdered milk, shoving shy rain mosquitoes
into the grave not even George Washington could defend.
Measuring sick thespian vacancy with the same
motley precision a syringe injects its fistful of spitfire,
some other dead prophet—Martin Luther King—rolls over
squashing the maggots he fed in trenches of glory, privacy
oh privacy and the black nothinghood gangs littering
our scared and scarred streets, denying reality’s heavy lip
thus clings like a sea-dried ghost over the forefather’s city
washing in the blood of not the lamb but the wolf
where statistical impulses anxiously numb

rob the same paragraph these interrogatories rib.

[ 1995, Washington, DC ]

KINETIC CHRIST

2007-09-23T10:33:00.000-04:00

I was deprived of power as a child, said the balding
eagle to the claims department, his breath
on fire, and his hand on third base flying
homeward, relieved of duty

and pitched into another shift on a close call.

Woman’s intuition is that a man should do it,
evidently another lost cause, his death
to prove nothing but the release
winging it to spare us his fall.

Pop crackle. Moonsong.
The efforts are worn from the chest,
splinters of glory dancing in the fireccaves
nearer to thy loins than lions in the wind
and the murmurs of generations
never savvy to the wisdom
of peppermint slaves.

The choice of ironing the only shirt in town
or swinging with the slugger’s club
parches a few tongues, a brain
and a bodyguard on leave from art school,
the video drones loving the effects
much more than the call of DNA—
but denying it in fashionable cliques
of gestation. The metal clown
chirps…

“Woe, woe, woe your boat , mintly down the cream,
wearily, wearily, wearily, wearily, wife’s a butterbean!”

Home court presses, visitation rights,
the metal clown chirps.

[ 1996, Washington, DC ]

TANGENT

2007-09-23T10:07:00.000-04:00

Sitting around on high
discussing bankruptcy plans, we are paralyzed
by high-priced beauty battering us in piles of magazines.
Loosely kept secrets and cleavages strike the pose
just like the cowboy song says—there’s no other way. Our kingdom
crumbles the same way burnt toast, virtual memory,
and a livid lion’s den melting with envy
struggles to remain in vogue,
new foci vain and too hip but in a well-measured pain,
the American struggles of hard work and meritocracy
(resonating in quicksand of the celebrity crush)
shortcircuiting the way we’re taught to reign.

And as the familiar bell of gasoline slips into the morning
welcoming me skewed and priceless, no longer the surveyor
with chains and maps and plans and rods,
or fine instruments bound to the circle,
straight lines, or schools of sweat,

I dig into the vision light scatters across the wallpaper,
a pastel Monet, and irises rising into profile
like soldiers guarding the soul, where the only death
here is imaginary and immune to the newspaper
or the streets where yet another rape is spun
(where details are withheld as purposes)
of business because I don’t own a gun
and this ain’t no comic caper
of the shapes we’re in.

Victims are a dollar a dozen. Inflation stealthly bites
into our proverbs, but have you noticed how well dressed
the common poor are these days? Fine cars, fine threads,
fine guns, fine beds, fat to the gills, but still no ease comes
to our revoltutionary heads still hung in dry nooses
conjured up by witch doctors of the dead,
mouthing words no longer built
but retrogressed.

The spies are elder foils for demons of hatred and pith,
luring a whole generation, maybe more, ever down
the path thermotaxis where juice scales weighted
(baby don’t wanna be no social experiment)
are meant for no one, not even these
heavy-laden with rubbery myth
of the thirteenth generation x—

Fall out! Fall in! The message the same,
eating into the muscle life buried within our name
under cheap shelter shaping the unknown,
until we give the victorious word, undressing
with dowried care of an innocent Brahmin calf
the issues done especially for us, inspecting, undressing
the fevers, draining off the pus infecting, suspecting
keen the trajectory our souls must make
without blame

and finding the circle of fate is God cubed,
we erase mere tangency with yet another claim
of superiority complexes and the fake
inferior rugs our interior has tubed.

[ 1993, Washington, DC ]

OF KINGS AND PLURAL PRONOUNS

2007-09-23T09:28:00.000-04:00

To write the epic of the world
in a few words or less
(in one word or less)
is the method
of Cameo Kidney,
an unfanned philosopher,
a basic star streaker,
a stunning safety soldier,
hiding in the cloak closet,
chaffed but unashamed
that English is the only
language which capitalizes
I while several capitalize
the pronoun—you.

To be born in my manger,
made affluent in three gifts
by strangers harried from afar,
is the feeling faked everywhere
in the shadow of my birthdate—
and you break out the best dishes
saying, “Your book, if as a canvas
is an ugly painting hanging in all the wrong places.”

Generations of chalk
revile the science of gestures
nicknamed virgins coax to their brow,
laughing and lampooning
Einstein’s stepchildren
God was forced to allow.

To kiss them where muses lick,
begetting secrets we shower in song
(Tormenting earth for five months…)
eagerly selling dark matter to the sun,
dead idol Beelzebub’s a cracking
jokes at the keeper of the knots
“home of the label”
spinning report card eyes
to recall laughter understood
in the vernacular to be fatal.

To accept each hand in marriage
as a lion among the woodpiles
lost on timeshared tee-shirts
admiring the sundown of business
& extreme video conjugations
counting numbers without commas
calling names without numbers
dealing cards without names
shaving beards without cards
booking definitions

Fermi solutions with redlights
poke through.

[1986, Washington, DC ]

POLYGLOT WITTGENSTEIN

2007-09-23T09:25:00.000-04:00

Quarrels I brought to authorities
for which I was fish-bowled,
such as when on a calculated whim
I gave a vow, a pledge
of allegiance

of one thousand collard green symptoms
pratting particular a peculiar persuader,
outstretched paw netting loudly,
preaching television sainthood
out of the fish’s mouth.

The bum prophet,
returned his mistress much more
than killing her son for a sign
the ages had dealt in blow of scripture,

and Wittgenstein never forgot me, either.
Under the sun nothing knew less
than that camera I took on sound advice
lathering misquotationals without clue.

The ultimate passage from logic to freelancing
specialty wisdomatics flying northward
toward the bear and glad tidings,
moonlight red infrastructurally

correct as by law and by prostitution,
the victimless philosophies of cold
and behold, cash and flash, pairings
of quick understandings still stamped.

The minds of many who died not hungry
reads the line separating this from that.
And ample enough soup to go around the world
save the stupid revolutionaries fumbling

the galls and testicles of good people
of every race groping a deep graze,
too simply fool-ruled to use the best,
the rest, and not be buried in treasure.

Justice in summer foliage falls between
cracks both the lion and the lamb spring across
where boo-kings crush meanings from life,
dream wreckage and Wittgenstein snorts fair.

In catacombs mighty hair warriors take leaven
bread beneath waters covering young history
unexplored, lost yesterday down grammarian spells,
even Stephen could not vouch for, nor Paul

in his vest of holy trousers turned inward.
Stretched bloody naked and attractive,
mosquitos did never squat where lovers sweat.
But Wittgenstein took me shoulder first, I cleared.

My throat hollow where men before me came never before,
and I felt like new names nothing forbade, not especially
the weak, the calm, the floored, nor the wronged angels
sweeping up avenues long given over to party politics.

Seasons twisted upon each other and friendship convulsed.
Open arsenals recoiled, the serpent's head spit glass,
broken, images priced like art invested no plumage whereas
stock sold steadily until there were no other dead issues.

Bull edits charged emotional terrapins as runners
of illegal slow, dull, unimportant feet, dry glands
purposely banded as one, vehicles offering last rites
mankind waiving, inner harbor city lights removed.

Yet Wittgenstein never operated under served piffle,
could repair ugly scar tissue booking redress, obviously
lip-synched trade favors; in return the mantled box thumb
thugs ruled left to rights, or rights to be left

alone or without someone else's aloneness combined
to equip equations and co-efficients with unreal numbers
numbing outsiders, error friendless but with plenty
of food and street wisdom, meaning to write a book.

Where we all appear placed happily eager to be.
What to be is all in time and flesh is time.
Or trips to the Milky Way vacate shun or be shunned.
Like Uncle Sam's son colorfully primed for United States.

But where did Paine fail to speak his mind?
His friend broke off penal envy for the sake of
forsaking oven roaster birds war bred but blowing
off that same wind Dylan wore, a weatherman's cap.

Did any effort die by the hand of any clock?
Management problems rope eye emblems shattering mock success,
taxing poets improperly prospering, the plainclothesmen's plan X,
and optimums of the classes, share in Baalam's bra,

key pimped pragmaticisms perplexing the raw multitudes Freud
slew, licking time's dragon multiplied and automatically
disguised, guilty, as such a single atom prays au natural,
financially secure but fearing assailants silent

enough to warn miracles to cease and weapons to flourish
inebriating reason, samples exposing undecided votes,
serial mirrors helpless to utter a lie saith the surveyor.
Gather all flocks, mathematics, onions, ash or else!

That these feverish linear progressions plummet to bedrock
cup, and yet deliver a single soul from eternal damnation
boning up conquerors of Kierkegaard and worshippers
of the last breath of Wittgenstein I’d shouldered enough.

[ 1992, Washington, DC ]

OBVIOUSLY CHALLENGING THE OBVIOUS

2007-09-21T09:06:00.000-04:00

Originally published on December 12, 1999

It was a Ginsberg quote: "The Beat Movement was never meant to be a rebellion. It was meant to bring in a new consciousness. The middle-class, who were rebelling against Mother Nature by destroying her ecologically, made us out to be rebellious."

And also, when remarking on how Laura Miller had trashed his "Grammatron" in the NYTBR, Mark Amerika complained that she had set up a "false binary" and "unnecessary either/or oppositions", and then proposed that we simply open our minds to a variety of styles and possibilities within any given framework.

So to answer your question, allow me to say that I too am weary of this plethora of binary constructs that attack the imagination in exactly the same way the media controls operate. In the US, the race issue is always put to the people in binary form, but everybody knows (except those on the hot button payroll) the issue is both simultaneously more simple and more complex than it's presented in the media, but the media elite and the political hacks milk the same anachronistic cow day after day, and very little ever changes except we continue to lose perspective with this increasing concentration of the THEM VERSUS THEM dichotomy.

Crash writes—I'm with you on this—it has always been a quite useful method of control to set up artificial binary conflicts to keep people angry at each other and to keep them blind to the true problems—Burroughs always stated that in order to truly challenge a system you have to move outside the constructs of language which is grounded in the binary system of control—of course this also leaves out most people who are unable or unwilling to approach a work such as the Burroughs books—so where should we go? I think a very effective means of challenging systems is to attack the discourse upon which they rest—language for me is the key to power—not just spoken or written dictum, but also the language of images that are broadcast and plastered everywhere.

Levi-Strauss pointed out how in primitive myths the mispronounciation of words and the misuse of language were considered to be very dangerous and very powerful methods of disrupting the system and the coded language that they used as their base of understanding, and power. Is this not even more true today—when it seems that we are ever so more dependent on words and images to define our perceptions?

Is not the mass medias almost a form of magic in most peoples lives—turn the TV on and the tribal stories are broadcast from the hearth of your living room and the smoke signals of info are distributed to the family—turn on the computer and miraculously we can fly to any part of the world—just among our small group—when was the last time one of us spent a whole day in which we didn’t recive some kind of mediated input (books, magazines, radio, tv, film, internet, etc).

What power is there in producing transgressive materials that seek to wreck havoc on the codes of the dominant culture? I don’t know to any degree of clarity, but I wonder if the many people who have pointed out that when we engage in straight binary resistance to the system we are only reinforcing that system, I wonder if they have a point—that is to say, that in resisting the dominant culture straight on we help them to define themselves and to point at easily recognizable, definable, and soon to be specularized deviants who can be set up as the new boogeyman. I know I’m rambling a bit here—but what do you all think?

Gabriel wrote— It's a blood given that corporate giants and political hacks are ruthless sluts. It’s in their ideological DNA. But why should that stop anyone with enough guts and stamina to be different, to risk it all, to tear down the walls of a slum, and build afresh, a new way of thinking; no matter how we cut the ideological cake trailblazers can't afford to be whiners (see Henry Miller's Cosmological Eye). Of course everyone wants to be the hot new thing, if only to themselves, and if they fail, they usually become grumpy old whiners accusing the system of foul play.

But then Cobain and Steinbeck chose very different paths to avoid the pains of their success. Ghandi could have been a very rich man, he declined. What's wrong with making money, if one spends it well. Bill Gates is a jolly liar as his testimony before the US Department of Justice in his anti-trust litigation is proving, but he has frequently said that he doesn't believe in leaving amassed fortunes to heirs. If he spent enough millions on truly changing the landscape of certain depressed areas, why would not his taxations of those peoples and organizations that COULD afford it, be forgivable.

