21. SO MUCH FOR THAT (the 'Year of Best Intentions'):
OK then I'm not sure where any of that came from but looking at the paper on the wall I'm thinking pure chance - an old barn pattern with little chickens and a rooster and a weathervane and a red barn and barnyard repeated ad infinitum in some older format of what once somehow was bleakly called 'early American' and which style graced many a 1960's kitchen and kitchenette (two more words gone by the wayside) and which is now probably all gone (yet here still holding the connections to food - pig-out country dining in a most happy fashion) and a calendar on the wall proclaims the 'year of best intentions' but it's inconsequential for sure since it's for a tire company so I cannot make out any connection there - except for tires on vehicles which take people to endless eateries along the highway but...OH NO!!...not that again! - and the Michelin Man was a fat tire pig and they're round and filled up and roly-poly too but who knew that back in the old days anyway when starch and food and all that could very well get you through the bleakest of the cold winter months when you most needed some fat to work off to make the needed body heat to survive the frost and work of the lesser-food season which came upon you - and I never knew a fat farmer an obese dairyman and I never saw one who couldn't work off a meal baling hay or throwing a few milk cans around and year after year of best intentions shall make Jack a thin boy 'see saw Marjory Daw Jack shall have a NEW master and he shall make but a penny a day because he can't work any faster' I thought I'd heard that not so long ago and if that too was early American then call me late for supper (yum yum I can't wait to eat again and 'the smell of pig meat warmed my heart' said Anthony Victor Lavalle 'the pleasures of food were stolen from me in the interest of being svelte/but now it's over I'm done with that/I'm letting out my belt') and opposite to that actually I'm thinking of that skinny dark guy Franz Kafka brooding on and on about starvation and lack in his story 'The Hunger Artist' the premise of which goes something like this - some strange solitary and reflective type guy a dark character a loner a brooder goes into a zoo over to the panther's cage and watches the panther as it paces back and forth in its beauty and form devouring flesh and feed as it is thrown to him and the admiring eyes of all those who have paid to see it are gaping and gawking at the live beauty of what they see and what they're witnessing and this guy too is fascinated and still and fixated by the sight but in his mind he wishes to do the opposite and somehow convinces a zoo guard to give him a cage and he goes in and has people pay admission to watch him STARVE waste away simply wither from no food and this is his wish his ideal the prime goal of his life and he gets thinner and thinner and withers to nothing and the crowd - whatever there was - dwindles too and fewer and fewer people until none at all visit him in his cage to watch and he eventually withers and dies emaciated and skeletal in front of NO ONE in particular - a sad sideshow to a sideshow an abandoned forgotten cage tucked away in a corner and eventually covered with a tarp beneath which our hero - lone stark thin and silent - dies a lonely slow death - as was his wish : his very own 'Year of Best Intentions'.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
I COULDN'T SET YOU FREE
20. I COULDN'T SET YOU FREE (Yukio Mishima and me):
And it was never like I had a choice anyway : nightlight broadlight streetlight camping out you rolled the dice over my fading solace and I remember we spoke pretty much of nothing at all you balancing as you could something on your head as I watched and it was a pile of books or something and I thought of your African curls and how well you looked just then of any of this pictures I used to see of African women walking great distances with jugs on their head balanced and steady or the other pictures I'd seen and even that guy in Plainfield walking the streets with a pile of laundry in a big sack set steady atop his head or their heads and whatever and I knew you were tribal I knew you'd come from someplace else and far off distant and you just kept walking past and showing me and my eyes were locked and I couldn't set you free even had I wished to wanted to cared enough to to do so : it was all like a fine country caper and up on some knoll or fading bluff somewhere over the carnivorous sea - eating men eating dreams eating sailors eating me - and then we both took candles to the dark and went up the thin staircase to the top that small narrow room with but one crooked window overlooking the water and as we watched nothing moved nothing outside except the black the black of you and the black of me pounding rough and hard like surf like something we served on a platter as the candles wore down and turned oily and knotted into sad lumps and you talked you talked going on about the faded American dreams of a busted revolution and a society sick and rotten and how all you wanted was a knife to go home with but you knew you could never return and you said 'if my land was like my country that would be one thing but they are both so very different and I have nowhere to call now home and I only have you to love me once and a million times more can you will you and then I'll stay if I only know this' and I said I understood but it meant nothing because I didn't understand the longing and I had none never did never had anything to wish for never 'pined' for those pines of Rome and I wasn't no Ceasar and so didn't care 'my Rome to your Carthage' was the joke of our day and we settled back and then and listened to the sounds that ocean waves and water made and too the sounds of love were heard in the never-fading air until you stayed no more and then you were gone and I was left holding nothing at all (like that sailor who fell from grace with the sea).
