25. HAVE YOU EVER? (the bible salesman Sanford on Allen Street, NYC 1970):
...Dined with the hungry, eaten with the dead, spied falcons off the cliff or suspended the moments of reckoning you've passed over ? no no I would say no of course not the very thought of the marvels which made you can hurt just in thinking and the last day I recalled ever being so mis-shapen and uninformed was the day I awoke from a pallor of doubt and found myself on Allen Street between someone's bags of flour - splayed as I was without meaning on the broken sidewalk front and it was 5am and a hot Summer morning with the heat vaulting rooftops already before day had done its work and a senseless dog was at my side sniffing something anything at all as dogs do : wide-eyed and open every doorway beckoned as the slow creep of hours went by I stood and called my own name quietly just to be sure - at the least - that I was in the right spot and the bible salesman Sanford whom I'd seen a hundred times before passed me and asked if I was alright and I said yes and he said 'walk with me we can have a quick breakfast' so I went dishevelled and broken but no more than he was and we sat at some small pitiful window seat in an un-busy Jewish neighborhood shop with coffee and whatever else he'd brought and he asked me why I lived like this and I said 'I don't know - you sure it's even living?' and I could tell he was trying to get to something other some point of reckoning by which to define his own time and day and he said 'my point is I'm not averse to helping you but I often ask why and then I begin to think it's perhaps time you yourself put some of these pieces together and figured why you're stuck like this - here have another - and you know your life is passing by you you're losing time and it doesn't come back and each day you awaken like this your teeth are rotting from no care - just absolutely sizzling away slowly from the sugars and acids of the junk you must be eating - and the dirt on your skin takes its own toll : you are mortal my son after all - what a discovery that ! no ? and let me put myself in your position five years ago I would have better understood but now as it is I can only see you as vermin or hurt and lost' and I said back 'why not just think of me as a survivor like you a survivor like you and your high-vaunted people who think of themselves all as survivors too? and what's the difference anyway?' and with that he gave me a strange look that I wondered about for a long time after : we got up he paid the little man at the counter and we went our separate ways but only after - last parting shot - he said 'you are less wise than you think and your years they will take a toll and I have half-heartedly in this attempt tried to bring you around but it will be no more I shall pass you by forever each time now that I see you there is no thankfulness in doing something for nothing over and over you are finding your way heedlessly - like all the others - to the scrapheap of time and history wherein you shall dwell then forever go ahead I don't any longer care' and somehow too it did all make sense and then I realized as well that I had dreamed of this sequence a few times and It had almost perfectly recreated itself - except for the strange setting of a grey basement and blue wooden shelves being painted by a small girl in a funny knit hat and I had a dying cat in a box that suddenly started to scamper around after showing only lifelessness throughout the dream and the man across the way - the frame shop - had been trying to get me to sign disclaimers and bills for eight hundred dollars and yet outside of that I knew just knew I had lived all this scene before and I went along my way determined then to find that spot that Allen Street entryway perhaps into that other place and time where I would feel far more comfortable and better with words that any of this grubbing on the street : the bible salesman Sanford is now long gone I would imagine but maybe still peddling his ancient wares from a shelf on high above the Heavens and all the Earths somewhere I'll never know.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
DANCING THE DANCE
24. DANCING THE DANCE:
'If you've got the smarts to take it off you should take it off to be smart' was the motto over the doorway once at a strip club I went past in the mid-40's off Eighth Ave. and it was back at a time when it was still pretty unusual to see nudity played so publicly - of course all that has now changed and maybe since Oh Calcutta! and all that stuff it has become perfectly normal and acceptable in theater parlance to move the 'show-portion' of the activity towards anything that shows skin - totally naked or otherwise - and in fact just the other day I was sitting at a diner in nearby Newark and adjacent to me in another booth were two people - a film-student sort of guy and a girl of the usual 'art' outlook - and I overheard him matter-of-factly speaking of film as he said "when you're watching a film you WANT to see shit - the reason you're watching is for explosions gunshots or naked people" and he went on from there but I thought it pretty interesting to hear that from one of today's young people working through film as a craft and it all just showed how different everything has become - until today's situation wherein anything goes and goes so much as to have already been brought out as pretty jaded and tired for simple nudity and naked situations to appear - like the old attitude always went 'how much of that can you see and still care?' or something like that but in any case everyday is a first day for someone and you have to consider the reams of thirteen or fourteen year olds or less just starting now to become