Tuesday, April 2, 2013

90% Of Art Is A Prank - Portfolio and Notes


Dreams are a plague...

If they lie to you, it's because it's still none of your business...




 An equation: Art < Beauty >Truth

sparkled/glow/stand/hungry/aloud/wordless/partner/gliding/helping/electric/floating/how/street/outside/mirror/rang/ready/slicked/awaited/spirits/close/auspicious/hips/fingertips/music/lights/arrive/vivid/festival/decided/good/joy/weekend...



No War No TV No Taxes No Banks...

Never fake a seizure just because you want a kiss...





This is the end of the book.
The last chapter.
The last page.
The final word...
Blanks off into two extra pages of nothingness bound together.


xxo.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

J A M A I C A

For a week at the beginning of November of 2012, I paid a visit to Montego Bay and Negril...
+





+

Last night I stood outside and listened to music with the local boys while they drank a little rum and danced and talked. It made me smile to watch them.
Locals pack the hostel court at night along with the strut of black marbled pigeons.
Grooves can be heard from local parties going on well into the night. I didn't go to Pier One, where the big friday bash is in Mo'Bay, instead I rode around with Carlos (a driver with a sound system who loves anything with a beat) up into his neighborhood called Melbourne. Quiet and dark except for pockets of local parties and people dancing. We laughed about how they thought I was a boy (my head recently shaved) at the local shop while getting "Wissla" (long rolling papers for smoking with the name "king weedie" on the side) and Red Stripe (never a hangover) and some drink that comes in a tiny bottle and tastes super sweet like cough syrup.

Old school. The way people do things is the way they do, until something comes along that makes them want to do it differently. Jamaicans understand this.
The whole place scares the hell out of me, but I'm getting used to it. Maybe even liking it a little bit: that terror that means you're beyond your comfort zone for the moment.
Thinking about where to go and how to get there and how much cash to bring along sometimes tires me out. Or I just wish my hostel had more couches...



It was explained to me by a high-all-the-time professional JUTA bus driver that "there are 3 classes of citizens in JA. Rich (who keep getting richer), Middle (majority taxi drivers and other service workers), and Ghetto- poor-as-dirt, "Real Rasta" slum-dwellers.
He talks further about clocking a drive to Kingston in 1 hour and 45 minutes. Unbelievable. It should take 3. 2 hours is how he usually does it, he says. One time it was dark and a bicyclist came out of nowhere. He hit him. Heard him hollar, but he didn't stop... and that's the protocol.
"You don't stop. If you hit someone and stop, they'll kill you or fuck up your car. You just continue on and go to the police station."
That night, he went home and went to bed.

They have a phrase: "Left is right. Right is suicide!"
Somehow, as absolutely nutty as drivers and driving is here, it is comforting to be in a car.

Taking lots of pictures here has been a goal.
Behind the little enclosed neighbor dome of the Mt. Salem housing project is a ghetto hill country with unfinished houses, beautifully shaped nonetheless. Most of my photography constitutes architecture, since I don't want to impose my giant lens on local folk.
I hang with some people from my hostel: a sky-diving German who talks it up about being a greaser in Hamberg, and a Czech accountant with a Cuban girlfriend younger than his youngest son. Both of them smoke like it's going out of style, and are drunk by sunset.
Learn my lesson with that one. We are white people. Therefore we are always about 5 seconds away from a jam when we go out and about here.
I practice never abandoning my drink.



Clothes lines flutter everywhere. A teeming slum, writhing and colorful and filthy. Potholes so big they put Chicago to shame. Jah mon.

Mighty fruits hang like ballsacks from the tree above the long picnic table where I work and spy my first Jamaican skink skurry up to a shady ledge where he can lounge out. Draping his legs over the cool painted concrete and keeping out of the purrview of cats.

The sand is very coarse and the stormclouds are fickle as the afternoons approach. All was well, very relaxed and quiet at Doctor's Cave Beach yesterday.

Boring, yes, but so worth it for the relaxation of a bouyant float and a canopy by which to stay out of the sun.
I never want to get out of the water for how much it feels like a bath.


 
50 years independent this year. The breezy day in the Caribbean glimmers with light... Irie, Irie.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Milk, Milk, Lemonade - 3 Poems


True Story-


We sit in powdered down furniture
to keep the bugs away.

The candles were lit from stolen lighters.

Dishes are clean, and away,
but the peanut butter is out.

All days
become
Saturdays.


+


Self Portrait, Evening-


One light.

Paint from earlier
dried on my arms.

Some white wine
on the night table
and a kind of
holding pattern.

Book unfinished.
Shower untaken.

This movie has great music
and
River Phoenix.


