December rush, eh? Rebarbative bedfellows, yes? Assuage the babblative, no?
You’ve got another December rush going and no guardian of the journal yet—you… you… you see… you see men hovering outside your window 15 & 1/2 storeys up—what phantasms these? What dour inflections of second sight? What third-eye astigamtismus, those shimmering Fata Morganas? Weren’t the visitations supposed to happen Christmas Eve? It’s two days after Christmas, man! Be damned masts! Confound the mast climbers! Rock the rock pigeons in their hidebound pinnacles! At the end of the year I see a procession of all the dead things seen throughout the year. What queasiness this? How quizzical. How illogically logical that this would appear before me on the day of the supernovae—on the day of multitude earthquakes—and dozens of volcano borborygmus…(or is it my stomach?) Be off visions—be off, you hovering homunculi, before I pincer you with forefinger and thumb—you pin-tailed wren (assassins). Vape elsewhere into the winds. Count the years conquests in slower measures, and hushed(!) tones, by the edge of tsunami quay—and take long steps toward the end of that miniature pier. Your eye sockets full of garter and indigo snakes compel me toward viper thoughts. This door prize of papercuts bores me in the standard modes. Note the batch and quantity—mark the name and model! Inspector 13 was here, and he hung from his neck a single use noose—17 centimeters from the ground, and he drowned in 9.5 centimeters of water. Take your excellence wherever you can find it…
Yours sincerely,
The Gibbous Red Star
What I’m Reading:
“please take a piece of me back home, each piece is anti-war and don’t pay your rent, in fact remember: property is robbery, give everybody everything…”
Scrolling down a number of superimpositions they multiply—pages of writing, collages, painting, films—audio also multiplied as reading and new noise fades in…
Also try flashlight projection of negatives or slides on wall and film it….
At the edge of decay (details: edge of pigeon…)
Multiple overlayered photos… build photo wall as u speak, cover Wooly shots with an innocent shot of childhood misconceptions
Use the writing done on Crispr Packs
Stripped down song like kg or tw
See photos in 2nd museum visit:
1. Like film “remains” very slow pans over dilapidated scenes, garbage, cultural detritus, read slowly over it
2. Like photos from “road journal” of torn pages revealing very little but enough of life story
3. Like dirt born “2nd History” rephotograph images of hoods and make them extended family, with narration hagiography over pix — and make documents or other artifacts like air mail mailers, maybe passaports etc
4. Make storyboards with pastel, cut-outs, pix, et al and animate it
5. Layer like contaminated “xy” & “stars” (no) and rephoto them as the final work
6. Repaint band aid packets for injuries suffered in childhood and equate them with the things I broke…
7. paint / sketch a real daddy doll with cut out clothes… or find a big unicorn rainbow second hand
8. Stones from different places visited and the ptsd inducing situations they mark
9. Copy and enlarge the word wall over and over until avatar of the turtle type of enlarged detritus and make wall of it
10. Tear pages out of book and paint something on it pertaining to you at Tim’s animal farm imbroglio
11. In-camera edited film: little bits and tips of crayons
What I’m Reading:
“The fantasy contented her for a vacant minute. It became the content of her life. Her fantasies were tacky home movies, not features.”
“One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;”
— Wallace Stevens / “The Snow Man”
“Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex. No matter if it is snowing lightly and unseriously, or snowing very seriously, well on into the night, I would like to stop whatever manifestation of life I am engaged in and have sex…”
— Mary Ruefle / “Snow”
“Out of ice us: what we’re made of came from comets, which are ice.”
— Martha Collins / “Coming Through”
“The wintry west extends his blast, And hail and rain does blaw; Or, the stormy north sends driving forth The blinding sleet and snaw…”
— Robert Burns / “Winter: A Dirge”
“As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
— Claire Keegan / Small Things Like These
“Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.”
— Wallace Stevens / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
What I’m Listening To:
“Well I’m lookin at the snowflakes And they all look the same And the clouds are goin by me They’re playin some kind of game Well you know there’s a snowstorm”
The mizzle was the type of drizzle that drove him batty. Forever speckling his glasses, so that he had to take them off, wipe them, and replace them every few minutes. This was daft, he decided. Nowhere but here does it mainly rain.
Nowhere but on the Spanish plains do they lament the death of Franco—the laying-on of paternalistic hands—hands missed at the moments that one is being confronted by liberal foolishness, he thought, in an atypically illiberal instant.
He heard his father’s voice again through time and space: we need the return of the strong man—he of the gentle but firm hand guiding us, occasionally tapping us on the head when we veer off-course. Deliberate. Stolid. Of course we need his guidance, for we are nothing without it. Without him.
He had the insight that his father was sin and mental illness incarnate. A burr of incessant commands. A fuzz of violence. A spritz of acid walking.
His father once said, “get behind the mule and plow for the state. Plow for the caudillo!”
He told his father that the good lord knew he tried, but he wasn’t going to move a foot. Not behind the mule, the plow, or his father. “You are not the boss of me. Boss men are a thing of the past,” he said, and spit a wad of bubblegum out. “No sir, ain’t doing it. Get yourself some other flunky.”