aware of this stuff on a regular basis - and they become aware of it in lieu of everything else too so eventually it really does stunt their outlook and all but I'm not sure that's any different from the old days when someone just arriving in the Army or something like it would get their first exposure to naked playing cards or girlie magazines (as they were once called) and to view a naked opposite-sex was really once considered a big deal - oh well - that was what made old 42nd street so daring I suppose and what made that motto I opened with so weirdly enticing even in its non-sensical outlook - after all WHAT the hell does it mean? or what is it trying to say anyway? - but the theater world (as was said before) has always been mixed in with the underworld and that of course is where pornography and nudity and such all come together because the best way for anyone especially a girl to get started in the film industry or theater is to be perfectly explicit and open and experimental about her sex-life (and this means guys too whether or not homosexual) and accepting of most any sort of coitus or sex-abuse which comes her way and if that means paying dues by taking off her clothes or submitting to whatever - filmed or not - then so be it for the carnal aspect of the entertainment industry is its means of generating money and first and foremost MONEY is what it's about and it's that which accounts for the massive abundance of its vulgarity abusiveness bad humor and filth and the ways it uses abuse and mockery to depict everyday life and people - IT DEMANDS a distancing of itself from any form of perfection and it does this through peddling a strange form of nervous filth which eventually degenerates the people who either enact it or take part in it or view it until they become no more than ciphers addicted to returning to the scene again and again - thus the money generation and the debased currency of quality and life which is brought forth - and it's like that or was all along the central section of strip bars and porno palaces which once lined both the street and avenues around 42nd where upstairs from many of the establishments there were veritable mills of debauchery - whorehouses captive young girls forced to perform sexually and be filmed doing so in pay-for-use rooms for masturbation film-viewing voyeurism peeping or watching and all the rest and an entire INDUSTRY thus formed went from here to California doing same and making money over and above any of the almost self-flagellant propensities of reformers and law enforcement (read 'pay-offs') to stop it AND in the end (no pun intended) everything failed and everything gave up and even today it has simply moved somewhere else.
'If you've got the smarts to take it off you should take it off to be smart' was the motto over the doorway once at a strip club I went past in the mid-40's off Eighth Ave. and it was back at a time when it was still pretty unusual to see nudity played so publicly - of course all that has now changed and maybe since Oh Calcutta! and all that stuff it has become perfectly normal and acceptable in theater parlance to move the 'show-portion' of the activity towards anything that shows skin - totally naked or otherwise - and in fact just the other day I was sitting at a diner in nearby Newark and adjacent to me in another booth were two people - a film-student sort of guy and a girl of the usual 'art' outlook - and I overheard him matter-of-factly speaking of film as he said "when you're watching a film you WANT to see shit - the reason you're watching is for explosions gunshots or naked people" and he went on from there but I thought it pretty interesting to hear that from one of today's young people working through film as a craft and it all just showed how different everything has become - until today's situation wherein anything goes and goes so much as to have already been brought out as pretty jaded and tired for simple nudity and naked situations to appear - like the old attitude always went 'how much of that can you see and still care?' or something like that but in any case everyday is a first day for someone and you have to consider the reams of thirteen or fourteen year olds or less just starting now to become aware of this stuff on a regular basis - and they become aware of it in lieu of everything else too so eventually it really does stunt their outlook and all but I'm not sure that's any different from the old days when someone just arriving in the Army or something like it would get their first exposure to naked playing cards or girlie magazines (as they were once called) and to view a naked opposite-sex was really once considered a big deal - oh well - that was what made old 42nd street so daring I suppose and what made that motto I opened with so weirdly enticing even in its non-sensical outlook - after all WHAT the hell does it mean? or what is it trying to say anyway? - but the theater world (as was said before) has always been mixed in with the underworld and that of course is where pornography and nudity and such all come together because the best way for anyone especially a girl to get started in the film industry or theater is to be perfectly explicit and open and experimental about her sex-life (and this means guys too whether or not homosexual) and accepting of most any sort of coitus or sex-abuse which comes her way and if that means paying dues by taking off her clothes or submitting to whatever - filmed or not - then so be it for the carnal aspect of the entertainment industry is its means of generating money and first and foremost MONEY is what it's about and it's that which accounts for the massive abundance of its vulgarity abusiveness bad humor and