+


Eleven and Seven-


Your heartbeat is shaking the bed.
Sniff, shift,
Sleep.

Your heartbeat is shaking the bed.

I suppose you think
it's going to cry
for you.


Sunday, January 13, 2013

Brief Discourse On A Black Square

Tattoos are keys... and curse. For every new key, you may have to find a new lock...

After the ink was set in Hemet, California in 2004, it was not long before the name Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) came up.
A Russian "Suprematist" who believed in extreme reduction: "The object in itself is meaningless… the idea of the conscious mind are worthless… I want the supremacy of pure feeling." 
Images that spoke to him offered no reference at all to a particular reality, and yet were everywhere in reality. He wanted non-objective objectivity/representation. Attached to nothing, and larger than art.
 
This man's philosophy and other's like it were not the direct inspiration for this work- a 2in. x 2in. solid black square- yet the very unique obstacle that inhibits an explanation of this tattoo from being "brief" perhaps, is the same that offers it the appeal and intrigue of something timeless.

By nature physically small, occupying little space and offering only basic details. The only important detail, is that it has the ability to have as many or as few details as it likes. Hence the fluidity of something solid, forced to move thru time.
2x2 inch solid black square turned rectangle with the stretching of skin caused by the lowering of my right arm. Offering a mercurial portrait that accompanies fascination and illicits curiosity. Strangers ask why and receive at best a loose understanding of the inherent ideas that drive this tattoo's renewed impermanence and fresh imperfections.

Located on my writing arm, the tattoo is meant to reflect in part the great openness revealed to me as a writer. (Vacancy or gap- paradoxically represented by the blank white page.) A welcome return and a belonging to a world which exists only in my vision, and perhaps then only to satisfy a need to create and by creating, destroy.
 
The breakdown of this theory offers an illustration of the duality of non-existence. "Something is nothing, nothing is something."

As the philosophies of ideas, knowledge, and science weave remarkable patterns within and beyond themselves, the simple becomes the complex becomes the simple again, and thus the impossible possible.

Humans experience, on this vast and remote island Earth, pressures and burdens that dominate but do not necessarily inhibit their daily lives. In everything from the near 15 lbs of atmospheric pressure exerted on them at sea level for every square inch of their bodies, to the invisible, often heavier palpable emotional weight associated with our love for and duties to one another.
Each force finds a way to balance the others.
 
Among these seemingly esoteric ideas, a universal and uniting constant remains. Deeply rooted in a cosmologist viewpoint, the belief that our origins began from the largeness (relative to us) of stars and nebulas and galaxies, and the combining of the elements made inside them to create the innovative soliloquy of the human race and of all things we ourselves encounter and make...
It is that we are a stardust microcosm, and being such, we are bound to return to the fold, even amidst its continued great expansion. The infinite is to be discovered in the infinitesimal.

Tattoos done with intent have no choice but to sink close to the soul, seeking both a way of embracing without capture the life-affirming zen-like tenants of unattachment and impermanence; and of faith and healing- the giving of oneself to the knowledge that all will be returned to its rightful place in the "end", when, what and wherever that may be. Toward knowledge gone unobtained, yet exposed and available to the opened mind, go notions soon made manifest.
No good ink goes unlived.


Sunday, December 16, 2012

Long Count Blessing

There is another "I'm-imaginary-saving-the-world" type dream that I have.

This time it's about fire.

From a magical dead letter office with a black sky full of stars, at the magnetic center of the world.
Here I am, beside a magnificent oil drum, which is the mouthy chimney of this contained inferno.
I am the sole attendant of this world fire.

Surrounded by papers, which I will tell you all about because they are the most fun beyond the immolation at hand, I watch the flashing white-red burn that does not throw sparks.

It's purpose- great heat- is pulled away and pushed into all the blood and hearts of those it could save... Children first.

It is the fire that keeps others going in oil drums topside. Because I have the right kind of fuel, they don't need to gather the wrong kind upstairs.

It's just me. I can float if I want to. But usually I climb.

If I get hungry, the papers become food. Love letters taste especially sweet and deliciously nourishing.

There is the fire, a 6 foot circle around the fire, a folding chair, and stacks and piles and stacks and piles. Straight to the ceiling of no ceiling, To the wide high of starry black.

Fuel: letters, newspapers, books, loose ephemera. Some important, most not.

I am the fire-keeper and a speed reader with a spectacular rate of retention.
Sometimes what I read causes others topside to remember. They look into a fire near to them, or a fire inside of them, and find a new answer.

I never tire, tho' I do pause in the chair and watch. The fire, the stars, the fire again.

I work for years of no time giving all these fires a final purpose.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Only Part Two:

(For November, and Nick D.)