You see, there are so many complex choices presented to us, but we stumble around and usually end up either goofing along picking up a few addictions which insult our biology and agenda for happiness, or else we opt into nosing the grindstone a slave to production so that we also pick up a few addictions that insult our biology and agenda for happiness.

The key, as a few savvy Greeks agreed, was moderation in all things. But few of us (and I’m one of 'em, unfortunately) can't learn to implement moderation in our lives because we are ruled by addictive personalties, and as Tolstoy (modernized) put it, it does us no good to beat ourselves up over one addiction only to have another two or three rush in to take its place. Whether we're talking substance abuse, laziness, addiction to work, sex, well hell, you know what I mean, it's all the same problem child within us.

Good news is that when faced with a ruthless giant, nature seems to transform us into thinking we’re a giant killer. Not too long ago the Internet founders (a cluster of old hippies and nerds) threatened to bring the world together in a non-commercialized free-spirited community. Then Mammon got a whiff of what was happening, and started pissing in the pond. Well, we can't stymie that but we can work like hell to keep the original spirit alive, and do what we can to advocate the world we want, never flinching, but rather calling for a cease-fire to all this whining.

I don't mean lay down your intellectual arms and join the enemy, but simply to accept the challenge of David & Goliath, forge partnerships, or lessen one's sights at directly competing, but more often than not merely supplementing the bullies, by carving out a solid niche from which we embark upon that brave, new world, regardless of who is watching, who is following, or who gives a flying carpet ride one way or the other.

Books? Yes, more books are being published than ever before, but are we any closer to changing the world, if indeed that is the stated goal of the persuaders?

Crash writes—niche carving is a very good method of slicing into mediated realms (hey Manus, I’m starting to sound like one of those video game players) and setting up zones of operation (much like Gabriel has started here).

Gabriel wrote—Writers have never had more freedom (despite all the Internet porn busts smelling up the coffeehouse) in history. Recall Voltaire, Rousseau, running for their lives, hiding in exile, poverty, and scorn save the intellectual and financial graces of the few. We artists (if indeed we are artists, and not simply poseurs seeking escape from responsibility) in the west now have such an accelerated vision of freedom, we think we are living in especially perilous times, and in the supertechnological superpolitical sense we perhaps are, but we have also never been more free to express ourselves (no artist was born guarateed fame, riches, or readers).

Despite my own yearning to burst out of my skin to trumpet the last charge on a world corrupted by its own sense of infallibility whether originating from the right or the left, capitalism or marxism, I am convicted by my own sense of limitation, not always imposed from the outside, but often enough a consequence of my own choices, and those of my genetic bearing. How can I blame someone else for that?

Crash writes—yes, more books than ever are being published—but what kind of books—i have no problem with the consumption of brain candy—as Manus knows when I just told him about Joe Lansdale’s thrillers. But there is no need to legally pursue dangerous writers or artists anymore—becausethey are drowned out in the flood of product that dominates the market. And who is controlling what is published? What books are advertised—open up any advertisement for a book store and peruse what is put before consumers—walk through your Barnes and Nobles, your Borders?

In the 1960s there were more than a hundred substantial publishers in NYC alone. By 1980 there were only 70; by 1995 the number had dropped down to 15, and presently, through further merging there is only 5! Major publishers and these subsequential others are also tied in with the producers of other mass mediums. Now I don’t mean to sound like I’m crying that the sky is falling down—but this must be disturbing in some way.

True, the market is flooded with books like never before (as well as other forms of info) but what are these texts? Of course once again this is also a benefit to us and others who seek difference. As the mainstream producers continue to narrow their fields of interest and seek to the common denominator it opens up the possibility for very viable and strong niches of operation for smaller more specialized organizations—so perhaps this is a mixed blessing. Are we ourselves cultivating some form of sub-cultural capital—as we are all thinking on these days—what is our true goals in these efforts—do we intend to do something to challenge the hierarchal stratification of society—the mind-numbing mediatized comformity?

Gabriel wrote—Again Crash, when I look around these here parts I don't see this world as one straitjacketed by conformity (although I surely hear and read a lot of noise to the contrary). In the greater populations (putting aside the corporate merger trend which is just the opposite than what is happening in the de-centralized neighborhoods and streets, but I guess we have Debord to explain this cause and effect to us). I nevertheless see cat fights and dog bones between warring factions along every corridor as soldiers of each faction scrawl hard lines of demarcation to help solidify a turf. Bias to difficult, damn near impossible to extricate from the common mind.

*Your Australia may be very different from my America, but when I see a group of folks working and playing in harmony I marvel at how the group has conformed to an ideal so often missing on the street, in the universities, on certain ballclubs, in art snot piss fights, no one simply content to be different hanging on the same street corner or intellectual counterpoint but everyone bucking for superiority status.

Competition ain't dead, and if competition is not dead, how can we also be lost on the mind-numbing mediatized comformity rap? And racial conflicts with their wealth of metaphors are the easiest to exploit. Debord had it right when he said the Spectacle tosses out two opposite claims and watches the skirmish in glee, knowing that the debate will roll on forever while the social structure remains the same. Superiority, that's what straw leaders are after.

That ain't just a white man thing anymore, if it ever was (and I doubt that very seriously, the Euros just won a few wars at a strategic time in history, have gained and lost as a result). I know I'm guilty of thinking no one is my superior, and will fight like mad to prove how wrong I can be. The point is, the stratification of society is just something we're going to have to accept because it is a rather natural phenomenon despite its excesses and inherent unfairness. I agree with Matthew's proclamation of a couple of posts back:

"...abolishing hierarchies is as impossible as abolishing the state. Let's face it—anarchy without hierarchy just ain’t never gunna happen, that's my opinion anyway."

As for "sub-cultural capital", methinks I'd like to see some elaboration on the concept. I'm not sure what you're suggesting. And since I've ranted enough today I'd rather not go barking down a cold trail.

Crash writes—I don't know—i see a lot more conformity than you do—maybe it’s because I view the system (in the US) as encouraging a cultivated form of difference and that its ability to immediately suck up and spit out a clean, sanitized version of anything that may challenge its operations—a simplified example would be punk's howl of rage—short time of challenge—fear from the populace—by 1977 we see punk fashion on fashion runways, London newspapers printing articles on how punks are just part of the family, punk is cleaned, sanitized and marketed—dead before it gets started—it is now just another acceptable means of conforming, albeit leaving the troubled youth a bit of dignity in believing that they may in some way be giving some challenge to the system that they feel has excluded them.

As for sub-cultural capital—it was an off-hand remark actually questioning my own purposes or intents since I believe we must question ourselves—and tossed out to everyone else—wondering if I may not be somehow cultivating a form of sub-cultural capital, a sanitized and safe form of alternative "cultural capital" (cultural capital cultivated artistic and intellectual capabilities that leads to your being valued by elites).

As I said just questioning my own intent—I have a very good friend from eastern Europe who understands resistance to a system in a way that I never could, having grownup in the states where, although they will and do kill people for the wrong reasons, it’s not quite as harrowing and prevalent as the former soviet system)—she constantly keeps me on my toes about some of my *resistance* stances and leads me to question my intent (or as I think she may see it my overly romantic, overly idealistic views). So I guess this was a moment of self-doubt on my part. What do we see as the problem that we should be devoting our attentions to—we seem to be attempting to come up with plans of attack without really thinking upon what we want to change or what we could best effect with our efforts.

Gabriel wrote—Elitism based on phony distinctions is a major problem, but hucksterism is its whoring stepsister. They hate each other, plot behind each other's arched back, spit in each other's intellectual food, kick each other's namby ankles, and attempt to steal each other's cultural graces without even bothering to shed its skin until it's absolutely forced upon them. Both exist across every social and economical class. Both breed mistrust and greed. Acknowledging their relationship to each other however they will bond together to thwart any and all those who stand in their way, that is to say, the vocal non-elitists and the few trailblazers committed to absolute (not to be confused with pre-conceived) integrity.

And they often win their battles against the non-elitists and integriters because they appeal with flattery and spectacular powers in their search for allies among the spectacularized populations in order to defeat these enemies, these straight shooters, these few honest constituents of a better world once taught them in childhood mythos as sacred and worthy but ushered away as the real world ruled by this beast we have just described becomes clearly the prince of all that worships it, and reality replaces mythos as the battleground upon which we shed our blood.

How do we attack this world of theirs, if we declare ourselves enemies of elitism and hucksterism, you ask? We must practice a more honest implemented form of warfare in putting our own personal spins on the solution, that is, we must know who and what we are, playing the humble idiot if we must, the loud-mouthed brute if we dare, but always, always keeping to the mark when it comes to personal honesty (read Henry Miller, enemies hate it when you've already laid all your own dirty laundry on the table, and they can't hose you with it in an ambush) and candor (without the elitism & hucksterism, we must define these values next) but I am still nagged by something Manus wrote:

As I am being my honest self here, I must declare that I could give a fuck about 1) audience 2) viral politics or 3) allies until we here at SWORG have something to show for ourselves, namely, a unified schtick (as GT initially proposed) that gives us a raison d'etre as an active GROUP. My logic is irrefutable when I say that causticness is a necessary perquisite as egotism is a necessary perquisite to ANY activity in this warlock of cyberspace, and that we should not only solidify our reasons for existing, but assure ourselves that, yes, a bit of caustic bite really is the necessary fuel for lighting the fire of collaboration between ourselves, and initiating any engagements with OTHERS.

Gabriel wrote—my visceral response to this outlook is negative running contrary to my hypothetical Boy Scout nature, but I reluctantly agree with the whole of Matt's statement, so I guess I am still fomenting the idea of caustic abruptness (as Landry will testify I'm no rookie rabblerouser) as it is magnified in relationship to my sensibilities concerning false elitism and hucksterism in the SWORG groupthink arena. But I still think the whole concern is rather premature since we have mucho mucho work to do in the chainthinking section of the site particularly since, uh, wait a minute, uh since, in fact, no one but Manus is privy to those earlier discussions which initially brought him into the Scenewash Project. Truth is I'm aware of no one but he who has actually signed onto anything but the SWORG-talk list, and believe me I'm far too jaded with past failed collaborations to presume ANYTHING about who is committed to what at present.

Crash writes—I like your ideas on what we need to do—as far as moving past the abuses of huckesterisma and elitism. And I truly believe in the need to hone and develop a true system of personal honesty—nothing could be higher on my list—because i believe that is the key in my development and that it is also vital in my dealing with others (both my personal honesty and hopefully theirs). As for other efforts that are need here on the website—you are correct in your statement that I haven’t contributed to the Scenewash Project—because:

A) I’m trying to get my thesis finished soI can get the fuck out of this college
B) I’m trying to set up employment so that i dont starve when i do leave.
C) These are extremely important to me, because I do not have a wife who will support me (this is what you stated Gabriel?) or Matthew's very important network of comrades or Landry's admirable corporate job or Rebunk's art criticism gig.
D) So since I will be no good to no one living on the streets (least of all myself—trust me I’ve been there, and while fascinating I don’t really have a desire to do it again). I must concentrate on this in order to become more valuable.
E) But what do you need—I write constantly—ask me I will write and contribute in any way—i will research what needs to be found.

I hope that this is not a problem, but you must understand the situation that I'm in and that while willing to contribute to "our thing" I must keep a check on the very real concerns of food and shelter.

Gabriel wrote—well, Crash, like the tagline goes, think globally, act locally, the cutting edge shimmers, and so drifts the echo, the pitter patter of dangling lost feet...

Here's an example of what I mean about pinning the "tale" on the donkey, getting at the root of one's individual or collective desires in the seemingly vain attempt at rewriting the rulebook of human life on earth. Like much that passes for wit in the spam-o-world, these few lines exemplify a certain notion about human conceptuality, methinks:

Reflections On Life As A Male

When I was 14, all I wanted was a girl with large breasts.

When I was 16, I dated a girl with large breasts, but there was no passion. So I decided that I needed a passionate girl with a zest for life.

In college, I dated a passionate girl, but she was too emotional: everything was an emergency; she was a drama queen; she cried all the time and threatened suicide. So then I decided I needed a girl with some stability.

I found a very stable girl, but she was boring. She was totally predictable and never got excited about anything. Life became so dull that I decided I needed a girl with some excitement.

I found an exciting girl, but I couldn't keep up with her. She rushed from one thing to another, never settling on anything. She did mad, impetuous things, and flirted with everyone she met. She made me miserable as often as happy. She was great fun initially and very energetic, but directionless. So I decided to find a girl with some ambition.

After University, I found a smart, ambitious girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground, and married her. She was so ambitious that she divorced me and took everything I owned.

Now all I want is a girl with big tits.