filth and the ways it uses abuse and mockery to depict everyday life and people - IT DEMANDS a distancing of itself from any form of perfection and it does this through peddling a strange form of nervous filth which eventually degenerates the people who either enact it or take part in it or view it until they become no more than ciphers addicted to returning to the scene again and again - thus the money generation and the debased currency of quality and life which is brought forth - and it's like that or was all along the central section of strip bars and porno palaces which once lined both the street and avenues around 42nd where upstairs from many of the establishments there were veritable mills of debauchery - whorehouses captive young girls forced to perform sexually and be filmed doing so in pay-for-use rooms for masturbation film-viewing voyeurism peeping or watching and all the rest and an entire INDUSTRY thus formed went from here to California doing same and making money over and above any of the almost self-flagellant propensities of reformers and law enforcement (read 'pay-offs') to stop it AND in the end (no pun intended) everything failed and everything gave up and even today it has simply moved somewhere else.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
ALL THE BAGGAGE OF ABSALOM IS USELESS
23. ALL THE BAGGAGE OF ABSALOM IS USELESS:
"I don't eat tomatoes I never did I hate trains and they never run on time anyway and anywhere ten people are gathered they're not gathered in my name you can be sure of that and there's no fool like an old fool but chimneys gather no moss and a rocking horse is as good as an elephant to a blind man on a galloping horse or is that in a galloping hearse I really do forget but NO MATTER for fourteen siblings in one big cradle are all I've ever lost and today's posts are piled to drive into the quaggy past on which impermanent palaces balance and if God were an angel I'd be the head of a pin and all matter is only that - things left over from Day One and never corrected : clods clover marble iron rat bull bird and all the rest YOU can have the lot of them and I bet - sexually speaking - that Adam never made an Eve that wouldn't make an Adam - and there's Theology for you buster but if the word GOD is to have any use it must include everything and so I feel we all must have in our bones at least a bit of some kind of Pantheism and a reverence for all of creation - for if any one part of it THEN the whole and the only thing we can do is to keep on finding out as much carefully controlled common sense about the world as we can NO MORE OR NO LESS but not for profit or gain GOOD GOD not for profit or gain for therein lies the Devil and DID YOU KNOW that 'Then is Now and the star you steer by is gone - its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane as spider floss on my cheek and a light from the zenith spun when the slowworm lay in her lap fifty years back' and wheat lies in excrement while seeds thrive in the corruption of their flowers and the poet Aneurin counted men slain by Northumbria's conquerors several hundred years ago as if it were a simple yet doleful task and the moon shone over the corpses for nothing while he tallied and the restlessness of the imagination is such that it lies with one to dream of another ! and it was William James who said:
'Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at a definite point in time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a seagull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.'
"I don't eat tomatoes I never did I hate trains and they never run on time anyway and anywhere ten people are gathered they're not gathered in my name you can be sure of that and there's no fool like an old fool but chimneys gather no moss and a rocking horse is as good as an elephant to a blind man on a galloping horse or is that in a galloping hearse I really do forget but NO MATTER for fourteen siblings in one big cradle are all I've ever lost and today's posts are piled to drive into the quaggy past on which impermanent palaces balance and if God were an angel I'd be the head of a pin and all matter is only that - things left over from Day One and never corrected : clods clover marble iron rat bull bird and all the rest YOU can have the lot of them and I bet - sexually speaking - that Adam never made an Eve that wouldn't make an Adam - and there's Theology for you buster but if the word GOD is to have any use it must include everything and so I feel we all must have in our bones at least a bit of some kind of Pantheism and a reverence for all of creation - for if any one part of it THEN the whole and the only thing we can do is to keep on finding out as much carefully controlled common sense about the world as we can NO MORE OR NO LESS but not for profit or gain GOOD GOD not for profit or gain for therein lies the Devil and DID YOU KNOW that 'Then is Now and the star you steer by is gone - its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane as spider floss on my cheek and a light from the zenith spun when the slowworm lay in her lap fifty years back' and wheat lies in excrement while seeds thrive in the corruption of their flowers and the poet Aneurin counted men slain by Northumbria's conquerors several hundred years ago as if it were a simple yet doleful task and the moon shone over the corpses for nothing while he tallied and the restlessness of the imagination is such that it lies with one to dream of another ! and it was William James who said:
'Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at a definite point in time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a seagull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.'