And it was never like I had a choice anyway : nightlight broadlight streetlight camping out you rolled the dice over my fading solace and I remember we spoke pretty much of nothing at all you balancing as you could something on your head as I watched and it was a pile of books or something and I thought of your African curls and how well you looked just then of any of this pictures I used to see of African women walking great distances with jugs on their head balanced and steady or the other pictures I'd seen and even that guy in Plainfield walking the streets with a pile of laundry in a big sack set steady atop his head or their heads and whatever and I knew you were tribal I knew you'd come from someplace else and far off distant and you just kept walking past and showing me and my eyes were locked and I couldn't set you free even had I wished to wanted to cared enough to to do so : it was all like a fine country caper and up on some knoll or fading bluff somewhere over the carnivorous sea - eating men eating dreams eating sailors eating me - and then we both took candles to the dark and went up the thin staircase to the top that small narrow room with but one crooked window overlooking the water and as we watched nothing moved nothing outside except the black the black of you and the black of me pounding rough and hard like surf like something we served on a platter as the candles wore down and turned oily and knotted into sad lumps and you talked you talked going on about the faded American dreams of a busted revolution and a society sick and rotten and how all you wanted was a knife to go home with but you knew you could never return and you said 'if my land was like my country that would be one thing but they are both so very different and I have nowhere to call now home and I only have you to love me once and a million times more can you will you and then I'll stay if I only know this' and I said I understood but it meant nothing because I didn't understand the longing and I had none never did never had anything to wish for never 'pined' for those pines of Rome and I wasn't no Ceasar and so didn't care 'my Rome to your Carthage' was the joke of our day and we settled back and then and listened to the sounds that ocean waves and water made and too the sounds of love were heard in the never-fading air until you stayed no more and then you were gone and I was left holding nothing at all (like that sailor who fell from grace with the sea).
Sunday, August 8, 2010
GIVE ME PAUSE
19. GIVE ME PAUSE:
“A mentally challenged man named Sam strolled right in said ‘strike up the band’ and the crowd went wild or so it seemed as stagelights flickered and the piano man preened” but that was all I heard of the story because they were passing the hat and I hadn’t any unnecessary money to give them so I moved on but kept wondering on the rest of that story or at least what it could have been and it MUST GIVE ME PAUSE to even stop to think what I might have missed but oh well anyway now it’s over and done so when I saw the stone roses on that churchyard wall I stopped just a moment to stare and my mind RUMINATING upon itself said to me wordlessly ‘I could have lied but who would save the world?’
“A mentally challenged man named Sam strolled right in said ‘strike up the band’ and the crowd went wild or so it seemed as stagelights flickered and the piano man preened” but that was all I heard of the story because they were passing the hat and I hadn’t any unnecessary money to give them so I moved on but kept wondering on the rest of that story or at least what it could have been and it MUST GIVE ME PAUSE to even stop to think what I might have missed but oh well anyway now it’s over and done so when I saw the stone roses on that churchyard wall I stopped just a moment to stare and my mind RUMINATING upon itself said to me wordlessly ‘I could have lied but who would save the world?’
Saturday, July 17, 2010
A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD
18. A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD:
If there were ever a brain-spot for tracing delusions I’d have been covered with them - easy to see and simple to find - as after a few years I was simply dog-crazed with the usual battery of events and situations but all compounded by my intense desire to keep going and the ephemeral sensation of success and achievement that kept passing through me like a cloud-mist over and over and I was sometimes elated and other times just drawn and quartered to death but I remained with it at whatever cost : painting gallery walls for twenty-five dollar days when I could – the same crisp but flat white paint almost gesso-like which went into the cover-up of anything beneath it the same scant but totally distant skinny girls behind the front desks of a hundred galleries one alike to the other so that anyone coming in immediately felt as if they were already in an alien place where they didn’t belong or that they’d entered the central headquarters of some bizarre cult of ‘we’re certainly too good for you’ aliens and these girls remained that way forever - most exquisite in their designer tight outfits and blossoming-beautiful too but seditiously dangerous in their manners (always making me think some ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one to fuck her’ but knowing I ‘would’ if I had to) and in these places I always seemed incorrect in whatever assumption I made – because they weren’t certainly about ART at all even though that’s what supposedly hung on the walls – they were instead about money and valuation and profit and gain and insider status and all the rest be damned - these people inhabited a small little club of coterie of wealth which had spread its dastardly and sticky fingers all over the ‘art-world’ as they declaimed it for their purposes of lucre and if they’d not imprimatured it yet well then it didn’t exist - but if it suddenly did and they had why then it could soon be worth a cool million so ‘stand by’ and all that - ‘but first please repaint these white walls white again’ and that sort of thing rang like a Sousaphone inside my head because I knew THAT wasn’t the New York City I’d sought to inhabit even though it probably had always been like that too - even in the gay 1890’s and all that gilded age stuff with pearls and jewels pouring off wealthy people in their gardens and drawing rooms of facetious value while an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT world – unbeknownst to them – was about to come crashing down on them and NO ONE knew a thing (as an aside for partially that reason I always got a kick out of an old film called ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ precisely because it sets up an old world still bumbling in the face of its own creation of the new world about to subsume and smother it - all grace and gentility soon to be gone) so while I stayed there and walked all those incredible streets just looking for rhymes in the cast-offs and magic in the misery I found it was actually always there – just had to be located – and it all became my sole reason of staying and doing : study work art paint structure light form texture density photography storyline and all the rest : I was always able to love it and stay atop it so that MISERY and squalor meant nothing SEX and sensuality meant nothing and DEATH and venom too could simply be passed over and as to invite my fear away I took on roles all my own and played them well : in that I dwarfed the midgets (at least some form of achievement) and I towered over the giants too (a more stunning achievement to be sure).