His father didn’t take kindly to that, and set off on a pitched run toward him, and as he appproached and reached out for him, the son, for he was his son…
(I thought it was obvious. I tagged his father as “father” … if not, forgive me for the incomplete scene setting and half-constructed world … I gave you drizzle, but really not much in way of landscape, no … you see, there have been problems, issues you might call them: bomb cyclones to endure, debt ceilings to fret about, desperate measures to consider … did you know that … sorry, back to this other thing … humbly … sorry)
… He deftly took a half-step back, tilted up his boot and caught his father at the base of his leg, and off his father flew—the impulse of his own weight and gravity. Gravid gravity—
(though neither had ever been pregnant—it’s merely a secondary definition of gravid at work here—but they’d often been under the effects of centrifugal force, which really if you think about it might be the most effective way of rendering this … sorry, again)
Five feet later his father came down with a mortar shell thud, and an exhalation of breath that sounded closer to a pig’s squeal. The father knew he was beat before he even thought of getting up. The wind had left him. His fingers bent up to the sky, the same crooked talons that grasped his neck and shook him violently as a child.
He now chewed a new wad of John Cage bubblegum—
(NOTE: All music is currently being composed by chance operation. There is no sound. Not yet…)
What I’m Reading:
“There are many corpses on the back of this country, and we will continue to carry them until we have the right tools, the right words, to bury them, so that the fertile human field of becoming can flower with justice and equality.”
the lone image that resolved in his head was that of the video of Amanda Fielding’s bloodbrainvolume pulsing through the sub-cranial dura to the rhythm of her heart and that first tenuous trickle of blood that riverined down her forehead…
What I’m Reading:
“I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don’t.”
1. You are playing mechanized baseball: a ball bearing is pitched out of a hole, and the bat is a pinball flipper — and fwap! The ball bearing falls into one of a series of holes marked “single, double, triple, home run, and out.” There are vastly more outs than hits. Then you move on to submarine warfare: small plastic ships float out near the horizon line as you look through your periscope: you estimate position, hit the fire button on the handle, and BOOM! Down goes das boot!
2. You are the night’s confabulation. You don a Richard Burton affectation and on occasion you break out into song and dance, Al Jolson style, viz., a good Jewish boy doing blackface or something minstrel-like. Not to worry, you’ve run this through the department of psychological sanitation, and nothing that you do or say will offend, chagrin, or impinge upon a healthy state of mind. No, in fact, you shall be put through the “so called” ringer, and as a point of further fact you are wearing an Arab strap, and it will assist you in hitting certain notes with a certain meaning. No! No cause for alarm. This is all family friendly, PG rated, and sanitized for your protection. The buzzword to listen for: gentrification, collateral damage, enhanced interrogations, debt ceiling limits… the list is long, but you know them well. So without further ado…
3. You are Claudia’s kid — conceived at that apartment she and Terry lived in above the Garden of Eden Diner in Hoboken. Yeah, remember they were doing roadie work for Yo La Tengo that year, they even opened a couple of shows for them using the name of their first band, Rasputin’s Swim.
4. You are a case of the shakes, momma made the shake n’ bake. I got the shakes, momma made the chicken fried steak. I got the shakes, momma made the whole world quake — she’s got the power you know. I got the shakes, momma said she’s going away.
5. You are the doxology of reflection in a darkened alcove. God is in the alcove. God is in the house. God is loose in there. Who let him in? Did you bait him with cerulean cookies and sugar clouds? Now God’s rummaging around. Uninvited. Unwanted. What dolts you both are.
6. You are biddable in the execrable moments before the prisoner is executed. You are Richard Burton bombast, Shakespearean affectation a notch too loud and an eyelash too wide. You are the murmuration of starlings lost in the roiling chaos in that instant before banking hard left. You are the suppurations of wounds that don’t heal three weeks out. You are the gesticulations of the man without legs as the detritus and shrapnel falls back to earth and settles on the rim of the new-formed crater. You are the child transfixed with the sky as she traces the arc of the parachute bomb’s parabola on its ecliptic. You are.
7. You are last day of November: when ladies of idle lament, and big men with boxy jackets in swimming trunks, big trunks, salute portmanteaus in the streets of Deauville. You sing, “break up to make up, that’s all we do, first you love me, then you hate me, that’s a game for fools.”
8. You are lust unbound. You just want to kiss her, “please just let me kiss you.” She wants to smash you. “I will let you smash me. Beat me with that truncheon, smash me with that truncheon.” Then she broke the spell and hissed: “disrepute!” You lodged a complaint via computer, the one on the street corner, then you had enough. You stopped.
9. You are tornado thoughts ten seconds after the weather warning has been issued.
10. You are the shrieking instrument panel on the jet spiraling earthbound.
Gustatory. Gestation. Genuflection. Generative. Gainsay. Can you guess, which, if any, of the terms above doubles as a po’ boy, a grinder, and a nuclear submarine? If you answered: “Birds on ice,” you win nothing but my heart. I’ve come to the point where points are pointless. Where well-thought out thesis statements are too hegemonic, where writing the well-constructed story is too formulaic, and where proper pacing, narrative arc, and “stakes”—stakes! for goodness sakes—stakes! Who talks that way about art? What are the stakes? What’s at stake for this character? When did art become a parimutuel endeavor? This has all become painting by numbers. Who is best at coloring inside the lines. Why is this ok? Why does this make sense? Why the rush to the normative-homogeneous? Why does everything a human do become subsumed to the capital imperative? Where’s the profit to be made? How do we monetize this? How do we get the most eyes on our ads? Let’s use this work of art as a conduit for our festooning advertising around it. Please. Stop.
What I’m Reading:
“The politicians and newspapers talk a lot about freedom but the moment you begin to apply any, either in Life or in the Art-form, you are in for a cell, ridicule or misunderstanding.”