So again I am prompted to ask, "What does a would-be worldchanging revolutionary like ourselves desire in terms of a workable liberty for all? I hear plenty about injustice and those conflicting wills to power that we loudly boo at every turn of the screw, but I hear almost nothing about this brave, new world we all supposedly desire in our heart of hearts. Even when I do hear of some shimmering off the wall ploy, like Bob Black's "Zerowork, All Play" anthem to futurism now, in a solar system where the 2nd law of thermodynamics rules with an atomic fist, I see an all or nothing approach rather fetching in aspiration but far too reaching in terms of practicality or desirability, especially when much of the labor required to oppose entropy is merely camouflaged as play in a falsifying language, much like "political correctness" operates today."

* I later realized my mistake in momentarily confusing Crash, an American then going to school in the Midwest, with another of our group, Reuben Keehan, who was the Australian I had in mind when I wrote that response.

to be continued...

IN STATING THE OBVIOUS WE FALTER

2007-09-21T07:43:00.000-04:00

Originally published on December 14, 1999

Purpose, strata, conformity! Samson agonistes!

I think once we have ripped past the communist manifesto negation phase of these chats, and accept the fact that capitalism with all its excesses is still a rather young pup and has a ways to go (fifty? a hundred? 200 years?) unless raped by a nuclear holocaust gangbanger before imminent global collapse, we should indeed strive to reveal to the group as a whole just what it is we as individuals strung across the marble as we are, find fascinating about dancing on the fringe with the faith that we among millions who don't give a damn, might be selected by history, fate, or hard work to make a big enough difference in the world we find so challenging, repugnant, lovable, just plain here, while so many try and fail (saving the Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" argument for a later discussion), and how we organize that plan.

I hope that we are now at that fulcrum, but I am not sure. Despite my desires to share my resources with a few good minds who just happen to appreciate said resources, I am not a communist, and have never been a communist sympathizer, except when it comes to a personal sharing of my own occasional windfall with those who have crossed my path. Unfortunately, I have been far too vigorous in displaying myself as an easy touch for hucksters and abusers of my time and generosity, and as a result, I began to grow bitter and abusive in return, groping for anything I could exploit with fingertips and gutfire since little in my opinion (and I'm talking about a 12-year stretch of woeful friendships) was being funneled my way in any kind of usable quid pro quo. After finally divesting myself of these dead-in social relationships one at a time I am only just now attempting to harden my resolve against these "communistic" tendencies of mine.

As mentioned earlier in a note to Manus, I seek to wed theory with action. Until I change my mind I must admitt I find intellectual masterbation a bit too boring, and need the grounding praxis of social purpose to give it that reality kick I need to sustain my interest at this point in my life (having no academic training since highschool graduation in 1973). That's why, I in my panic to achieve something real right now rather than chase after publishing contracts which may never materialize, cannot return to the unreadable 900 page novel nesting inside my Macintosh.

Being a full-blooded child of inertia (body in motion tends to remain in motion, body at rest tends to remain at rest) my spectacle-thwarted psychology keeps requiring a return to the real sticks and stones I find out my back door, and I explode in a furious desire to help influence a change, make that unproven splash that requires the powers that be to grant us not only an audience but to recoognize that we speak the truth and must act now, not later.

Note in particular the early beginnings of the GASS & ROCC subsites. My wife works for a lobbying firm, hired guns, environmental and transporation concerns mostly, but will bank any paying client that can afford them. She has the ear of a rising young black woman in the office whom I want to amply politicize with my points on developing the Anacostia River stretch I live along primarily (she's warmed to the initial threads already), and refederalizing the District of Columbia, as a constitutionally pure but politically radical solution to the governing problem here.

This latter scheme will be a tough sell, but she's a politically perfect candidate to juggernaut the ROCC Foundation into the public consciousness with the express purpose of revolutionizing the urban landscape of the federal city in which I and half a million more intruders now reside illegally (according to my argument), if I can convince a constitutional law firm to pro bono the case. There's not a chance in hell these ideas will win favor in my lifetime, but I am certain the war is worth fighting.

The battleplans must be drawn, and the soldiers called. There's not much info on the sites right now, particularly for you folks from down under who may not comprehend the initial outline, but the ROCC project is very hot property and I've got to play these cards as soon as I can seize the opportunities, so I welcome anyone who wishes to contribute to the Scenewash Project pages in ANY capacity to climb aboard, state your skills, your preferences for contribution, and don't be shyor silly in offering insights about improving a particular hierarchy of thought (but I'll be on guard against frivolous changes, and still hold rank as editor of the Project, but there's no length I'll not go to accommodate a genuine effort), and no doubt depending on the level of cooperation we may truly have to pass out menial tasks, so let's get rolling, there's more to the SWORG than this list...

I know we each have our pet projects. Time will rat us out, as to who is in this for the long haul, and who is merely coasting looking for a place to lodge a rant every now and then. No insults intended, but as Manus warned, a little caustic straight dope will be required if the SWORG is not to be back-burnered on a consistent basis. OK, Manus, how's that for putting on the ego and self-esteem? Ritz or no, I can puff up big time, brother, but the kindler, gentler side of this bull elephant is sensitive to disgusting extremes at times, and you tiptoed through some of that earlier.

TRACING THE ROOTS OF MY UMBRELLA

2007-09-20T19:41:00.000-04:00

Originally published on June 11, 1999

Peggy once held down that night auditor's job at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Peachtree back in the early Eighties. Every cuticle of horsepower in management and grunt services alike starting with the owner shined of gay blade, so Mother always referred to herself not as the token female (having owned that role before) but rather, the token straight, sharing a laugh with her accommodating lads. As a woman in struggle and a woman of breeding, she had always prided herself—the mother of a gay son, my youngest sibling—as someone of tolerance and empathy, however misguided as she often was.

In fact Mother was on the job when I took respite on her sofa at the Howell House a hundred steps away in the rather short GT-Ru Paul era after wheeling in from Corpus Christi, poor, thin, and desperate for my own artistic statement. Home was a sixth floor corner one bedroom apartment in that Midtown highrise, rentfree, straight up for acting as the senior-citizens coordinator in a building demographic just over 50% extremely geriatric.

The Ritz-Carlton graced Peachtree directly across the street from the fabulous and famous Fox Theatre, where "Gone With the Wind" premiered back in the 40s at the height of Hollywood glamour. Tucked into the corner of the hotel was the famed Alex Cooley's Electric Ballroom, now under new management and dubbed the Agora Ballroom. I never saw a show at either.

On the Fox side of the block only a parking lot and Third Street separated the elegantly ornate old theatre where I watched the moneyed classes pour into the streets after soaking up bands like the Stray Cats, the Go Gos and Elvis Costello. And me six flights up wishing and twitching I'd had the money to go, and accepting I'd missed the show, miffed I had no camera to mark the spatial moment of my desires.

Beautiful people playing ugly, ugly people playing beautiful, each marked for the glory of the times screaming bloody murder at the winds of freedom flung out to every dick and jane exercising a basic American youth ritual of bringing down a rock show, a right fought for and won about the time I was being born in 1955. But pacing along the sixth floor corner windows, I was blankly gazing, scoping, pinching myself, making assumptions, ripping roaring assumptions about these oddball and crazy people as they laughed and skipped and coughed and cursed, perched from on high was I. Never would I forget these images. Though I was young for my age, I was already 26. Though I was old for my age, I was only 26.

A heritage group had recently saved the Fox from demolition. The grand theatre, still in decent shape with a spit of glistening in her eye, yet aching for major repairs was then owned by a notorious porn mobster headed to jail who was threatening to bulldoze the landmark to spite the city as well as raise funds for his own empire quest. Rumor was Southern Bell wanted to erect another 'scraper on the spot.

One block west on Third and West Peachtree stood the 688 Club, the only only punk club in the city at the time. Punk as in cheap. Cheap tickets. Cheap beer. This was the only life I had for those six weeks rocking out on Jason and the Nashville Scorchers, as this powerful crew were originally called. The Georgia Satellites, as THEY were then known. Pylon. REM. The Swimming Pool Q's. Richard Hell. The Restraints. Punk and nasty. Thew nights bled into all night dream sessions quickening into stark frightening afternoons.

Fashionably thug ugly Chris Wood, the diabetic skinhead lead singer of the Restraints always squeezed off an insulin syringe into his bald skull at some spectacular point in a song during every show. He had a local hit single, an S&M ballad called Whacka Whacka Whacka, where he usually tried, and often successfully to pull a babe onto the stage for a whacking. When the fuss had ended, the girl in suburban clothing was scratched and torn, ass was bared. This was eyeball to eyeball punk rock Atlanta 1982-styled, pre-Genitorturers-GWAR-Mentors razorsharp breakout jones.

I heard through the Carol Reed grape I guess two years later, my first year in DC, that Wood had been convicted of murder, and was in prison for a long string, and that was that. Diabetes and minor rock stardom wasn't enough for this guy. He wanted more more more whacka whacka whacka. But true to the myth he was a soft-talking nice guy when we drank beers together at some jukebox bar in the area which offered up the Whacka single...

Pushing up skin on occasion a few more blocks up West Peachtree at the kindler, gentler, most quaint Bistro was a glitterpunk lesbian band called the Lipstick Stains. The L-Stains, along with another queer band called Weeweepole featuring a pre-drag Ru Paul jacked our jetsons once or twice a week, so the awakening had never been richer or more frivolous for me during my previously coarse life. Packing it up for the Lipstick Stains were three girlz & a boy who knew how to throw pajama parties at the Bistro, doing so with a flourish unique to the scene back in the day, and not a moment too soon as I began digging at the roots of my umbrella...

But that was then, this is now, so pray tell, what on God's green is going on between Matthew and Kubhlai? Does it concern me, GT, the SWORG, the changing of the guard, the seasons, my underwear, what?

Oh yes, I almost forgot, after a number of months, three, four maybe, the gay brigade eventually ran my mother off the job to replace her with another of an endless parade of fey boys. She was notably upset at the time, really digging the convenience and prestigious atmosphere of the office, but she shoved on, kept her senior-citizens duties at the Howell Howell for another couple of years or so, and is still kicking up the dust of all her detractors...

The gay mafia no doubt, like all special interest power groups, lives on...

[My mother does not.]

GT

THE SITUATIONISTS AT LARGE

2007-09-20T18:24:00.000-04:00

Originally published on November 12, 1997

I haven't been keeping up with these dudes since it became a book selling booth and then something's screwed up where I'm on the list twice (get everything twice) but can't respond or unsubscribe because of unexplained cosmic glitch. However, I decided to peek and see you getting mutilated by some humanoid. I can't say if I agree or disagree because I don't have the whole story but the hostility is acidic. I know, however, that you can take it and I'm sure you're just laughing on this.

Landry, I've thought about your newsgroup problem. How does this sound? Pick out what you find pertinent, disregarding the rest. Spud really doesn't monitor the newsgroup. It's automated. You signed up beaucoup months ago when you had another address. In order to UNSUBSCRIBE, you have to UNSUBSCRIBE with that same address. You get duplicates sometimes because I forward you stuff and the newsgroup forwards you the same stuff because you are still on the list. Your company E-mail server still accepts mail from your old address. Unsubscribe twice using both your current E-mail address and your former, then SUBSCRIBE afresh should you still be interested in receiving the list. Other than that I'm clueless. Yes, I am laughing, saddened by this sorry state of affairs, but laughing nevertheless. It's my only refuge.

I want to note that I believe that a lot of the people on this list or graduate students or something and am disappointed at the thin intellectual conversation spewing from their lip-fingers. How sad. I would love to get paid to spew. They don't know what they possess. Looks like academia is nothing more than a booksellers guild where they reshape sentences of sentences written about thinkers of the past. Who's doing the original thinking?

Not this crew. That is certain. I think I am wiggling towards the next wave of logic, but I can't get a word in edgewise. It's funny because I never mention g-o-d, but these people truly run for cover whenever I quote anything remotely Hebrew, even though I've tried to point out over and over again the wholesale ransacking and theft of the literature by Marx and Debord. Dead silence or the petty voice you quoted below is all these "great thinkers" can manage. Strange, I didn't receive that unsigned text. Maybe Spud has indeed axed me from the group.

Was Marx the highest point intellectual thought could attain? I keep waiting for the next thing, the next evolution on the food chain of an attempt to organize the human condition but I see only rehash rehash rehash. Art is rehashing cubism with slightly different variations. Literature is dancing around the macabre Faulkneresque trip into the dark side of family life with modern therapy heavy judgment thrown in. Music is nothing but push button computer masturbation.

Well, the "next" thing was Debord. Of this I am positive. A very good starting block for this clearinghouse of competing ideologies swarming around like angry hornets with an endless supply of stingers. However I seek not to clarify but to modify Debord, present a plan of action (or action by inaction) for which we stand. But of course these yahoos are too busy worshipping at the altar of Debord to ever "say" anything much less something of substance. It's the same numbing stagnation of thought they claim the spectacle creates and holds the world as hostage, that they practice. Duh, what a waste of fine godfodder, oops, I finally used the word.