If there were ever a brain-spot for tracing delusions I’d have been covered with them - easy to see and simple to find - as after a few years I was simply dog-crazed with the usual battery of events and situations but all compounded by my intense desire to keep going and the ephemeral sensation of success and achievement that kept passing through me like a cloud-mist over and over and I was sometimes elated and other times just drawn and quartered to death but I remained with it at whatever cost : painting gallery walls for twenty-five dollar days when I could – the same crisp but flat white paint almost gesso-like which went into the cover-up of anything beneath it the same scant but totally distant skinny girls behind the front desks of a hundred galleries one alike to the other so that anyone coming in immediately felt as if they were already in an alien place where they didn’t belong or that they’d entered the central headquarters of some bizarre cult of ‘we’re certainly too good for you’ aliens and these girls remained that way forever - most exquisite in their designer tight outfits and blossoming-beautiful too but seditiously dangerous in their manners (always making me think some ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one to fuck her’ but knowing I ‘would’ if I had to) and in these places I always seemed incorrect in whatever assumption I made – because they weren’t certainly about ART at all even though that’s what supposedly hung on the walls – they were instead about money and valuation and profit and gain and insider status and all the rest be damned - these people inhabited a small little club of coterie of wealth which had spread its dastardly and sticky fingers all over the ‘art-world’ as they declaimed it for their purposes of lucre and if they’d not imprimatured it yet well then it didn’t exist - but if it suddenly did and they had why then it could soon be worth a cool million so ‘stand by’ and all that - ‘but first please repaint these white walls white again’ and that sort of thing rang like a Sousaphone inside my head because I knew THAT wasn’t the New York City I’d sought to inhabit even though it probably had always been like that too - even in the gay 1890’s and all that gilded age stuff with pearls and jewels pouring off wealthy people in their gardens and drawing rooms of facetious value while an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT world – unbeknownst to them – was about to come crashing down on them and NO ONE knew a thing (as an aside for partially that reason I always got a kick out of an old film called ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ precisely because it sets up an old world still bumbling in the face of its own creation of the new world about to subsume and smother it - all grace and gentility soon to be gone) so while I stayed there and walked all those incredible streets just looking for rhymes in the cast-offs and magic in the misery I found it was actually always there – just had to be located – and it all became my sole reason of staying and doing : study work art paint structure light form texture density photography storyline and all the rest : I was always able to love it and stay atop it so that MISERY and squalor meant nothing SEX and sensuality meant nothing and DEATH and venom too could simply be passed over and as to invite my fear away I took on roles all my own and played them well : in that I dwarfed the midgets (at least some form of achievement) and I towered over the giants too (a more stunning achievement to be sure).
Sunday, June 27, 2010
AS LARGE AS IT IS
17. -AS LARGE AS IT IS-
INCIDENTAL MUSICS:
_______________
Sadness Comes in Three Sizes:
‘Wind in the pines.
Tears on my sleeve.
Spaghetti.’
_________________
The Buddha’s body cannot be measured. This is truly miraculous.
_______
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion instead raging in the dark and morality is made by humans - not found in the world - and a man must have an intellectual temperment with a delight in muscular language and the power to shock and the idea although a bit banal is that a person is responsible for his own life and external forces and events are just the raw materials out of which we make a life and we therefore have no right to blame anyone else for the result because it was ours to make or muff and this is a philosophy or psychology which is basically optimistic cheerful and a forward looking one of self-assertion of liberation from oppressive frameworks such as that created by religions or other dogmas.
Esta buchiamento elanastero tria
enomble telerado myanaro dustimistus
aeroda mueya riligant et yatdo
bosta bosta tiriamis trex no ! no
ah dey waymo lagdo tipes
ayvama ayvama norta !