It takes you.
And you are two.


II.
So simple.
We can demand to be granted thus:
Notes!
Our crumbling babylon shall still have its
notes!
Our sweet language dancing a perversion of order.
Carnival lights spelling:
As long as I write
I am light and I shall live!
Fiat Lux!
Forward with all uncareful gestures!
Our knowledge can not afford
to be hemmed neatly into museum nook
under tempered glass.

Our knowledge is a hearth.
A hot manifesto seeping life.
Ever ready to witness!
Chance is so very jealous to be you.
time-traveler,
immortal-seeker.
Lover, exacter.
Practiced and made of many!
Chance so creeping and ill with jealousy what riddles further
toward complication,
those chances
unknown even of their own volume.
Chances unprotected, intangible.
-
Hold your breath, and make time stop.
Together in this spectacle, each rumor is a special answer,
as tall orbits demand us.
To the culling limit.
A divine gesture multiplied.
Shattered rim of appearances housed in verbiage.
Punctuating seconds into seasons.
O slaked reclamation,
the particle,
the pulse!
One great perseverance
crushing negativity.
Crooning opposites make a frame, an angle, over twice-
help to dueling its own cause
with factual mannerless sweetness.

Observed from eyes to teeth-
why, every sink is a leaking sink!
Water nomadic and formless as
careening thoughts.
Themselves things that become suns
setting behind the pupil.

The telescoping orange reveals a red banded network for first stars.
Another white wide disk revealed:
The Pearl
what a thing to find which has not composed a secret for itself, though is the most hidden thing!

Again an eye
possessed of prehistoric evolutionary
vision.
No other enlightened obstructions exist but this-
The key to the theme beyond.
Measured in sky sizes- frequency and amplitude.
The medicine to wake all sleeping worlds.
Light as salt, sugar, and hieroglyphics.
Seized again by bathos!
The girl made the world by blowing bubbles in a snowstorm.
In the mediated voiceover of god, she feels the pain of portrayal.
The domestic alpha called actress.
Necessarily psychic, her salient complexities bisecting realities conquests.
Simple is not as simple as it once was.
Unmentionable vicissitudes afloat in the greeting gloss of a galactic bookstore packed with pretentious customers.
But well-wishes cannot promise notes.
And notes,
truths,
are what we must have.
-

Saturday, October 20, 2012

15 Towns








If you can name at least 10 of the cities each of these photos were taken in, I will send you a prize that includes $.

Good luck.
-D










Monday, September 10, 2012

Sent By Post to Mr. Crispin Hellion Glover

2 ErotiXperimental Pieces: "Johnny" and "Josephine"

"Johnny" - nov/dec/2k11

1.
Johnny can taste the sun.
The talent of his vision bleeds wholesome softness into the darkest corners, and into the caves of men.
Johnny is the bringer of great undoings
and in this way, he is a friend to all things created, which must then be devised of an ending.

He does not spare to give warning where none is needed.
His non-belief in hidden things removes time. It is never too dim or too late for true savory softness to compel others to weep their lightest breath.

2.
Johnny is today, engaged. Lurked.
Johnny is unrumpled and clean as a profanity of motion.
Johnny goes about as the sea, or as a library.
As an ineffable nothing.
Commissioning wishes to become efforts.
Johnny dreams into unmasking places,
Where the mosques are full of naked women. Each one named sovereign. Each one different.
Johnny observes. Translates.
Indulges infinite pareidolia.
guh
oh
nnee
oh
a
guhhne.

Johnny=Polymath

The man too smooth for the scene. Lithe and intimate talking down cloudbursts.
Building coffins to bury drowned midnights.
Johnny.
Telephone and the telephone call to fleeting worlds.
The letter from the dead man's wife.
A woman who is also a sister
stolen like wine from a church.
Johnny- you bright dime! Spent in the name of enlightenment.
A divine resuscitation.

3.
A conversion of ink,
brass and flesh female
J becomes conversation, continuation, chop-chop
reveille
from alien life.
The echoes of a giggle of irresponsible future.

Sure,
Johnny knows fantastic danger
as much as the next inbred crime-practiced
exponent.
He can denounce all the necessary shrines,
but never enough complaints to build a following.

Real lepers cannot leap, or form orders.

Yes, all Johnny's laugh. Johnny laughter- each Johnny gonad jumping restless and symptomless with the industry of it.

Women contract the abject romanticism of that ritual argument and all the Johnny-flavored forts to follow.
All women whose tits are austere frowns are belittled and put to bed publicly.

Bulwark. Prominent conformist: Johnny.
His environs pisswalls- strange and strong as money.
His coos all patriarchal indiscretions.