Your text above describes what Debord was howling against. He was aware of the rehash, and wanted to "revolutionize" everyday life, but I believe he failed rather miserably*, just as Jesus** did in his own revolutionary pose (although his effects are as well-documented as this modern messiah***), but GODSEAK on the other hand IS very much alive conducting his press upon the stage of HISTORICAL TIME, a very very very Debordian phrase that seems to have only one meaning for all that I can uncover: the spark that leads to the Len Bracken generation's own personal civil war. Debord was an athiest; Bracken confesses the same.

Civil war is the great god they worship. Capitalism the devil. Their own historical time, their own dirty war in the name of the zeroworker theory interlaced with an abrupt dismissal of all things proprietary, a ridiculous idea of course betrayed by their own hypocrisies. I say, like Zachariah, the great and terrible day is coming in nuclear spades but woe to those who would wish for its arrival, especially to those by whose hands it is accelerated. Of course I am dismissed as a mere fool and a preposterous godlover. It seems to me they actualize, accentuate, and love the Great and Terrible Lord of Theosplatz more than I do, but that's just my opinion, uncouth, unhip as it is. The mark of the beast. The fall of mercantilism. No copyrights. No work. Hot BOG & BOR topics****, but all these wankers can do is strut about in their task to mark me as declasse. They claim a desire to elevate the man without quality but when I present a self-portrait of that very man without quality they attack me with strange wordy affairs contrary to the schematic of universal understanding, and sink into the abyss, well-deserved victims of their own quality.

Aaah, the wonders of the intellect . . .

A few notes:
* in his exclusionary practices
** in his inclusionary practices
*** in this case I see Debord as Barrabas, and still no messiah on the horizon.
**** BOG (Book of Genesis), BOR (Book of Revelation)

GT

"I see pieces of men marching trying to take heaven by force . . ."
-Bob Dylan

IS AYN RAND STILL RELEVANT?

2007-09-20T17:59:00.000-04:00

Orginally published on December 3, 1997

Jack and I bickered on and off which culminated in a ridiculous fight on Sunday. I was upset like I've never seen before; sobbing, vomiting. Of course, he says mean things and then ends discussion. Jack is more willing to sever ties with his closest relations than to admit he's "wrong." What he doesn't realize is that in any relationship (friendship, love, whatever) right and wrong don't mean much. It's all compromise and forgiveness and humility. I think I've finally come to terms with this. There is no way to fix it. He is malfunctioned. It still hurts me like no tomorrow. No sign that it bothers Jack. I don't think he really cares.

Ho hum. Yes, it "appears" Jack really doesn't care. He buzzes to a strong inner core that allows him to survive the petty trivialities of life like truth, honesty, genuine compassion for others outside the projection of his own gutteral desire and whimsy.

I realize that you've had to hear this crap for nearly two years. I realize that you may still think I'm singing the wolf song. Maybe. But, I've got a piece of space with a lesbian coworker and a straight simoan babe (who's into bondage/leather shit—your kinda woman). It sounds great. Low cost of rent which includes maid service. Great neighborhood. No lease. No credit check. I can get on my feet and hopefully have my own place within six months. I may even just take over the house eventually.

I haven't minded being there for you Landry. You have helped me by proxy in my struggle to regain what was lost in the floods of dead consciousness I'd embraced in the likes of that whole rock scene plus a heavy dose of messianic complex I in high confusion told myself I was influencing here in Washington DC. You helped me clarify the issues by holding a mirror to the exploitative flames I had finally resolved to escape after long being too weak with misplaced sympathy and unfocussed id gratification in the form of self-loathing to snuff out once and for all, and Jack's self-imposed exile helped accelerate just such an initiative for me to clean house, such were the powerful corrosions of these rather reluctant friendships and epiphanies. It took bold strokes of error-thwarting cross-examination over long agonizing months to reconstruct enough of that previous, more contented, abundant self I knew myself to be, was born to be and would die to recover, after being completely sucked dry of soul and self-respect by those who would call themselves my friends with their lies and their mayhem as I became in my public image the polar opposite of the original. These past two years have been a steady scratching at the blackboard of independence as I have sought a return to the finer intelligence of my youth, my own strong and moral twenties, an intelligence I carved up into tiny pieces and flung to the winds of aggressive discord and poisonous irresponsibility in my thirties as I lived through the dark storms of personality presenting themselves to me as cool, hip, and aimless reaction when in fact I had been fooled into living FOR others, and not FOR myself, and have as a result drunk and eaten myself into the cloaked miseries of poor health and civil oblivion. Jack however has mastered selfishness, perhaps is even hardwired for it, but instead of using this mastery of self for good he seeks the evil path and manipulates others less savvy with the methods of selfishness to prop himself up in all his own imaginary glory. Allow me to quote from Ayn Rand:

"You think the world is essentially a mixture of good and evil, and one must compromise with the evil, and you're sick of that, so you're giving up the world? Nonsense. Evil, by definition (if we have made the right definition), is the impotent, the impractical, the powerless, that which does not work. So it is no threat to us, it cannot stand in our way - unless we permit it and help it to do so. It cannot poison the world for us - unless we carry the poison and spread it. The parasites cannot exploit us or rule us - unless we voluntarily agree to be exploited and hand them the tools with which to rule us.

"Let us withdraw the tools. . .

"We permit it, and we have suffered this long, for one essential reason: the generosity of the creator. It is our nature that we wish to give, prodigally, recklessly, because we know the source - our creative energy - is inexhaustible. Being self-sufficient, we cannot conceive of dependence, so we are modest in relation to others, we never think we are indispensible to them or superior, because we do not consider THEM indispensible or superior to us. We act as equals toward equals - and an exchange between equals is a proper, natural activity. We are glad to give because our creation is a discovery or embodiment of truth and when others respond to truth we welcome their response, we are happy - not because of the good that it does THEM, not because their approval gives us pleasure or is of any importance to us - but because their response is a victory for truth, that what we welcome is their entrance into OUR world, into that world we know to be good and true.

"We see no danger in giving - we think we're giving to men as rich as we are; we think of it as gifts not alms. And whenever we come up against an inferior - that he is an inferior is the hardest thing for us to believe; we see the evidence and we think it is a misunderstanding or a temporary misfortune that has affected the man; then we throw ourselves to the rescue, we give, we help, we let him lean on us and bleed us, we carry him - 'why not?' - we say, we are so strong, we have so much to spare. We are incapable of conceiving of the parasite's mind, so we can never understand him. We are incapable of hatred or malice. We will not accuse or reason - and we can't find the cause, since we can't understand him. So we become helpless and bewildered before him. We never accuse him, no matter what he does to us. He yells that we are selfish, cruel, tyrannical by reason of the very abundance and magnificence of our talents. And we almost come to believe this. 'Almost' - because no power on earth can really make us believe this; we are men of truth, we cannot fall that far into lying; and since our talents, our creative energies, are our sacred possessions, the source of our joy for living, we cannot permit so great a sacrilege against them."

"We allow ourselves to become torn. In a vague, unstated, indefinable way, we begin to feel we must atone for something, make amends to someone, pay someonefor something in some manner. What? We don't know. We can never know. We refuse to admit to ourselves the truth in a clear statement: that we are being damned for the best within us, and that the creature making the accusation is small, inferior, and truly evil. We are generous, and do not pronounce such a judgement upon a fellow human being. Hatred and anger are unnatural to us; contempt for a human being is totally unnatural to us, perhaps impossible - because we think and act as if we were dealing with men, and it is not proper to despise men, we are worshippers of man, because WE are men and this is the logical implication of our self-reverence. One's opinion of mankind comes from one's opinion of oneself, which is the only first-hand knowledge of man one can have. The man who respects himself, will carry the respect to his species, to others. The man who despises himself, with good reason, carries the contempt, the malice, the hatred, the suspicion to all humanity. We, the creators, cannot conceive of this. We are bewildered by the parasite's malice - we do not even recognize it as malice, because we don't really know malice.

"But so long as, for any reason, we do not recognize the truth - we are bound to fail and to suffer in the whole sphere and in all our actions where we have left this truth unrecognized. Our generosity is a good motive? NOTHING is good if it motivates lying, falsehood, or evasion. There is no morality except in an unbending, absolute recognition of the truth, in relation to everything; an absolute will to find, face, and grasp the truth, to the utmost of our capacity, then to act upon it. Nothing is moral but this cold, ruthless, rational pursuit. But we have not faced or recognized the truth about the parasites - so we fail, we're helpless, we're disarmed, and they've got us. Did they win over us? No, we won the battle for them. They rule the world? No, we handed it over to them. The guilt is ours, but not in the way they think; in the exact opposite way. The guilt is that we refused to see the truth about ourselves and about them."

The preceding few paragraphs are fetched from THE JOURNALS OF AYN RAND (Dutton, 1997) pages 399-401. While Rand is often a bit too pretentiously black and white, she offers a wide berth of gray as her lengthy journal characterizations of personalities from her two major novels, THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED attest. She admits imperfection, her superman is a cold human being, a product of severe intellect and resolve, but worldly success is hardly the criteria for recognizing this true man. She is unabashedly anti-collectivism and opposed to such mundane concepts as self-sacrifice and herd instinct, of course, having been sharpened by the catastrophic blades of Soviet Russia in its rush toward dialectic materialism, escaping to America in 1926.

Writing in 1946, Rand continues to plot her book, suggesting that the great minds, the individual genius, the prime movers should go on strike:

"This last form of striking always happens when gifted men find themselves in a morally corrupt society. And such a society is always collectivist, or on its way to collectivism, because morality and individualism are inseparable. The degree of individualism in a society determines its degree of morality. In effect, the gifted men find themselves dealing with men and conditions THEY DO NOT WISH TO DEAL WITH. So they do one of three things: (1) they do not function at all and become drifting, aimless bums; (2) they function in some field other than their peoper one, and produce only enough for their own sustenance, refusing to let the world benefit from their surplus energy; or (3) they function in their proper field but produce less than one-tenth of their actual capacity - it is a strained, unhappy, forced effort for them with their disgust against the conditions under which their energy has to function."

As you can see she, like all fingerpointers and none of us can claim to be otherwise, muddies the puddle of clear passionate labels soon enough. It's like the biblical metaphor that JC will return as an avenging lion, while at the same time, we are informed that archrival Lucifer not only presents himself as an angel of light as if he were some passive lamb or man of peace but that he too, is a roaring lion out to ruin men's best intentions. How in damnation are WE MERE MORTALS supposed to figger out who is playing what field and when?

I get home. Jack ignores me. He is playing Nintendo, empty bowls in the sink. His appetite, his life, all unphased. I realize: he doesn't give a fuck. I do the bills in the bedroom, my stomach in knots. I try to talk to him but I am the recipient of grudge silence. Jack would rather sever his arm rather than apologize to it. I think: I have no enemies. I have never stopped talking to somone—not even ex lovers. Jack has turned his back on you, Gabe, and others I'm sure I don't know about with not so much as a sniff. Less than two years in SF and he already has a list of people he does not talk to. This is wrong. I don't understand it.

It's unfair to characterize Jack as a thoroughbred parasite. But let's not mince words or hide behind veils of superficial morality. Let's call a liar a liar. Jack certainly fails the truth and honesty test when it comes to pure genius, preferring to mindfuck and aggravate his closest friends while sucking up to the famed and the fortuned as an extension of his own greater self, a role I too embraced in those awful years of socially incompatible boredom unleashed upon the worthless rock scene of noise pebbles and strutting egos. But I differ from Jack. He hides behind the facade or the appearance of not needing others, proud in his aloof aloneness but he truly can't survive without the social contact of the scene. I meanwhile parade around in a foul attempt to need everybody when really I am quite uncomfortable with people of any scene (with the possible exception of my wife), and prefer my aloneness, and feel self-worth only when alone, an escape from the weariness of conflict inevitable with the approach of the smug and the self-satisfied.

Oftentimes the philosophical canvas of well-mapped minds seems painted in pure black and pure white rhetorically-enhanced pigments, but Rand is quite robust in flushing out the multitudes of gray failures in her vibrant palette of undisguised potential. She writes of the trickle down "theory of greatness in practice" long before the writers for Herr Reagan took up the mantle, using these words:

"On the basis of this beginning, the story proceeds like this: The prime movers say to the world, in effect: "You hate us. You don't want us. You put every obstacle in our way. Very well - we'll stop. We won't fight you or bother you. We'll merely stop functioning. We'll stop doing the things you martyr us for. AND SEE HOW YOU LIKE IT. The complete statement of the strike's objective is this: We have had enough of your exploitation, persecution, insults, stealing, and expropriation. Go ahead and try to exists without us. We will not come back until you recognize and acknowledge the truth of the matter. Until you admit what we are, give us full credit for what we do, and give us full freedom from your chains, orders, restrictions, and encroachments - physical, spiritual, political, and moral. Until you accept a philosophy that will leave us alone to function as we please. Until you take your hands off us - and keep them off. We ak nothing but the freedom to work and live as we please. You will get gifts and benefits from us such as you can never imagine. But you will not get them until you leave us alone . . ."