That strange foreign man he is measuring the sky he is lighting rages of fire and distorting the horizon far awkward already by refraction and stealth he walks without limbs and covets whatever he wishes and in strictures so defined he widely carries forth along and over as people listen and so I wonder from what is gathering strength and why them as at that moment something flutters along past me and I see it is merely old newsprint the same old print which is covering the park with debris as papers flown around lose meaning so too I cannot hardly now read anything ands the hour though late is still enough for watching the morning light take far away the fading moon so fat still fat and settling as it sinks in whatever horizon is left for we are all different now so far from any place we’ve lived before OH DELICATE FLOWER wither not now but stay until the Spring and let me known you are there once more ‘I love the laughing vale I love the echoing hill I love the oaken seat beneath the oaken tree where all the villagers meet and laugh our sports to see’ and sitting here myself I am awed too by age and its distance of soldiers in a field schooners on the water whale masters trodding the old waterfront the sheds and shanty rank and filled with all the debris of watery ages the spars and ropes and hooks and containers and the seaman’s salty cry for food and drink that knife slammed flat or thrown hard down into a tabletop and the people straining to see out far to the watery horizon what sails approach and whose flag whose endeavor what journey closes for AS LARGE AS IT IS IT’S A SMALLER WORLD and one marked by the craft and the line the maps of men and maiden and calendars are scrawled : “Father my father you have brought forth a northern God to protect us yet he will do not good here for there are not enough vessels to contain him and ‘ere long enough we must go anayway to places his hand can protect us from the evils and travails of wicked men with messengers of gold and iron and tongues of magical weaving ad flames of light and falshood flaming and they too shall bow down before that as quickly as you have gone from sight and your words will be forgotten even less heard and it shall be as if you never appeared never lived or never brought Him here!’ and so they built three churches on the hills around so as the landed people traveled wherever they went there would be someplace for them to enter and think of that God or at the least consider His ways as they passed on their earthly missions and these churches yet stand if only their gravelly foundations and the holes they once covered for on this earth the light is as darkness and the shadows are dense and the winged butterfly alighting stays not long or withers in the heat and fire and windward yonder blows sea breezes where all men pine to go each and every seeks to leave but those who stay by force remain unhappy in their lot but steady THUS THUS THAT IS OUR LAND TODAY for even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space…even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space.
_____________
- THE DIVINE IMAGE -
by William Blake
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear:
And mercy pity peace and love
Is Man his child dear.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
___________
INCIDENTAL MUSICS:
_______________
Sadness Comes in Three Sizes:
‘Wind in the pines.
Tears on my sleeve.
Spaghetti.’
_________________
The Buddha’s body cannot be measured. This is truly miraculous.
_______
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion instead raging in the dark and morality is made by humans - not found in the world - and a man must have an intellectual temperment with a delight in muscular language and the power to shock and the idea although a bit banal is that a person is responsible for his own life and external forces and events are just the raw materials out of which we make a life and we therefore have no right to blame anyone else for the result because it was ours to make or muff and this is a philosophy or psychology which is basically optimistic cheerful and a forward looking one of self-assertion of liberation from oppressive frameworks such as that created by religions or other dogmas.
Esta buchiamento elanastero tria
enomble telerado myanaro dustimistus
aeroda mueya riligant et yatdo
bosta bosta tiriamis trex no ! no
ah dey waymo lagdo tipes
ayvama ayvama norta !
That strange foreign man he is measuring the sky he is lighting rages of fire and distorting the horizon far awkward already by refraction and stealth he walks without limbs and covets whatever he wishes and in strictures so defined he widely carries forth along and over as people listen and so I wonder from what is gathering strength and why them as at that moment something flutters along past me and I see it is merely old newsprint the same old print which is covering the park with debris as papers flown around lose meaning so too I cannot hardly now read anything ands the hour though late is still enough for watching the morning light take far away the fading moon so fat still fat and settling as it sinks in whatever horizon is left for we are all different now so far from any place we’ve lived before OH DELICATE FLOWER wither not now but stay until the Spring and let me known you are there once more ‘I love the laughing vale I love the echoing hill I love the oaken seat beneath the oaken tree where all the villagers meet and laugh our sports to see’ and sitting here myself I am awed too by age and its distance of soldiers in a field schooners on the water whale masters trodding the old waterfront the sheds and shanty rank and filled with all the debris of watery ages the spars and ropes and hooks and containers and the seaman’s salty cry for food and drink that knife slammed flat or thrown hard down into a tabletop and the people straining to see out far to the watery horizon what sails approach and whose flag whose endeavor what journey closes for AS LARGE AS IT IS IT’S A SMALLER WORLD and one marked by the craft and the line the maps of men and maiden and calendars are scrawled : “Father my father you have brought forth a northern God to protect us yet he will do not good here for there are not enough vessels to contain him and ‘ere long enough we must go anayway to places his hand can protect us from the evils and travails of wicked men with messengers of gold and iron and tongues of magical weaving ad flames of light and falshood flaming and they too shall bow down before that as quickly as you have gone from sight and your words will be forgotten even less heard and it shall be as if you never appeared never lived or never brought Him here!’ and so they built three churches on the hills around so as the landed people traveled wherever they went there would be someplace for them to enter and think of that God or at the least consider His ways as they passed on their earthly missions and these churches yet stand if only their gravelly foundations and the holes they once covered for on this earth the light is as darkness and the shadows are dense and the winged butterfly alighting stays not long or withers in the heat and fire and windward yonder blows sea breezes where all men pine to go each and every seeks to leave but those who stay by force remain unhappy in their lot but steady THUS THUS THAT IS OUR LAND TODAY for even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space…even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space.