and he said it all for good luck and not much more but for every set of ears which hears ten million more hear nothing of it and waltz away in their own drunken haze - stupidity flounders no parson and idiocy never really sunk a ship but the greatest stars in he Heavens are the ones not yet charted and the telescope to show us PARADISE and all its minions has not yet been made but the man who grinds the glass to level all the Heaven's refracted and grandiloquent angles will surely bring us God in a jar to show as proof of where he has been and FINALLY my brothers (please listen up) :
'Look how clouds dance,
under the wind's wing,
and leaves delight
in transcience.'
and I have NO MORE to say."
'Look how clouds dance,
under the wind's wing,
and leaves delight
in transcience.'
and I have NO MORE to say."
Monday, January 10, 2011
TINY MONTGOMERY STREET
22. TINY MONTGOMERY STREET (Sometimes Sad Whatever Else):
There was a time mind you when we all lived together on Tiny Montgomery Street thinking we were alone and sometimes we'd make fun of the street name which was really Montgomery Street in Jersey City but the situation was so dire we called it Tiny Montgomery Street after a song or something Emil talked about and then he used to joke about whether he'd rather live on Jones Street or Great Jones Street when he got back to New York City same stuff like that kind of joking thing but nobody ever really followed it so we moved on and once we stole an old Buick that was down on its last legs sinking pretty low to the ground but just as it sat in some yard with a key in it that's just how we stole it and rode off and it worked for about 3 days as we rode around here and there and even got back into New York City with it three bucks for the Tunnel and then we abandoned it when it finally needed gas left it on the West Side Highway just off to the side and walked away with our stuff but it was pretty fun for the time we had it cars are interesting like that you can get around with them but sometimes you can't and everything stops and even though you're in a car you're going nowhere and all around you in the city the people walking are getting more places than you so we didn't miss it much for sure but there's nothing like the air and the windows down and the feeling you get passing by places you know as you drive along as if you owned the street and everything and the passing portraiture can sometimes astound as you see the tall buildings from street level all twisted and crazy or the monumental scale of steel and glass and stone and brick and the enormous entryways with their big numbers and frontages where people enter and leave in clumps and the third or fourth floor windows you can see from street-level all cluttered with papers and desk and busy-work stuff and the signs in the windows above the street 'Conde Nast Rothfell Brokers Granite City Lenders Abacus Decorations Pummelio Draperies and Fabrics National Time-Keeping Company Florimund Travel Argosy Books Trendy Costume Company Network Medical Systems Inc. On-Line Solutions The Mad Hatter' it all goes by in a rush and blur too fast to even talk about and just by listening you learn so much (like the guy talking about the wartime photographs of Vietnam just found taken by North Vietnamese photographers themselves neglected all these years stuffed in boxes and many many negatives just found wrapped in cardboard and placed in a box lined with kernels of rice to keep out moisture and all the men who once took these propaganda and wartime photographs from the North's perspective for once not the American or the South's are now all in their late seventies and eighties and are barely reminiscent of what they did back then but some can remember easily the tiniest detail of some of the pictures things like the hundreds of boots cast-off on the last day of the war by the fleeing North Vietnamese soldiers who in their haste to flee took off their uniforms and boots and clothing and wanted desperately to mingle and mix in with the peasants they returned to immediately so as not to be seen as having been soldiers just the morning before and the roadway in the photo is littered quite literally with a thousand boots and the fleeing cars and buses are just running over them and a few people on motorbike are seen heading in the other direction) and everywhere you go people are talking about something and you're walking along to just take it all in and without the car then you realize you are really part of a big middle-mass of life and activity all amidst the lunge and poke of sound and emphasis and meaning and emotion up and down every street and corner and block and avenue the attitude and the circumstance of living is worked out hundreds lunching hundreds for coffee hundreds at the curb hundreds on their way and so "hey forget the car" you wind up saying glad to see it's dead and gone and it's cheaper too to walk away and I remember once there was this girl with him Tea was her name (she called it 'Tay ya' I guess it sounded better) and she stayed with us for some time a couple of months anyway and her and Emil got pretty tight with each other even though it was difficult in our situations to move in on anyone he wasn't stopped no-how by that anyway Tea stayed along with us for a while doing pretty much whatever we did she was a nice girl about thirty maybe straggly hair sort of blond attractive and interesting too and Emil he used to say "You've got to