I'm kind of afraid of his recent behavior. I feel that if left untreated, it could turn into physical abuse. I feel that he is trying to alienate me from other people. The first step in physically abusive relationships. However, I don't think Jack is the kind of person to hit women. You would have told me that if so, I think. I think he's too lazy for that. I do not like the person he's made me become. It sucks. It hurts. It's no fun. It's pathetic. I am not me. I hate him. I never thought anyone could be so, so selfish. He doesn't seem human to me. How sad for him to be so gripped in the terror of not winning; of being wrong to be willing to toss aside EVERYONE. It really creeps me out. I look at him and think, he really doesn't get it. It's so very sad.

I'm not sure where this leads us in the matter at hand, Lynn. Most of us tend to see ourselves in the best possible light, or the worst. More typically, we flipflop on a rather consistent basis. This is our weakness. Nobody MAKES us flipflop. In our laziness and our weakness we think in terms of whatever suits our purposes of the moment, and adopt circular tautologies which reassure us that our past has no relationship to our present, unless of course we can glorify or punish ourselves as a helpless nonsensical victim of our past. That is the great lie we tell ourselves. Even Ayn Rand overestimates the ability to succinctly reverse the biological powers of entrenched thinking. We train ourselves to be weak and useless by referring to our decent motivations as signs of our goodness, of our moral strength, of our willingness to sacrifice. Piffle, irrelevant associations of the assaulted mind, useless in the arena of real activity. This trench warfare of oscillating between momentary truths rather than relying upon rational convictions is where we continually make our mistakes. And these mistakes, like firebrand molecules of self-destruction attach themselves to other mistakes, and we are rendered more weak and more useless than we were a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. Each detail of our psychology and our intellect, each philosophical concept and practical action must be analyzed on an individual basis, just as we wish to be anlayzed on an individual and not a collective, herdlike, stereotypical basis.

No doubt you still cling to Jack for the very same traits which inspired you in the first place. But you are not the same person anymore. You have been stripped of something precious, now replaced by the revolting chaos of petty lies, failed opportunities, and habitual belittlement slopping over from the other, as you struggle to bring order to that collectivism which is a relationship. It is probably a one-sided trade because of the competing natures involved. Because you are a doer, and not a mere parasite, you have inherited only the foreign, the unbridled unashamed chaos of the other. The excitement, the expansive thrill, and most importantly, even the quiet joy of living, you already possessed. The other would not, or could not add to that in any estimable portion. The basic problem with Jack, discounting his intrinsic dishonesty, is that he does not progress in the world of life and liveliness past the old thrills of adolescence. He remains a stagnated nullifying personality. Rather than change his life he changes the people in his life so that his fringe perspective can be dished out afresh, as progress is gained only in the turnover of faces and places, and he can tell himself and these new ears all the stories his multitude of "friends" and "locales" have helped him build in a world of illusive success in the eyes of others. It is these traits that keep Jack from dwelling at the far ends of the spectrum and deep into the gray of the mundane world as his genius is wasted on his desire to remain a "pampered" child, a desire I simply cannot fully comprehend, since responsibility and harsh realities were rudely thrust upon me and my organizational mind at a very early age.

This remains your call, Landry. Few of us are pure evil. Jack is not that much fun beneath the surface, but he's not pure evil either. However, let me acquaint you with the idea that the brain, the organ of the mind is indeed as valid in terms of physical flesh as the face or the arm, and is quite capable of being physically abused. A face wound might heal in a few days. A brain wound may never be healed if the thinking process is cajoled into repeated faulty reasoning while in mortal combat with an opponent who will stop at nothing to cloud the issue and win at any cost to truth and integrity.

I am the most dispicable of all creatures because I have lived through every evil of ethics and cvility in both postulate and axiomatic form. I have skinned every thought, and boiled every skin. I have been prowled when I had no chance to win. I transformed myself into a preditor when I had no opportunity to lose. I have always known the difference between the two, but nobody I have ever known has possessed the power to listen beyond the first few syllables, and so I've even had to admit for the sake of the herd, that I am indeed nothing but a mute with a speech impediment.

GT

STEINWAY AT TIFFANY'S ON THE ROAD

2007-09-20T16:39:00.000-04:00

Originally published on February 3, 1997

Andy Schoengold wrote to Martine on Landry's list, "It's not Gertrude Stein that said "That's not writing, it's typing." It was Truman Capote and I believe it reffered to Jack Kerouac. I've addressed this to everyone on the list just to make you feel that much more embarrassed.

Of course, I couldn't restrain myself from piling on, "Andy's absolutely right on all counts. I was gonna clean that up but since
I hardly knew you, I passed on the opportunity. However, in Andy's case, I think both Gertrude and Truman, given the chance, may have said of Andy's blurb that it was poor typing since he misspelled referred" Jack Kerouac on the other hand, might have opined of Andy's writing, that it should have been written reefered.

GT

"Don't ask me nuthing about nuthing, I just might tell you the truth."
—Bob Dylan

VERMONT STREET INTUITIONS

2007-09-20T15:51:00.000-04:00

Originally published on February 24, 1997

Thanks for the gracious input. Nothing too grim. Saw Tim this weekend, partied with him after chasing around northern VA all afternoon and early evening looking for a batting cage with Steve and Suzy. He's got a new place up in NW, a rather typical sparsely furnitured male group house with Tim in the basement stocked with his own kitchenette and private entrance, paying less money than he was doing here according to Steve. I was so drunk by the time we got there I don't even remember where it was, but it was near U Street, 11th, maybe. The boy's finally hit the big time without the safety net of parents or parental surrogates. It was good to see him. Below is an excerpt I wrote just last week in response to a query from Peter Burris, another early but now somewhat distanced while still supportive pal of Tim's...

I will express my opinions on this matter within the context of the Dollhouse Fevers serial. In fact, you are the primary cause of the serial. You were the first to write me for details, or perspective on what happened, and I wanted to give you a clear unambiguous assessment of the whole event, those details directly leading up to, and those details only peripherally inclined, that made the January 2 Dollhouse coup a necessity. Eight parts. I'll resend the first two tonight, and include my commentary on your EVIL piece. Hopefully I will write the third installment this weekend.

And may the force be with you to RECEIVE, and thus read ALL. Meanwhile, keep the faith, and toss out the baskets. I don't know how you think we saved Tim's life. He paid his own way, but then he paid for his own departure as well. A little hint at the future: I'm not angry at Tim in the traditional sense. I was just frustrated that my mark on him was as shallow as warm backwash in a cold beer can. His influence on me was greater than my influence on him. THAT was not a good thing ...

Namely, I've cut back drastically on my alcohol intake, although my eating habits have not diminished so I really haven't followed in your path enough to boast a substantial weight loss. Meanwhile just keeping busy, feeling better about life. Have not heard a peep from Julianna, but I didn't expect too much from her, even after I e-mailed a couple of times alerting her that I hadn't found a Johnny Cash CD she’d let me know she left without, and then again when I did find and subsequently send it back by post. But anywaze, while painful as the event might seem at first glance, it was a good riddance purge of all clutter and ingratitude that kept me in high spirits, and now that Tim and I have at least reconciled to a degree, I have nothing to gain by pressing anger in any direction.

As I said, I wanted to write this narrative because that's what writers do, they write. I write. I detect and analyze every detail of my life. This may not make me a healthy well-adjusted personality (recalling our recent exchange on that topic), but then I gave up on that flimflam years ago, and simply embrace the spirit that drives me. Some might see it as evil incarnate, or barely functional escapism. Others just don't give a shiver. Meanwhile it was good to discover only this past Saturday that Tim had indeed landed exactly where we would have wanted him, upon his own two feet accepting responsibility for himself.

GT

OF FEATHERS AND STRIPES

2007-09-20T15:40:00.000-04:00

I watched a presentation on PBS on depression and one interviewed therapist said that people who suffer from depression actually have a very accurate picture of themselves and the world around them. It's the one's who are happy who are deluding themselves. I thought this in terms of hammers and nails, since it's the happy people who tell you that you aren't normal and to cheer up and all that crap.

Ever since then, when I get down or frustrated or whatever I just think, “HEY, I'M THE ONE BEING REALISTIC. YOU, GET THAT SILLY GRIN OFF YOUR FACE. YOU'RE MISERABLE. FACE FACTS. I DID.”

It is also notable that the depressed drips among us who really know what's going on are given medication to stop them from being realistic! I'm not sure where to even GO with this line of thinking but all of it really disturbs me. Although, it makes me think that the people who use recreational drugs to "escape" reality probably have a real handle on things and those who choose not to escape are really messed up.

I also think that other people don't mind that certain folks are miserable. They just don't want to have to deal with it so if you hold it in and suffer your pain all by yourself, that's okay. However, if your bucket of pain gets full and you shoot up a post office, it's a problem. I say, vent it. Better to just punch a wall now and then or kick all the people out of your house than to shop the ammo section of an Arlington KMart and saunter off to happy hunting grounds.

On the other hand, how realistic is it for one to EVER think oneself responsible for the dingbats and wingnuts of the whole stinking world, moonlighting on some pedestal, self-annointed or otherwise, as some holy roller savior of billions, pocketing millions, or maybe not a dime, but nevertheless fainting and feigning lockjawed over that brother's keeper line of reasoning? Steve Taylor often has said he could care less for ANYBODY save his small circle of friends and his family. Worth noting. Hence, a generally happy outlook because he has relieved himself of a responsibility no one can shoulder realistically anyhow.

In this case, the sad eyed prophet is the delusional one who frets over the world's problems UNREAListicall, injuring himself in the process. But undiluted self-interest is as bogus as the converse. So the paradox remains. Is the algebra of happiness a reality marked by self-interest, or is the algebra of reality simply the starting gate for all unhappiness. In others words, might thinkers always think themselves into unhappiness, despite any slant given to the freedom of individuality? After all, paradoxes like nature, abhor a vacuum...

HIT THE ROAD, JACK

2007-09-20T15:29:00.000-04:00

Originally published on February 12, 1997

Susanne was a pretentious whiny mess, but I tell you what, Jack always finds a way to look really stupid and callous in the way he treats his relationships. But then again, this is me talking, and after 40 years of loving everybody with a howdy doo I now seem to find everybody a miserable waste of life force, especially those who go by the name of friend. Kerouac debatably wrote the first great modern friendship story. I must be writing the story of what a gross clusterfuck friendship can really turn out to be...

Sorry Jack didn't work out. He simply doesn't care beyond the next energy burst. He's always just an upbeat away from another potential friend, that easy touch. Having nothing and doing nothing seems to present him with that advantage. I think Jesus said something to that effect. But Jack rides the great dragon of lies. He tells an outrageous lie when a simple truth would get him closer to his mark than the fiction ever could, but, hey, that's Jack's security blanket it seems. Lie until it hurts, and then make up new ones. I've known him a decade now, and oh well...

Been working with Photoshop Actions batching routines today. WOW! What a wonderful feature. I can convert whole folders of say, a hundred TIFF grayscale graphics into JPGs, add a tint, resize, blur to smooth out edges, and save at a certain resolution, ALL BY FIRST HAVING PHOTOSHOP RECORD MY ACTIONS DURING ONE, and then executing for all the others. To watch one's computer open up files, add tints, resize, save into specified folder, close, and then open the next one is simply what power computing is all about!!! Then I simply grab that folder, and drop it onto a namechanging shareware program I recently picked up and it will standardize all the filenames—operations that I used to spend hours, days, even weeks hardclicking now accomplished in minutes. Sweet Macintosh!

GT

HOW RICH YOUR TEXT IS

2007-09-20T15:24:00.000-04:00

Originally published on February 6, 1997

Leave the bastard. Kick him out into the fruity liasons of territories still in contention. That seems to be all Jack can produce of himself. Man I greive for all the potential Jack could possibly manage yet continues to fuck up. You know, the first time we ever met, when he said he wished he could be like me...

I now suppose he was right, once upon a time. I am me, he ain't.

That was some strong detail you suffered, baby. Jack is a real ass, I'm sorry. Frankly I love you, not him, although Gene Wilcox and I were just watching Jack coordinate a video shoot we watched blah blah...and still recognize the power of Jack's presence...

I'm not only tired, I'm on the tail end of an 18 hour drunk. Gene Wilcox, who thinks, argues thinking he is, but ultimately agrees that I not he is the baby Jesus, is still here passed out on the couch...