_____________
- THE DIVINE IMAGE -
by William Blake
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear:
And mercy pity peace and love
Is Man his child dear.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
___________
Sunday, May 2, 2010
THE BIG MEXICAN SCENE
16. THE BIG MEXICAN SCENE:
"My son is in Mexico City and he would welcome you too if he were here but his job is with a bank there" said the dark-skinned lady with pearly teeth and I thanked her for that but said I was only here to catch a glimpse of the city - 'here' being the central overlook on the 21st floor balcony of some crazy red building I'd entered on 23rd and I'd seen her there too smoking with a marble-finish cigarette holder held lightly between her fingers but I figured she was just some crazy woman waiting for a drink (there was a bar off in the corner and some dumb-looking white-hatted attendant walking around) and perhaps even at that I was correct anyway but I never found out as I didn't stay that very long but she had on one or two wonderful shawls and scarves and things and I'd gotten the sense she really was something although probably just as daffy as she sounded and I didn't know anything about her son to be sure and not even what she was talking about nor why she'd have known I was coming to be 'welcomed' since the whole visit was a surprise even to myself but apparently there was something going on and I grabbed a pastry or two and sat there to see what went on and others too were milling about looking at things on the wall and admiring the view - which really wasn't much anyway - but it was all strange and felt like an appearance at any moment by Andy Warhol or Jackie Onassis or someone like that wouldn't be far-fetched even if they were both dead but probably no one here would notice anyway and they had stretched some western paintings - something like Frederick Remington would have done - over the walls and the hangings looked as if they'd been there some time but lights behind them kept moving about and I got the feel that something here was being filmed too or about to be but I never got to the bottom of any of that and in fact never read about it either in any society-feature page blowing about but some little guy did come up to me and asked "what do you think of the marriage of heaven and hell?" and I smiled and simply said back "oh like so many others it won't last a year" and he laughed and walked off but later as I got to thinking of it I decided perhaps that was name of some film they were immersed in doing maybe and maybe these were each characters from some weirder-than-I playbook they were running through and I knew that the 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell' was a Blake title and that lots of these arty types were lately keen on dramatizing William Blake but even I never thought it would happen with pastries and a Mexican but if that was what was going on I never figured it out nor heard of it again (as I said) so I figured I'd just enjoy the time and the surroundings and let happen what may and some other guy all pomaded up and wearing some really odd jacket (red black pearl-studded and cow-hide) came out and started reciting : "look ! there is the square we just came from with the promenaders and there are fewer of them now and now that the heat of the day has increased the girls are hanging closer and the sweat it is soaked through their blouses yet they are still so fine and beautiful everywhere they go and look ! look at the young boys in the shadow of the bandstand and LOOK what it is they are doing ! and there is the home of the little old lady and she is still there fanning herself on the patio and that I see now is where all the young girls are going!"