remain interesting in this life for it to be worth anything the last thing I want to see is a boring bunch of pricks who can't do anything differently or fresher than the next so no matter what format we have to do it in we've got to remain interesting and even startling to ourselves to give life that little kick that keeps it from being tiresome and the kind of thing that brings you down so let's go" he'd talk like that a lot a pep-talk to nobody in particular but that's what kept him bringing people around himself he was like the leader in charisma of any of the homeless and low-life's we ever were with he could get people to do just about anything for him if maybe not with him it was funny that whole scene was funny and it was different then too because a lot of what today is considered important and valuable areas were then just ruination I remember seeing boarded up doors and piles of cast-off vegetables and foods along the curbs and broken bags of garbage and debris windows gone doorways boarded the very streets that today draw thousands then were derelict places where'd you'd sometimes be afraid to be seen for fear of your life or getting beat up or stabbed or anything like that the old broken storefronts out of business from twelve years before the broken bannisters and porches and stoops on the houses the one after the other horrible junked cars broken twisted abandoned left there the dogs the kids the old people just staring off into some space it was like some tired old war zone of rubble and destruction being passed off as a city but that's where we lived that's the stuff we walked in it was an entire under-culture of people with no meaning or nothing and so much of that is gone now it's all so different but hey this is memory speaking remember and memory gets its privileges and I spoke to Tea once myself as she was simply and quietly sitting amongst the trees and greenery of a park bench across from the old pet store with all the birds in the window and we'd just the night before been playing off this blues crowd that had gathered outside one of those Bleecker Street clubs grubbing dollars and drinks and whatever we could from the gathered kids and it worked pretty well and she turned to me that day and said "you know I could have been into California by now probably all settled and with a place to live and everything only if I'd done what my people wanted me to do back then which was just simply straighten up and take some schooling and they would support me wherever I wanted to go or do and I did at one time want to be in Hollywood just to be around the stars and all and maybe get picked up by some talent scout or something working tables at a cafe or bar and then I coulda' played myself well and gotten a few roles and things and become a star like on TV and the movies people like Goldie Hawn or Lee Remick or Michelle Pfeiffer or any of them they ain't got nothing on me not looks not talent it's all a matter of luck yet here I am walking around for hunger and want driving all those old thoughts out of my head because they still hurt you know I remember back in '67 when they was casting right over there for Hair and I passed on that and Sam Shepherd was around then too and a lot of the guys now that you see getting older they were just starting and were young too back then taking their chances Hoffman and Pacino and a lot of others but what did I know I just wanted something right then and there because at that time you know tomorrow was a long way off and now I'm in it and here it is like they say you don't miss your water till your well runs dry and now I got nobody anywhere nobody left I'm all alone and that's sometimes sad whatever else" but that was all back when there was changes everywhere and we were just poor slobs but they always listened to Emil even when he'd be gone and now hell the millennium itself has changed around us and whenever I look up I see but a swarm of new modern young faces peering back at me from some stupid place like bars now that have their own brews and copper kettles suspended from the ceiling and they call themselves 'Harvest' or whatever and kids flock to them fill them up drinking and laughing and the old workmen's bars they're all gone I can't even remember where half of them was anymore because all the work that used to go with them is gone too and the old guys are all died off and we bury their memories with them too that's how the old world passes the old ways disappear and everywhere there's gawky kids in strange pants and they laugh and it seems like that's all they do sitting at these places eating food like it was always there but we have to and had to work for it so it meant something first but never for them and they don't understand what's been lost or removed they just play on and sometimes now as I remember even Tea wasn't nothing but a stupid kid at times or at least that's the way it seemed - you can tell people by what they talk about and their references and things and the thing I hate the most is being naive and innocent because my God that's got to go away immediately it's of no value at all once you're an adult and so those are the people who really get me going the ones who fall for shit and take on a story and run with it the kids are like that it's always a cause or a reason or a mission until they weary and get tired of it and then suddenly they can rationalize a way out of the situation that had just been consuming them.