GT

LOVE SHAFTS AND DEBAITED MARBLES

2007-09-20T15:20:00.000-04:00

Originally published on February 5, 1997

Hate Jack if you gotta (you'll have to stand in line, as I've noted I was there first), but a world without relationships, or a world without men, ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Despite all my clamor, and the recent dismissal of two of my supposedly closest friends after what was to be a very happy holiday turned to mud, I have always and will always yearn for the trusting, giving, mutually satisfying relationship, on either level, friendshipping or loveresque. I've always desired what I've understood as the near perfect union of Will and Ariel Durant, authors of that multivolumed set of THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION.

Won't burden you with the details here as you may already know the tale, but they really set the standard for all time. The other (one I'm seriously considering) is the 12th love tragedy of Abélard and Heloise. Yes, I'm thinking of castration, end of lust, fixation on the feminine, more energies my own to simply work out the philosophies I know the world needs to hear JUST ONE MORE TIME (claim to fame?)

Glad to hear you're back in the saddle (the workplace, not Jack's cockadoodledoo). I was beginning to worry about you.

GT

LANDRY'S FROZEN HOLIDAY

2007-09-20T15:16:00.000-04:00

Landry, "I turn 32 in fucking Minneapolis. Think I'll get laid?"

Just don't lick a frozen pole...

Lounged on the sofa ALL DAY today hoping to kick this mess, but here it is half past five and the congestion is rolling in like a Candlestick fog. My throat from coughing and my ears from ringing hurt the way a whore hoarse on frozen poles might hurt. Snot and phlegm bug me still, and the type is fuzzy on the screen, so my eyes have conspired as well, but I had to finally get up and move around.

Have fun in the tundra, girl. I've heard second only to SF, Minneapolis is the the capital city among the pink and the proud. And happy birthday. Age is a good thing when youth gets lost in its own reflection...

NUMBER THEORY

2007-09-20T15:13:00.000-04:00

Originally published pn January 14, 1997

Thanks Landry for the personal update. Been swamped with Bracken's biography of Guy Debord, that Situationist International revolutionary Frenchy fellow I've namedropped a few times in your direction. A decent book I must say, if only because it is the first so-called biography in ANY language of this rather famous dialectician, according to its author, although Greil Marcus writes about him extensively in LIPSTICK TRACES, a book with which I believe you are somewhat familiar.

Still haven't even begun to compose the New Year's Day, the Day After Massacre tale of Tim, Julianna, Steve and all the 1980s throwbacks, but it's right there waiting for me when I get my breath back from Bracken. Ninety-nine photos have been scanned, 400 pages of text converted from Windows to Mac, and all laid carefully into PageMaker.

Currently busy proofreading with an interested eye; although I loathe the man's politics, his philosophical insights are pure poetry. Beaucoup typos, misspellings, missing words, et cetera, so gotta keep my eye on the ball. I also designed the cover. Bracken's hip to it, so all things are hunky dorey. Will get paid (underpaid but satisfied) and appropriate acknowledgements.The publisher is Feral Books, currently of Portland, Oregon soon to be moving to sunny LA. Whew! Be glad when all this REAL WORK is behind me...

GT

WHERE ARE YOU SLEEPING?

2007-09-20T15:05:00.000-04:00

Orginally published on February 22, 1997

I sent this to Steve earlier this morning. Just to tide you over until I can focus on DAY 2 of the Fevers...

In other words, what is your current address? All I've got is that Taft Street number sequence. This morning early, after waking up in a fit of harrumph from an intrusive dream starring the "bar none kidz" Tim & Julianna, yes, after listening to them prattle on about how much they didn't appreciate this and that about how badly I treated them last month...of course Julianna was doing most of the chat while bringing out the PERQUACKY gameboard she wanted to engage with Tim, while strong silent type Tim was in the kitchen elbowing Sue in helping himself to the coffeemaker...

...I got busy in the wee scratching out postcards, postcards I threw together a couple of years ago on heavy stock with various old and contemporary photos of me, and of me AND Suzy, all embossed with a typical GT crytic title. Thought I'd send you one since I'd already addressed and stamped a batch, knowing you'd probably appreciate the younger Mohican Gabriel you may have missed.

...back to the dream. The "bar none kidz" had arrived at the back door together wanting to make amends, which in their vernacular, was to point out my unprovoked rudeness. At one point Julianna blurted out that she wanted the money she had spent on me returned, uh, she bought me a hamburger at Ruby Tuesday's on Monday's field trip to the shopping Mall (oops, that part of the story hasn't been written in blood yet!), and she came bearing a bottle of champagne the Saturday she arrived, but that pretty much sums up to the penny (well, gasoline to drive down) the whole of Julianna's financial support in 12 years of Dollhouse maneuvers. I told her to forget it, no way, no mula. How about her share in the $500 bucks we plunked down for limo, booze, and food when she was here?

She backed off with the wince of an illegal immigrant. Uh, geez, and I thought she knew how to make an argument. At one point I grabbed her in a bear hug, and walked her upright to the backdoor, but as soon as she was free she rocketed off on how she didn't appreciate being manhandled that way, and besides she hadn't played her game yet. In my drippiest sarcasm I mock the easily offended sensibilities of a woman scouring the AOL gutters as a submissive painseeking thrill artist while shoving this big fat lie of forever love up the ass of somebody she has known way to long to shaft like this. Meanwhile Tim is grumbling in the kitchen in his best Rodney King, "Can't we just get along" reasoning. I had finally had enough. I go beserk, trumpeting all arms akimbo:

"Wait a damn minute. I tossed both of you out of here, and I haven't invited either of you back and from the general sniff of things nor do I intend to, and yet here you are, making yourselves quite at home. Tim, get OUT of my kitchen! Julianna, PUT that board down. It's not even mine. It's Steve's..."

That's about the gist of it. I grabbed her up again and was making my way to the backdoor since she had once again adopted the diningroom table as her podium, before I woke from the sofa. Sharing this whole cinematic reel du force with Sue just a few minutes ago, with the summation that as bizarre as the dream sequence was, unfortunately, there's not much distortion in that version from what we both imagine, knowing them as symptomatically as we do, in how Tim and Julianna could waltz in proud as peacocks to the beat of their own hummer humming...

I allow myself to feel a slight remorse that I pushed the envelope of no return by taking a stick to old friends, but like your own proverbial red-face, it flushes and soon passes. Reality is indeed a wicked business, full of overloads, overlords, and understudies. Marsh grasses, foggy bottoms, and tricks of the trade. But even in the beer league one plays to win.

Guess Day 2 of the Six Day fever is overdue, but to borrow a phrase, I'm playing it by ear, having too much fun tweaking the nipples on my Macintosh laptop, my dream dancer...

GT

PING PING PING

2007-09-20T14:37:00.000-04:00

Orginally published on February 26, 1997

Yes, it's official! Actually sometime early last week I got my rejection notice from City Paper stating both the editing and design jobs had been filled but please try again in the future.

By the way, I really appreciated your comments the other day about the Dollhouse Fevers serial. That rather dry response I muscled out did not really indicate the true boost to my spirits your encouraging words sparked. To the point, I've noticed an ample loss in energy that obviously relates to your comments...

"boy, I am really enjoying this. I know it is the telling of a true trauma tale of friendship gained and lost, but as a piece of writing it is absolutely wonderful. I await Day 3."

...in that after writing on the topic I collapse, physically drained, numb in body and spirit. Surely a strong indication of the intensely personal nature of the writing, knowing that those persons being profiled no doubt will read the very words which could only drive the wedge between us even deeper than the events discussed.

Trust things are have gelled on the homefront. While visiting with Steve this weekend at his local watering hole in Philadelphia, he blurted out that he had been carrying on this secret E-mail campaign with you. I suspected as much. That was as far as the revelation went, but it followed on the heels of his patented rata-tat-tat speedwhiz monologue which on this occasion was employed to explain that he wasn't addicted to alcohol, oh no, but that he was addicted to irresponsibility.

Ping ping ping—the roll call of topics zing past faster than even a sober mind can retain—without rhyme or reason—ping ping ping—life has a way of explaining itself under the influences of irresponsibility. But enough of all that. While writing this I've been watching Ricki Lake gushing at the surprise baby shower thrown in her honor, hosted by Joan Lunden. John Waters was there, gifts and videoconferenced goo goo...

GT

REVIEW: GUY DEBORD, REVOLUTIONARY

2007-09-20T13:59:00.000-04:00

Originally published on January 31, 1997

I'm glad I went into detail. I checked my database. November 14 was the transition date from Big Al to the current notation.

You asked for editorial comments on "GUY DEBORD - Revolutionary" by the indefatigable Len Bracken. I have not forgotten, and was quite pleased that you asked for details of my impressions, so I suppose I should lay in a few lines on the topic right here, seeing as life is settling down again for me, and shorter than a thrice-used candlestick.

Considering the Situationist International's (SI) big cheese was, by revolutionary and philosophical necessity, a subterranean conspiracy veiled in secrecy, trapped in a state of chaos by idiosyncracies leaning toward an accelerated paranoia and strong diva tendancies, the volume was a decent read for the first biography ever written about the man (vested propoganda offered as fact by Len) in English. Especially for newcomers to Guy Debord and the SI. I was surprised by the general sense of objectivity in handling the material, having presumed Bracken to be a terminal sycophant of Debord as philosopher king of the whole romanticized SI movement.

I was able to argue plainly and successfully my objections with Len to the man and the philosophy based on details the book offered over the last week of proofing and finalizing the 420 page manuscript. The author's style was rather straightforward, his voice almost non-existent, a minor flaw in the book as I pointed out to Len.

As any serious reader might be, I was plagued with the question, who is this Len Bracken fellow of few daylight credentials? Again, I emphasize, this was no ordinary bio, given the secrecy of the subversive material and its originators, so much of the narrative is speculative and heresay. Debord's two wives are still alive, intellectuals in their own right, and yet were not interviewed personally by the biographer.

And while Bracken's bibliography and footnotes are extensive, this dependency on so much second and third hand information will no doubt register as a flaw with serious reviewers. Historical threads of Debord's intellectual ancestors are woven rather seamlessly into the cloth of the story, while personal anecdotes from behind the scenes are perhaps in short number. By the end of the volume I had gained probably for the first time ever a respect for both the biographer and the subject, while still disdaining the ultimate outcome of such a philosophical stance. Debord was a tyrant and a romantic. He carved up friendships with bold sweeping strokes. (Hmmm, something I might actually respect in the man given my own circumstances.)

Bracken indeed proved himself capable of putting flesh and flaw onto the man and the myth, much to the book's advantage. To his credit, Bracken's usual bluster and misplaced pomposity (Bracken's Breath) that this was a book that will be read for 500 years fortunately was kept out of the pages, and I could only plead in a feeble GT grit and grunt that my own ears had not been spared the oft repeated utterance, no doubt a trumped up cry for respect of a very needy author and personality.

I had to insist repeatedly that I was no cheerleader type, no empty flatterer, a symptom of my childhood no less, but that my comments were sincere and as comprehensive as I could make them. It was a roller coaster ride around here, but I think we did a pretty damn good job on the proofing, the layout, and an unbias review of the material. Could he not just leave it at that? Needless to say, I was not sad to see that job finished, and a satisfied Bracken wheeling out the door.

I am promised another $250 plus two copies of the finished product to add to the original $500. One can only speculate if I'll ever see either. Small press insecurities chewed at Len persistently over the month we worked together. Adam Parfrey is not intentionally a fly by nighter, but the Feral House Books wing span ain't exactly an eagle's badge of honor either...

GT

BACK IN THE SADDLE

2007-09-20T13:51:00.000-04:00

Originally published on January 31, 1997

I am forwarding these two recent notes I sent to Steve (who has been remarkably steady in recent days after months of little to say), only because since I've been so busy and completely absorbed by Bracken's project my own e-mail generation had dropped to almost nothing. I didn't want you to think I had blown you off or anything as vulgar or self-preserving like that.

Quite the contrary. I've been feeling guilty and depressed that you've written interestingly on several topics that I failed to engage because of my current workload, while simultaneously neglecting my own hefty writing project describing those sordid details of the changing of the guard here at the Dollhouse.

Steve meanwhile weighed in with his interest in hearing more about the book project. You did not, but hey, you certainly caused a stir at the Situationist camp a few weeks back that I thought you might still appreciate a few details while they were still warm in the oven.

After a month of working diligently for someone else I had a few general Mac housekeeping chores to manage, a major crash to weather, and I am now on my eighth day of flu sickness without antibiotic calvary persuading me that the end of this misery is yet in sight. So I face the hiss and boos of the faceless crowd as I admit that still the first line of the "Great Storm" ending 1996 has yet to find its way to page, although this Sunday, Groundhog's Day will mark the first month's anniversary of Tim and Julianna's exile from the Dollhouse fevers.