"My son is in Mexico City and he would welcome you too if he were here but his job is with a bank there" said the dark-skinned lady with pearly teeth and I thanked her for that but said I was only here to catch a glimpse of the city - 'here' being the central overlook on the 21st floor balcony of some crazy red building I'd entered on 23rd and I'd seen her there too smoking with a marble-finish cigarette holder held lightly between her fingers but I figured she was just some crazy woman waiting for a drink (there was a bar off in the corner and some dumb-looking white-hatted attendant walking around) and perhaps even at that I was correct anyway but I never found out as I didn't stay that very long but she had on one or two wonderful shawls and scarves and things and I'd gotten the sense she really was something although probably just as daffy as she sounded and I didn't know anything about her son to be sure and not even what she was talking about nor why she'd have known I was coming to be 'welcomed' since the whole visit was a surprise even to myself but apparently there was something going on and I grabbed a pastry or two and sat there to see what went on and others too were milling about looking at things on the wall and admiring the view - which really wasn't much anyway - but it was all strange and felt like an appearance at any moment by Andy Warhol or Jackie Onassis or someone like that wouldn't be far-fetched even if they were both dead but probably no one here would notice anyway and they had stretched some western paintings - something like Frederick Remington would have done - over the walls and the hangings looked as if they'd been there some time but lights behind them kept moving about and I got the feel that something here was being filmed too or about to be but I never got to the bottom of any of that and in fact never read about it either in any society-feature page blowing about but some little guy did come up to me and asked "what do you think of the marriage of heaven and hell?" and I smiled and simply said back "oh like so many others it won't last a year" and he laughed and walked off but later as I got to thinking of it I decided perhaps that was name of some film they were immersed in doing maybe and maybe these were each characters from some weirder-than-I playbook they were running through and I knew that the 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell' was a Blake title and that lots of these arty types were lately keen on dramatizing William Blake but even I never thought it would happen with pastries and a Mexican but if that was what was going on I never figured it out nor heard of it again (as I said) so I figured I'd just enjoy the time and the surroundings and let happen what may and some other guy all pomaded up and wearing some really odd jacket (red black pearl-studded and cow-hide) came out and started reciting : "look ! there is the square we just came from with the promenaders and there are fewer of them now and now that the heat of the day has increased the girls are hanging closer and the sweat it is soaked through their blouses yet they are still so fine and beautiful everywhere they go and look ! look at the young boys in the shadow of the bandstand and LOOK what it is they are doing ! and there is the home of the little old lady and she is still there fanning herself on the patio and that I see now is where all the young girls are going!"
Sunday, March 14, 2010
BILLY GROSBARD, Pt. 3 - IVERS AND JOHNSON AND ME
15. BILLY GROSBARD, Part 3 - IVERS AND JOHNSON AND ME (nyc, 1967):
The light was like a figment and I tired of the pretense so I stayed in the dark as much as I could - running amok at night mostly - through the darkened dead street loft-to loft making contacts and friends talking to this or that accomplice-in-art some performance geek making naked movies with blue sheets as backdrop in cheapened loft stage-sets hammered together with blood and sex and nails and there'd be a sandwich or two and a sink with a nozzle and a bunch of crap clothes lying around and if Noah - I used to think - if Noah saved the world for this and this alone he was sadly fucking mistaken by ever making that boat and God too should have kept his head in the clouds where it belonged for there weren't nothing alive left yet worth saving and now this was nothing but fornication for pay just like the rest of the world all those suit and tie bastards we'd see running to Wall Street and their finance-district whorehouses fucking with fingers pumping with dicks every deal and angle they could find - funding murders and wars and armaments of chemicals and bombs and death and destruction and the constabulary on their side did nothing just gave pretense and obsequies to the power and the right proclaimed by the sleazy and nasty military slowly taking things over - Fort This and Fort That filled with ass-lickers liars and killers all mixed together with a faked ideology of bravado and shame and I was for one sick of it all and I swore to myself that if I saw one more soldier-boy baby-face talking at me in favor of his war his land his country at any diner all-night eatery in front of me I swore to myself I'd kill him and I did when it had to be - my trusty Ivers and Johnson .22 never leaving my inside undershirt belt-strap just in case - it was a funny time and place to be and one you had to think about all the time - the angles had to stay fresh and stay sharp this active resistance this law-breaking fight-back to break the power and the strength of the force that was holding down and destroying society - so I was on a double-mission just like this : living on the streets alone and single but with a force behind me and a place to be and go not really lost but lost as any nonetheless and I fought back and mostly won resistance activism turnabout-is-fair-play and all that stuff and if I ever had the pawnshop blues I never felt them for a minute and I kept ALL my contacts alive and often thought often 'Billy Grosbard where are you now?'
The light was like a figment and I tired of the pretense so I stayed in the dark as much as I could - running amok at night mostly - through the darkened dead street loft-to loft making contacts and friends talking to this or that accomplice-in-art some performance geek making naked movies with blue sheets as backdrop in cheapened loft stage-sets hammered together with blood and sex and nails and there'd be a sandwich or two and a sink with a nozzle and a bunch of crap clothes lying around and if Noah - I used to think - if Noah saved the world for this and this alone he was sadly fucking mistaken by ever making that boat and God too should have kept his head in the clouds where it belonged for there weren't nothing alive left yet worth saving and now this was nothing but fornication for pay just like the rest of the world all those suit and tie bastards we'd see running to Wall Street and their finance-district whorehouses fucking with fingers pumping with dicks every deal and angle they could find - funding murders and wars and armaments of chemicals and bombs and death and destruction and the constabulary on their side did nothing just gave pretense and obsequies to the power and the right proclaimed by the sleazy and nasty military slowly taking things over - Fort This and Fort That filled with ass-lickers liars and killers all mixed together with a faked ideology of bravado and shame and I was for one sick of it all and I swore to myself that if I saw one more soldier-boy baby-face talking at me in favor of his war his land his country at any diner all-night eatery in front of me I swore to myself I'd kill him and I did when it had to be - my trusty Ivers and Johnson .22 never leaving my inside undershirt belt-strap just in case - it was a funny time and place to be and one you had to think about all the time - the angles had to stay fresh and stay sharp this active resistance this law-breaking fight-back to break the power and the strength of the force that was holding down and destroying society - so I was on a double-mission just like this : living on the streets alone and single but with a force behind me and a place to be and go not really lost but lost as any nonetheless and I fought back and mostly won resistance activism turnabout-is-fair-play and all that stuff and if I ever had the pawnshop blues I never felt them for a minute and I kept ALL my contacts alive and often thought often 'Billy Grosbard where are you now?'