There was a time mind you when we all lived together on Tiny Montgomery Street thinking we were alone and sometimes we'd make fun of the street name which was really Montgomery Street in Jersey City but the situation was so dire we called it Tiny Montgomery Street after a song or something Emil talked about and then he used to joke about whether he'd rather live on Jones Street or Great Jones Street when he got back to New York City same stuff like that kind of joking thing but nobody ever really followed it so we moved on and once we stole an old Buick that was down on its last legs sinking pretty low to the ground but just as it sat in some yard with a key in it that's just how we stole it and rode off and it worked for about 3 days as we rode around here and there and even got back into New York City with it three bucks for the Tunnel and then we abandoned it when it finally needed gas left it on the West Side Highway just off to the side and walked away with our stuff but it was pretty fun for the time we had it cars are interesting like that you can get around with them but sometimes you can't and everything stops and even though you're in a car you're going nowhere and all around you in the city the people walking are getting more places than you so we didn't miss it much for sure but there's nothing like the air and the windows down and the feeling you get passing by places you know as you drive along as if you owned the street and everything and the passing portraiture can sometimes astound as you see the tall buildings from street level all twisted and crazy or the monumental scale of steel and glass and stone and brick and the enormous entryways with their big numbers and frontages where people enter and leave in clumps and the third or fourth floor windows you can see from street-level all cluttered with papers and desk and busy-work stuff and the signs in the windows above the street 'Conde Nast Rothfell Brokers Granite City Lenders Abacus Decorations Pummelio Draperies and Fabrics National Time-Keeping Company Florimund Travel Argosy Books Trendy Costume Company Network Medical Systems Inc. On-Line Solutions The Mad Hatter' it all goes by in a rush and blur too fast to even talk about and just by listening you learn so much (like the guy talking about the wartime photographs of Vietnam just found taken by North Vietnamese photographers themselves neglected all these years stuffed in boxes and many many negatives just found wrapped in cardboard and placed in a box lined with kernels of rice to keep out moisture and all the men who once took these propaganda and wartime photographs from the North's perspective for once not the American or the South's are now all in their late seventies and eighties and are barely reminiscent of what they did back then but some can remember easily the tiniest detail of some of the pictures things like the hundreds of boots cast-off on the last day of the war by the fleeing North Vietnamese soldiers who in their haste to flee took off their uniforms and boots and clothing and wanted desperately to mingle and mix in with the peasants they returned to immediately so as not to be seen as having been soldiers just the morning before and the roadway in the photo is littered quite literally with a thousand boots and the fleeing cars and buses are just running over them and a few people on motorbike are seen heading in the other direction) and everywhere you go people are talking about something and you're walking along to just take it all in and without the car then you realize you are really part of a big middle-mass of life and activity all amidst the lunge and poke of sound and emphasis and meaning and emotion up and down every street and corner and block and avenue the attitude and the circumstance of living is worked out hundreds lunching hundreds for coffee hundreds at the curb hundreds on their way and so "hey forget the car" you wind up saying glad to see it's dead and gone and it's cheaper too to walk away and I remember once there was this girl with him Tea was her name (she called it 'Tay ya' I guess it sounded better) and she stayed with us for some time a couple of months anyway and her and Emil got pretty tight with each other even though it was difficult in our situations to move in on anyone he wasn't stopped no-how by that anyway Tea stayed along with us for a while doing pretty much whatever we did she was a nice girl about thirty maybe straggly hair sort of blond attractive and interesting too and Emil he used to say "You've got to remain interesting in this life for it to be worth anything the last thing I want to see is a boring bunch of pricks who can't do anything differently or fresher than the next so no matter what format we have to do it in we've got to remain interesting and even startling to ourselves to give life that little kick that keeps it from being tiresome and the kind of thing that brings you down so let's go" he'd talk like that a lot a pep-talk to nobody in particular but that's what kept him bringing people around himself he was like the leader in charisma of any of the homeless and low-life's we ever were