Speaking of anniversaries, what day exactly do you turn 31 in all your sass and bosomly anthem? Have you managed to seduce a frozen Swede onto your corporate tab? Would you tell me if you did? You wouldn't be pulling a Jack, now would you Landry, all bathed in secret lights and bold rationalizations while flogging community standards with one hand tied behind your back and the other on a stack of sci-fi novels, with nothing but your feet and your mouth to accomplish the dirty deeds, now would you Landry?

Of course I jest with you, but you know as well as I do that in the eye of the hurricane, few details are lost. It's out there on the swirl that conflict states its name and bends the rules to suit its own game. But have a swell Minnesota memory. Nothing lasts forever, not even a Green bay Packers grin....

WHEW! IT'S OVER!

2007-09-20T13:48:00.000-04:00

Originally published on January 22, 1997

Well, it's finally finished. The Debord book is packed off to Portland. Took data to service bureau to have my Syquest media converted to Zip, and printed out a color proof of the cover. Nearly a month's worth of work is in the can. Now I can address what happened over New Year's, settle back into my own themes, but first I need to awaken afresh. I am tired, needing a night's rest. Tomorrow I shall begin the prologue promised those long brackenish weeks ago. The details will no doubt seem shallow now, since most of you no doubt have struck conversations of some sort or another with the exiled in the meantime, but I am urged by inner demons and outer banks of fair recoil to capture the essence of my own perspectives. Thus I presume all of you are still interested in hearing these details, despite their tardiness, free from kneejerk but far from the thunder of that distant hour.

GT

COMPLAINT AS A YELLOW VEGETABLE

2007-09-20T13:36:00.000-04:00

Originally published on January 8, 1997

Landry, Landry, Landry, Landry, Landry...

Yesterday you were giving DC the fat finger of ho! ho! ho! I love my California lifestyle, and a mere 24 later it's I miss the things California can't even begin to hug.

I can sympathize, but from where I sit, stifled in a room in which I cannot trust another, it's either Steve dropping beers, Tim squawking about what a good boy he is, or Suzy, a mere voyeur, nary a creator among them sweating me out, and in the midst of all this east coast fog in some variation of Tourettes, I suddenly swear on a stack of thunderbolts that your busty orbit must be a thousand increments swifter than this slow comet to nowhere sane I ride.

No sex, no friends with whom I share a commiseration, no freaking inspiration but my own irredeemable past no one else can even appreciate due to generational bias or just plain selfishness. Even Len Bracken's $500 publishing job is beginning to run its course. He said he wanted to learn PageMaker, but it's me putting his book together one drop cap at a time. But that's okay. That five bill windfall blows away all but Suzy's saintly efforts these past few years as I've worked for free so long I hardly know how to break with the "tis better to give than receive" dead end trail of “do unto others before they do unto you” routines smothering me into a gray soul of nothingness ventured these past thirteen DC years that I have finally agreed to despise for the trouble they really were. That includes the Jack years and the Tim years synthesized into one long Eighties decade, collectively the Yellow Years, now over...

I have yet to begin writing the piece on the Great Rupture of Dollhouse Status Quo of 1996, but hang in there, dearies. It promises to be bold and bawky as a politician behind closed doors, and to be the most brilliant synopsis of where I stand on the issues I will have written to date. Take me at my word. Mine enemies have yet to become acquainted with the visionary depths and sincerity of homegrown wrath.

Digging living alone is one thing, Landry. Manipulating beyond the call of duty to achieve it or its converse is yet another. I've worn those boots, and cannot feel proud. What exactly is a Buck Down poem in your book, Landry? It's a damned shame he & I live two blocks apart and still have never met, although Howellnyms still sells him herbal resolve as far as I know. That shining beacon of brown shoe hero was cut from the herd several months back. I now claim no day to day friends from that bygone era. The Tim and Jennifer show closed the door on that whole scene forever. Sorry to be so harsh, but the crimes of personality perpetrated for so long upon Dollhouse sensibilities are finally being addressed. We simply want a more honest, less “disturbed adolescent” cast of characters in our lives, even if that means zero is the translator of vox populi.

I do not want to scream in quiet neighborhoods. I want to draw quietude into the neighborhood noises of confusion, criminality, corruption, and hatred. I do not want a revolution or two or many that paralyze the good ears along with the bad ears. I want a revolution asserting that revolution begins and ends with the broken mirror of self-adjustment. You can't preach Boasism where all cultural mores are globally relative, thereby equally important and then claim how exploited the poor natives are in some remote neck of the woods, unblemished by cabbage patch dolls or fast food chains.

Now don't get me wrong. Capitalism and scientific preference as practiced by rightwing multinationals is as evil as the night is long, because nary of us wants to return to the cave this fiscal war machine with its nuclear factor is promising us, but then do we, the hip to almost any cause, middle class Americans think that shackaninny West By God Virginny coal miners just a few nails and rotten boards away from the caves themselves should simply be content with their obscene lot because that makes them closer to nature and the way MOST folk lived only a few centuries ago before capitalism and the Industrial Revolution catapaulted us into the age of universal materialism on one hand and the brute recognition of both our rich and our poor neighbor's lot on the other?

Sorry guys, the Julianna Nope & Len Bracken influences rear their ugly trumpets once again. Loud-mouthed liberalism, I repeat, despite its formidable attempts to rectify not a few horrific excesses of the conservative “might is right” rollcall, is simply not the salvation of mankind its hydraheaded constituents would have us believe. The radical middle, inheriting grace and dignity from both ends of the spectrum and discarding the aggression and filth of each, is the only smart approach that 21st century humanity can endorse, a global plan for unification of the planet, sailing straight into a vigorous segregation if need be...

Segregation you say? Hey man, gaze about, the world IS segregated!!! Even as a much ballyhooed white male I cannot mingle among the young and beautiful cliques without suffering their abrupt arrogances. I cannot, by virtue of exclusionary practices of those I would solicit, freely engage in sex, an act many honored minds have stipulated as the driving basis of a healthy psychology itself, the will to life, in Freudian terms. I cannot even buy love with a coin of a different sort of razzle dazzle, although many characters can and do.

I cannot walk among certain so-called neighborhoods without enduring verbal or physical harassment. I cannot even admit publically my favorite singer and poet without illiciting attacks of generational bias or something worse. Whether right or wrong, segregation is a very real fact of life. Conflict of interests is the number one cause of misunderstanding and subsequent belligerence of rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, dim and bright, fashionable and drab, power ethnic and undergrowth the world over.

Admitting this, why is a political, economical, or ecological plan which looks straight into the eye of the beast, recognizing these cold but unchanging facts, suddenly dismissed as intentionally unworkable, unconscionable, hell, as fire-breathing fascism, incorrigibly evil in its very articulation? These few paragraphs certainly are not a plan, but they do beg the question: why does liberalism fail to meet the needs of the many while seducing the many to despise a more conservative approach to battling the primary nature and nurture questions that simply won't evaporate in the context of a increasingly dissatisfied population where liberalism has reigned supreme for nearly a century in the most powerful goods-generated civilization on earth?

It's not the goods that corrupt. It's the cancerous envy growing inside us that corrupts, and that envy is a product of a greedy right wing metabolism and an irresponsible unfocussed leftwing behaviorism, and that, my sweets, is the problem, and no revolutionary chant, crisis, or convulsion, and no liberal tax abolition or redistribution scheme will suffer the idiots who continue to misrepresent human nature and deny the importance of a clear-minded nurture.

On both sides of the political equation where humanity is an irrational number, neither side proves its solution. Something must be done, and history has shown only a heavy hand ever gets anything done. But of course revisionists of every flavor always love to point to the past heavy hand and call it evil, thinking what THEY are doing today is oh so very different than what has passed by already on this long treacherous hike back up the mudslide mountains of yesterday.

GT

"Don't ask me nuthing about nuthing, I just might tell you the truth..." —Bob Dylan

TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE

2007-09-20T12:59:00.000-04:00

Originally published on November 5, 1996

You have a point to a certain extent when you mock my statement that "there are two kinds of people in the word—those who vote and those who don’t vote."

I struggle with the question of citizenship, more specifically—voting or not voting. Many people suggest that voting is a cruel hoax, postulating with wimper and whine, that there is only one party, one slate, one candidate, and that’s the fascist corporate dog. Is this for real? Perhaps I am just a silly pawn participating in a sick process that allows the slave to choose his own master. Maybe I can't see the forest for the trees and am wasting precious brain cells worrying about this issue or that. I don't know. Do I betray myself as an artist and an individualist by convincing myself that citizenship, the right to vote, the right to serve on a jury is important? Socrates didn't think so. But then, Nietzche thought Socrates destroyed the aesthetic of Greek tragedy, of philosophy.

I am happy that I got up and went out to vote. I am happy that I took the time to read several perspectives on the issues, coming to my own conclusions, however petty they may seem on the worldstage at any given point of social struggle, and I don't have any regrets about voting for one of the big parties in spite how I believe the party system in this country is designed to keep new parties from arising. They make it so cost prohibitive, the only rebel we get to see rising from the dust is yet another rich little weasel dusting himself off with the people’s rag.

I also think it’s a shame that more people don't see their right to vote as important. Imagine, if more people did, we might actually see some change. Whether that would be for the better is up for debate, but a true democracy would be one where every eligible citizen adequately informed rises to the challenge and casts a vote. The original idea was that the American citizenry should have a non-violent revolution every election.Of course this idea is naive, and superficial, bugt it is the spirit from which we embrace our heritage. That's what we should strive for instead of sitting on lazy, uppity haunches pretending that we're staging some big protest by not voting. I know a lot of people who don't vote and they don't vote because they simply don't give a rats ass not from some higher level of protest.

I spit on the so-called "independents" determined not to be sheep by not voting. They are allowing their voices to be silent and are not doing anything subversive or meaningful by not voting.

Vote. It's free. You can go to the booth and vote for absolutely anyone you want. You can write in a candidate. That would be much more effective than sitting on a couch with a beer and a ciggy pretending to protest with apathy. There isn't enough revolution happening right now. We perhaps need some voting booth agitation to get our juices flowing. Isn’t that spirit still available to us?

But I digress.

THE APPLE, THE WORM, THE DRIP

2007-09-20T12:40:00.000-04:00

Hey Landry,

Jack was the one we all suspected was going to fly high, but somehow it always broke down with him. I don't know why specifically, although a major contributing factor in my mind is that crack thing he's got. A consistant need to pound drugs is obviously bad news for most gonzos. And like most gonzos Jack feels immune to these special dangers, and always feels like he can rise above any problems just in the nick of time. But time is merciless, and all I'm saying is I hope Jack steers clear of most of that garbage out there in his new start.

Yes, we had a little run in about that shit. He hasn't done it very often and I blew up so bad the last time to the point where he was obviously ashamed. If it happens again, I doubt I will give him a second chance. I just think it is throwing your money away in addition to being a waste of time. I am at a stage in my life where I just don't want to deal with that crap no how any which way, zero tolerance, no more turning the cheek in allowing lurkers to run roughshod.

Suzy and I are hopping the Amtrak up New York City this weekend to make the rounds with an old friend, Julianna Nope. Jack knows her at a distance. Up close, who knows anyone? We are each mere fractals of our true self.

Working on her doctorate in social anthropology—Jules just got notice of acceptance to Cornell—so she will be moving to Ithaca in upper state within a few weeks. The past two years at the New School have left at the freezeline of parental support, but this Cornell package carries with it an $8K annual stipend, so she’s set for pocket flash, but observes the town of Ithaca as an eerie hovel, full of strange hippy looking people, no strip malls, no 7-11s, nothing but a few docile streets, a couple of schools, and hills to kill for if one happened to be a skate punk. She’s not, however, and without a car, is already sweating the cold icy strides up and down those inclines, fretting she'll hate it, if she survives it.

Julianna is still rather gothic in appearance and outlook, can’t squelch the hipsterific riot grrrl stirring inside her, although she’s embraced an academic mindset, is quite the scholar, dean’s list et al, and seething to escape the stranglehold of her past. This weekend should be fantastic now that the heat wave in which we suffered 95-100 degree weather for three days straight has pissed off and new highs in the low 70s are expected. Her lower Lex Ave walk-up of course is slack on AC, and I suppose you don't have one either. I understand there are few of them on the SF Bay. But here at the Dollhouse climate control is ALWAYS a cool calculation.

Well, gotta go start some dinner. I’m blackening some salmon steaks tonight, although Tim is chewing top sirloin because he avoids seafood. The lad pays us a flat rate per as a dinner guest, so if living here boosts Tim's self-esteem and his sense of responsibility a notch or two as he claims and keeps him off heroin as he says it is doing, then I suppose we can all feel grateful that this particular opportunity knocked. His extra money helps keep us on monthly budget and out of hock, so it seems to be working all around, although of course I've had to stand firm on a few principles Tim would conveniently fail to understand, but I should brag in his name that these moments have been few thus far. I guess he's been here eight weeks on Friday. Jack only lasted three days when he returned from Germany, frying my patience before he bolted up to Diane and Adrian’s to squander his small forture with them.