Saturday, January 9, 2010
"...WILSON GOT HIS WAR..."
14. " …WILSON GOT HIS WAR…"
(from 'The Edison Papers'):
"Now time goes on has gone on passes me by after the fire we rebuilt and were up again in less than a year" he said to me still walking as we looked past the low brick wall which covered what now was a bleak yet quiet parking lot across from the Black Maria site "everything stayed pretty much the same along to the end in 1931 Wilson got his war and the creepy bastards flew into it with the rage and greed of all the world and then just as I was preparing to get out they moved again towards war footing seeking rubber and glass and radios and communications and technology like all of that could win the crafty minds of bad people that's all it was at that point bad people doing bad things to make bad money and because of that my labs went on to be legendary and Bell and Westinghouse and Edison became names to reckon with and the whole nation was lighted and people saw and heard but there I was going daff in the back of Llewellyn alone and Mina and the great piano and the room for socials and the receptions and the President came and Newark and New York and Cleveland and Boston and the whole world over came to see me and in my later dotage I mumbled and grunted and pointed and the dogs ran and I strolled quietly and I tried and tried - you know they attempted to get me to work on the electric chair and I refused simply said no you'd be better off with George Westinghouse’s system for that one and it's overlooked but I did refuse and wouldn't put my electric hand to slaughter to running currents through people and frying and cooking and burning oh I'd seen carnage in my day don't get me wrong but by then I couldn't hear and hardly see so I grunted and passed on lots of things and now as I recall even the smell of grazing and new-cut grass had turned from the natural smell to a smell of gasoline and noise and roar the roar of industry and engine and fuel and motor and I guess I started a lot of that and then by the end Ford had me old Henry took me over dismantled everything I did moved my stuff around and got strange with nostalgia and strange with situations and fakery so I stayed in Florida and withered there for a while and we moved about and Burroughs and Ford and me and others we sought refuges among ourselves but now it's gone and so am I" and with that he turned and looked back towards the old rambling factory set so strangely right on the street as if the street had always been there and no responsibility was his for anything but the sounds wafted from him as new musics to ears that had never heard before and the people flocked and visitors were seeking autographs and he did grunt and nod and sign and shake those hands proffered and the city buses rumbled right past him and the cars lined up and we crossed the deadly gasping traffic to go up to the main door at front and past the book stall and the early exhibit with the movie and the dolls that talked and the lights and the chemicals and the labs and the mills and the goldenrod plants for rubber and we stumbled eventually into the industrial entrance for workers where the big wooden time clock still stood on the wall and the vast office doors and the high office lobby and the books and the library but first he stood and stopped and punched his worker's card and we entered and then walked to what was left - the tinfoil phonograph from 1877 the strip kinetograph and electric light the power equipment and below us far below was the posthumous 1940 vault filled with and protecting Edison papers and rare examples of early works Edison Terrace and Alden Street Lakeside Avenue and Main Street Building 5 Main Laboratory machine shops stock rooms offices library and office Building 4 Metallurgical Laboratories to the Gatehouse and to the Water Tower still all extant still there all from trying trying and succeeding to produce a source of light by sending electric current through a material inside a vacuum causing it to glow and only Edison - in his words - "resisted the accepted use of high current and a low-resistance material I saw instead quite clearly that a very small filament of a highly-resistant material would glow with a lower current and last longer my first platinum wire lamp burned an hour or two but I had to improve on that and I did so by improving the vacuum inside the globe and turning to carbonized filaments one lamp right off burned for 13 and 1/2 hours that was really the beginnings as I consider of electric light but even then the bulb was useless outside the laboratory I knew that for people to benefit I would have to incorporate a new system of electric power distribution into established urban areas and that was I really feel a greater achievement than the electric lamp itself for I had to fight the endless gaslight interests and indifferent politicians and to do so I developed a system which I put in the financial district of New York City my Pearl Street Station where I developed a more powerful dynamo than ever before and combined it with a steam engine into one unit which combined worked to produce but only after I also had to design specifically for it a whole array of original devices insulated conduits mains underground junction boxes relay circuits switchboards meters fuses fuse boxes sockets and of course lamps not an easy task mind you but one that I did gladly in order to bring forth the new world as I really saw it as a new world of promise and trembling with light by 1887 I was set Menlo became merely prologue to West Orange's present now past and this is us here now all around us present with light."