with he could get people to do just about anything for him if maybe not with him it was funny that whole scene was funny and it was different then too because a lot of what today is considered important and valuable areas were then just ruination I remember seeing boarded up doors and piles of cast-off vegetables and foods along the curbs and broken bags of garbage and debris windows gone doorways boarded the very streets that today draw thousands then were derelict places where'd you'd sometimes be afraid to be seen for fear of your life or getting beat up or stabbed or anything like that the old broken storefronts out of business from twelve years before the broken bannisters and porches and stoops on the houses the one after the other horrible junked cars broken twisted abandoned left there the dogs the kids the old people just staring off into some space it was like some tired old war zone of rubble and destruction being passed off as a city but that's where we lived that's the stuff we walked in it was an entire under-culture of people with no meaning or nothing and so much of that is gone now it's all so different but hey this is memory speaking remember and memory gets its privileges and I spoke to Tea once myself as she was simply and quietly sitting amongst the trees and greenery of a park bench across from the old pet store with all the birds in the window and we'd just the night before been playing off this blues crowd that had gathered outside one of those Bleecker Street clubs grubbing dollars and drinks and whatever we could from the gathered kids and it worked pretty well and she turned to me that day and said "you know I could have been into California by now probably all settled and with a place to live and everything only if I'd done what my people wanted me to do back then which was just simply straighten up and take some schooling and they would support me wherever I wanted to go or do and I did at one time want to be in Hollywood just to be around the stars and all and maybe get picked up by some talent scout or something working tables at a cafe or bar and then I coulda' played myself well and gotten a few roles and things and become a star like on TV and the movies people like Goldie Hawn or Lee Remick or Michelle Pfeiffer or any of them they ain't got nothing on me not looks not talent it's all a matter of luck yet here I am walking around for hunger and want driving all those old thoughts out of my head because they still hurt you know I remember back in '67 when they was casting right over there for Hair and I passed on that and Sam Shepherd was around then too and a lot of the guys now that you see getting older they were just starting and were young too back then taking their chances Hoffman and Pacino and a lot of others but what did I know I just wanted something right then and there because at that time you know tomorrow was a long way off and now I'm in it and here it is like they say you don't miss your water till your well runs dry and now I got nobody anywhere nobody left I'm all alone and that's sometimes sad whatever else" but that was all back when there was changes everywhere and we were just poor slobs but they always listened to Emil even when he'd be gone and now hell the millennium itself has changed around us and whenever I look up I see but a swarm of new modern young faces peering back at me from some stupid place like bars now that have their own brews and copper kettles suspended from the ceiling and they call themselves 'Harvest' or whatever and kids flock to them fill them up drinking and laughing and the old workmen's bars they're all gone I can't even remember where half of them was anymore because all the work that used to go with them is gone too and the old guys are all died off and we bury their memories with them too that's how the old world passes the old ways disappear and everywhere there's gawky kids in strange pants and they laugh and it seems like that's all they do sitting at these places eating food like it was always there but we have to and had to work for it so it meant something first but never for them and they don't understand what's been lost or removed they just play on and sometimes now as I remember even Tea wasn't nothing but a stupid kid at times or at least that's the way it seemed - you can tell people by what they talk about and their references and things and the thing I hate the most is being naive and innocent because my God that's got to go away immediately it's of no value at all once you're an adult and so those are the people who really get me going the ones who fall for shit and take on a story and run with it the kids are like that it's always a cause or a reason or a mission until they weary and get tired of it and then suddenly they can rationalize a way out of the situation that had just been consuming them.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
SO MUCH FOR THAT
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'.
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'.
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?’
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