Such are the crass ironies of a well-circulated life, eh Landry? Hope all this psychodrip suits you. It's what I do when I write, and when I am alone wrestling with my thoughts, or wife. My style often takes the form of a complaint. But in all honesty, I am that I am...

GT

TYPESETTER SERVICES

2007-09-20T09:13:00.000-04:00

Orginally published on December 5, 1997

Dear Illuminet,

Len Bracken (author of Guy Debord - Revolutionary, Feral House 1997) suggested we offer my typesetting and design services to you since we had handled the original typesetting operation for his GDR title. He said that you had two or three titles requiring services. We are certainly prepared to discuss the possibility of handling your account. On the platform issue, we use PageMaker 6.0, Illustrator 6.0 and Photoshop 4.01 on a Macintosh 8500/120.

Although I currently live and work from my home in Washington DC, as an unheralded writer and web designer, most of my family ties are to the Atlanta area. It perplexed me when Bracken was unable to shed any light on why you had contacted him rather than seek a local typesetter, although he hinted that perhaps we might barter some sort of publishing for typesetting deal. Whatever the variables, please feel free to contact me.

Gabriel Thy
Creative Director, First Canary
Graphic Solutions Ink Systems

Scenewash Project 20003
http://www.scenewash.org

MOVING ALONG THE ASSEMBLY LINE

2007-09-17T19:47:00.000-04:00

Thanks, but no. I've had my fill. Time to coordinate and articulate all those hours I've already spent chasing the images of a 144,000 sloppy but willing . . . and the cage is definitely out of the question. My underwear is caked in blood every morning after a fresh dressing at night. This is not an easy surgery to "put behind one" in the rush back toward the routine of merely sitting.

The 8600 finally arrived in woeful condition. The cardboard box and styrofoam packing both looked as if the world's angriest pit bull had slipped them the big one. The CPU was not even inserted into what was left of the packing. The mouse and powercord were missing, the visibly fatigued cardboard sooted and sullied, loosely retaped with the metallic footprint showing through the three inch gap at the bottom flaps. The floppydrive coverplate was missing one of its two snap-on prongs, the other needed a ninety degree twist back to normal.

Of course, the plate doesn't not stay snapped into place as a result of the missing prong. Apple said there was nothing they could do about it, when Liberty called to report the horrendous UPS service yesterday. Ran her a long line of probable first day on the job bullshit even telling her that Apple could not track the shipment (to verify any details, how long it took to get to us, etc. after telling her it was a money back return deal ONLY in the first seven days AFTER they shipped). Sue defied them in her usual weak way that indeed SHE had tracked the whole shippping path since June 20 (uh, to July 6, considerably longer than a seven day loop) from the UPS website, which she was sure he too could access since it was Apple who had E-mailed us the UPS tracking number (actually my version of the argument is probably more detailed than hers, unfortunately).

Back and forth, disgusting telephone dancestepping remarkable only in its depth of ignorance and misguided presumptuousness from the once highly touted Apple side of the equation and the frustratingly (for me, if not its own bearer) weak powers of articulation on the consumer side. They finally hung up, nothing resolved except a 90-day warranty. I will fret on this a few days before deciding whether or not to step into the ring to mandate satisfaction, or else simply let it go by pushing the limits of the machine in the first 90, find some spare parts elsewhere if I need them, and get back to business, knowing I'll never buy directly from Apple ever again (this ain't the first direct buy that's gone sour).

Miraculously, the damned thing booted right up. It's running OS 7.6.1 which we'll upgrade to OS 8.1. Still haven't decided on a server package, but as is my wont, I'll probably settle on the Mac industry leader, spend the bigger bucks on WebStar, and top it all off with the full throttle of nifty add-ons. And soon be comnpeting with the best and the rest, right here from the Dollhouse Studio Z.

Bat criteria? Simple. One that FEELS good and LOOKS good in the hands of the slugger. I'd ramble off a few brandnames and some arcaneia about appropriate lengths and weights to suit the needs and style of the hitter, but the doodads are calling. . . .

LOST IN THE SYSTEM

2007-09-17T19:12:00.000-04:00

Orginally punlished on January 18, 1998

Most did settle out of court from what I've read. Now, law is leaning toward allowing companies an edge in arguments against domain name speculators, but I think the domain name wars are over as a result of this a new set of seven upper domains on tap, plus the other two [CC & TO] that are already on the market at TABNET, but who knows if "cocacola.com" will declare manifest trademark rights on "cocacola.net." Doesn't seem to have, after a quick check.

Still painting, burning weeds. Order in the court. Speaking of that. The DC government has sent me a two dollar check for appearing in court for jury duty on January 7, 1998. They also sent me a thirty dollar day for January 7. Then I received another two dollar check for services rendered on January 8. Then another thirty. I only went to the courthouse a half a day, and that was January 7. This, after blowing off the whole thing back on December 8, when I was originally scheduled to appear in Superior as a potential petit juror. Being sick, I didn't go, but I straightened up. They sent a threatening letter teasing me with a $300 fine, seven days jail, or both. Now they are sending me all this money.

Got to rework the Takaro Farm site nearly from scratch again to be viewable without scrolling at 640x480 rez on a 15" display. This the client now prefers, after first declaring he wanted frames because he saw them elsewhere, but disturbing inconsistences in the display of text over graphics on one of the pages in the current design are forcing me to rethink and revamp the site at large, so as to have the material fully viewable on first screen, in that monstrous resolution, at a size that looks large to him. What's your take on this topic, Steve? Two years ago I could agree with Hector, but Hector admittedly knows nothing about his own computer, much less the industry. If he did, he should perhaps try to lure some Apple money into his pockets. But today? I think 15" display 800x600 resolution is by far the norm, and more specifically, the cheapest view I can imagine someone looking to purchase a $10K horse from around the world, would be visiting the Takaro farm site. So far, Hector has liked everything, graphically. He just thinks it's too big, and needs to be scaled back, which is my evening project, after I finish this forest green painting of the paper closet, install the bric-a-brac-and handle, and set up the new ETF account I was telling you about.

GT

GRAVY FOR AN OLD ROAST

2007-09-17T19:07:00.000-04:00

Originally published on September 19, 1997

Thanks for all the little notes you've wafted down this way lately. Read them, bookmarked accordingly, grinned when our own thoughts have been replicated in the "real" press, et cetera.

Been busy finishing off the A&F site. Now I move into the promotion and maintenance phase. A six-month contract. Sue's going out to Hector's farm today to load AOL on his Performa out there, and also to begin formulating his farm site by gathering up horse pics.

News. Peter Burris is moving into the Dollhouse basement next weekend for a season or two, the Sunday following my 42th birthday. Yes, happy and all that. We'll be hosting a few a quiet gathering after work on Friday. Blumstein celebrates his last day at Columbia Research on the same night. He hasn't responded to my E-mail inviting him and Allie over, but I reckon he might have other celebrationary options up his sleeve. We still haven't talked since that night of the pokerfaced airconditioning mishap a month ago.

We plan to throw a lot of cash and sweat at the basement as you've already been made aware. Timing is gonna be tight to get all the damned ducks in a row, but everybody involved is psyched to making it work, and so Peter might be camping out for a few days or a week until we cut the ribbon. This has all been rather sudden. A year ago I would have never dreamed that PHB would welcome or be welcomed in this house on this sort of long-term familiar basis.

Time does tend to change our perspectives for better AND worse, n'est pas? Karen may have landed us a huge trucking company account, but it won't kick in until late October as the owner puts the finishing touches on a multimillion dollar startup company. It's not in the basket yet, but is almost a sure thing, as he's an ex-and-wouldbe-current beau. She's really excited about her new role as GSIS sales rep. So are we. And best of all, she's no mirror mashed maniac like the rest of us. She's a levelheaded bubbly sort, who just has too many potential contacts to not exploit. So we've all stepped up to the plate looking for that fat pitch down the middle.

By the way, Karen gave Pitch a major bitching over that condescending kissoff note he wrote me, from her own volition. She told Sue about it later. Pitch had CC'd the note to her. Apparently she read it the same way I did. Sue's often characterized Karen as not being too awfully smart. I haven't been around her that much, but she continues to impress me with her downhome country wisdom. She's nobody's fool. She loves Sue, and is always cratcheting Hector about undervaluing Sue. And her mother loves me, in Karen's words. Now isn't that just gravy for an old roast like me. We have suddenly found ourselves bright-eyed and bushy-butted, primed for the feast.

And just think, not too long ago . . .

GT

TODAY IN HISTORY

2007-09-17T19:00:00.000-04:00

GINSBERG AIN'T HOWLING NO MORE

2007-09-17T18:56:00.000-04:00

Originally published on April 7, 1997

WE MOURN THE PASSING. Allen Ginsberg's dead.The poet laureate of the Beat Generation died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. His liver quit living.

Steve. Tried to read your files first thing this morning. Nothing I had would read the text. I discovered that I did not have MacLinkPlus which I used successfully to convert Bracken's DOS WordPerfect files, on my machine.Your files meanwhile are blank doc icons, not even PC tagged.

So I file-shared IMOTE (my Mac) with HEDRICK (Sue's), and 3/4 of her drive was locked, feeding me garbage about not having enough access priviledges. I went on to other things. Later I called Sue to troubleshoot that little annoyance, but have been too focussed on building the iMote Bookskellar to tear away. Will eyeball and get back to you later on that.

Did I already tell you that yesterday afternoon that the Sue's colleague Karen, and her boyfriend Pitch, brought her home from the airport? Yes I did, but did I tell you that he works in public relations for the Navy at the Pentagon, was impressed with what he had the short time to see of my site, and is perhaps interested in farming design work my way. Mmmm...maybe you primed the pump.

ONLY ID YOU WASH YOU

2007-09-17T18:52:00.000-04:00

Ageless quarrel made of universal matter,
I introduce us as the welcomed one
Grooming the gods and blaming no one
Except those who believe it doesn’t matter.

The Silent Connie from Corpus Christi
Who knew the night to take her breath away,
Gave it freely to kiss holy
The frail man of ancient money.
Into his breasts were blown blankettes for her stay,
Milk and honey words placed before them.
(Is this a picnic arrangement or something
Honoring nude dancer worship between them?)
And when the left-handed artist put them in a painting,
Into his bleeding eyes
She poured her healing rush.

Go about your business,
Do what you will ,
Dead honesty provides for you,
He whispered so that all could hear.
(The guildrunners smiled at these winning words,
as Lucifer's breath scattered those ready to sneer.)
Any of your wetnesses,
You must witness them here.
Gone about sheer destiny stripping
Clean of every wordless fear,
Describe the city juggernaut
To the race often come near.

A lion walks the progress line alone
Lately behind dark places unknown
To the readers of bookless questions shown
Likely to rub raw jaw bone to jaw bone
Yet willing to speak in decision
To drink a beer
With her talking of loving

To learn the tongue of yet her mouth
And praise the unwilted way
Along the solemn fast parade
Of bodies novel parting quick mouth.

Very good they are together she thinks.

Naked telephone,
Why have you voiced frank silences
Deported in ritual to the border of grievances
We suspect we own?
The rise and fall of something earlier,
Instructs another silence pause inspirational, breeding
Merciful noises as each willing cause shifts
Its shape upon her face freely.

Oh wake up bitch and smell the azaleas!
The dam is burst! Ocean Silent Consuela!
Consult with him now because I know
We aren't fit to be labeled strangers,
Just old friends
Hearing the hurrying children grow.
Take your eyes and plant them
Among the Nuclear Islands, where
There swims something someone
Left you in his will be done
Across dry beds of summer freely.

You have known the September Monk.

Yet in achievement of absolute goodness,
Sometimes the sentences jam
Themselves in traffic protecting the evening lamb
From the flood of lying freely.

When he nuzzles her and listens to secular eternity,
Inalienable illusions poison unfading reality,
Pouring liquid role into dreamy feats freely
Past frenzy into grace in a twinkling.
Women of inertia,
You changed into an unwed girl
Not silly but measured like an ageless pearl
Becomes when joy smiles freely, governing
The aisle of annoyance’s exact look.
Proceed sounding your road,
Knowing I stroll unrobbed of innocense by plot,
Disrobing the figures dawning unprepared
To cash in utter allowance
This cutters' brand of passion,
Circulating among my members freely.

Scandal and omniscience were lamenting our pose,
And I don’t remember
Were they wearing propaganda clothes,
Praising poor artists with nostrils still wet,
Wanted for performance and a message that grows,
Freely.

Across the belly of a forgotten poll
We fly from role to role
Wading through weeds of validity.

(The symptoms stole the attempt.)

[ 1981, Corpus Christi, TX ]