(from 'The Edison Papers'):
"Now time goes on has gone on passes me by after the fire we rebuilt and were up again in less than a year" he said to me still walking as we looked past the low brick wall which covered what now was a bleak yet quiet parking lot across from the Black Maria site "everything stayed pretty much the same along to the end in 1931 Wilson got his war and the creepy bastards flew into it with the rage and greed of all the world and then just as I was preparing to get out they moved again towards war footing seeking rubber and glass and radios and communications and technology like all of that could win the crafty minds of bad people that's all it was at that point bad people doing bad things to make bad money and because of that my labs went on to be legendary and Bell and Westinghouse and Edison became names to reckon with and the whole nation was lighted and people saw and heard but there I was going daff in the back of Llewellyn alone and Mina and the great piano and the room for socials and the receptions and the President came and Newark and New York and Cleveland and Boston and the whole world over came to see me and in my later dotage I mumbled and grunted and pointed and the dogs ran and I strolled quietly and I tried and tried - you know they attempted to get me to work on the electric chair and I refused simply said no you'd be better off with George Westinghouse’s system for that one and it's overlooked but I did refuse and wouldn't put my electric hand to slaughter to running currents through people and frying and cooking and burning oh I'd seen carnage in my day don't get me wrong but by then I couldn't hear and hardly see so I grunted and passed on lots of things and now as I recall even the smell of grazing and new-cut grass had turned from the natural smell to a smell of gasoline and noise and roar the roar of industry and engine and fuel and motor and I guess I started a lot of that and then by the end Ford had me old Henry took me over dismantled everything I did moved my stuff around and got strange with nostalgia and strange with situations and fakery so I stayed in Florida and withered there for a while and we moved about and Burroughs and Ford and me and others we sought refuges among ourselves but now it's gone and so am I" and with that he turned and looked back towards the old rambling factory set so strangely right on the street as if the street had always been there and no responsibility was his for anything but the sounds wafted from him as new musics to ears that had never heard before and the people flocked and visitors were seeking autographs and he did grunt and nod and sign and shake those hands proffered and the city buses rumbled right past him and the cars lined up and we crossed the deadly gasping traffic to go up to the main door at front and past the book stall and the early exhibit with the movie and the dolls that talked and the lights and the chemicals and the labs and the mills and the goldenrod plants for rubber and we stumbled eventually into the industrial entrance for workers where the big wooden time clock still stood on the wall and the vast office doors and the high office lobby and the books and the library but first he stood and stopped and punched his worker's card and we entered and then walked to what was left - the tinfoil phonograph from 1877 the strip kinetograph and electric light the power equipment and below us far below was the posthumous 1940 vault filled with and protecting Edison papers and rare examples of early works Edison Terrace and Alden Street Lakeside Avenue and Main Street Building 5 Main Laboratory machine shops stock rooms offices library and office Building 4 Metallurgical Laboratories to the Gatehouse and to the Water Tower still all extant still there all from trying trying and succeeding to produce a source of light by sending electric current through a material inside a vacuum causing it to glow and only Edison - in his words - "resisted the accepted use of high current and a low-resistance material I saw instead quite clearly that a very small filament of a highly-resistant material would glow with a lower current and last longer my first platinum wire lamp burned an hour or two but I had to improve on that and I did so by improving the vacuum inside the globe and turning to carbonized filaments one lamp right off burned for 13 and 1/2 hours that was really the beginnings as I consider of electric light but even then the bulb was useless outside the laboratory I knew that for people to benefit I would have to incorporate a new system of electric power distribution into established urban areas and that was I really feel a greater achievement than the electric lamp itself for I had to fight the endless gaslight interests and indifferent politicians and to do so I developed a system which I put in the financial district of New York City my Pearl Street Station where I developed a more powerful dynamo than ever before and combined it with a steam engine into one unit which combined worked to produce but only after I also had to design specifically for it a whole array of original devices insulated conduits mains underground junction boxes relay circuits switchboards meters fuses fuse boxes sockets and of course lamps not an easy task mind you but one that I did gladly in order to bring forth the new world as I really saw it as a new world of promise and trembling with light by 1887 I was set Menlo became merely prologue to West Orange's present now past and this is us here now all around us present with light."
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