4.
Hello.
Let's establish hereforthwith
the expected utility.

Johnny's insubstantial and extraterrestrial
infantilism
distributing kiss-crisis
natural as ontology
masturbating to burial for schedule.
For formal reactions.

Give god to your Johnny's to chant
home a wet law.
And how happy duality is to have found you both!
Hearkened, and numerical!

If you are a woman, you are a V.
And if a Johnny- F.

Appearing to feed- infectious and unsuspected.
Too slummed to live along the lateral year.

The price comes in fives.


- - -

From "Josephine" (June 2k11)


The sun is up & high & bright & she's still in bed with curtains pulled. A victim of reverse paradise, with the man gone to work.
His yesterdays t-shirt bunched up in the corner like a big, elongated skull. Dream seepage caring back. In some post-reality glimpsed at his alarm, she's kissing a man she knows in real life but has never before kissed. Deep, hard, wet kissing.
After too, recalling arrivals, comings & goings of women of a previous acquaintance, each laced with mixed messages of dreamselves layered into collective experience without language.
And so, she finds wakefulness & reaches for the 1st drug- her pussy. Last night it was hot & wet & worked over from the man's pumping penis. His body's hot action a thrusting orgasmic magnet.
She hesitates, still resting, listening for the sounds of the women up in the next room. In & out of the bathroom with efficiency and timeliness of having somewhere to be.
If he were the one masturbating now on this very bed, on his back, kissing the air. He would be whispering her name as jisim spilled from the tip of his erect cock. Thought after thought of a good ripe throb thrills the body into the little death.
Into the exhaustion of a perfect feeling.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Congealed Splendor

There are streets and corners and public places everyone is used to, and uses. These are the common map.
Then there are the hidden corners in neighborhoods. Private. Fenced in by wood and hedges.
Sometimes the secret spaces decay and lean over into view- overgrown and neglected lots harboring rotting picnic benches or rusty iron furniture and cracked tiki lamps- out of fuel since that last backyard party almost five years ago.
I want to be a hidden thing, a tiny animal, darting unnoticed and free into these garden niches where pieces of treasure have stayed long lost. Where birds nests are safe, and the sound of water from a small fountain or a glistening spill from minute pockets of rain can be hinted at or heard or seen.
I want a whole city island of these reconfigured oasis to wander through, linked by steps of dirt and marble. Roundabouts marked in columns and cairns. Taking all day to get lost in the undomed conservatory of remotest paradise.
Such edenesque sensory overload finally, exquisitely, on all sides bordered by the rolling gleam of a magnificent ocean.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Desert Days of Brother and Summer

Dear Bryce Canyon-

It is an hour from sunset on Sunday night here in your "North" campground.
My brother has fucked off for a good long while so I can take a nap, text some friends, take a ritalin and read and write.
I took my blood pressure today in the grocery store where we bought local beer, cookies and sprouts. Carrots and more almond milk.
Paid for gas today on the way in, and it was great weather again, but storms are expected soon.
We got a flat tire just as we pulled into the Kolob Canyons parking lot. Right up next to a mexican family in a big truck with a shredded tire of their own. Same tire! They had no spare, unfortunately.
Our tire looks to be in ok shape, but it turns out it needs more than just a patch.
Now I have twirled the parts of my hair that aren't too gross to touch from grime and dust, sand and silt and not bathing for almost a week. My hair dreads itself out in a furious way.
Bohemian brew pilsner from Midvale, Utah and clips of readings from the Nomadic Festival's zine "Carnival of Chaos" narrate my afternoon post hike into your exquisite "Queen's garden".
Amazing! .8 miles from Sunrise Point and drowned in switchbacks. When I get back to my bro, whom I've now left napping, has split, and without a water bottle, so I hope he hasn't gone far. I'm hoping he will appear by the time I've finished this beer (which is pretty soon).
The campground amphitheatre is a short downhill jaunt away. I might perform some poems there in homage to the dusk.
A truck periodically swings over the roads, sprinkling them with water to keep the dust down.
And a very flirty and determined chipmunk (maybe more than one) skitters about the campsite hoping for a speck of chow.
Stellar's Jays-smart and beautiful- swing elusively from tree to tree and call their short evocative song. They are my new favorite birds.
Up at 6a for sunrise photos on the ridge. Making tea and packing up. Morning rituals have Chris at yoga, then tea, grapefruit. Along for the ride are cereal and oatmeal. Pop tarts and apples.
Last night he treated me to pizza and salad. We eat and drink well on this trip... And enjoy plenty of olfactory emissions!
Finished a book by Bukowski (good), wrote three haiku for Sedona (ok), and a jotted a little bit in my experimental storybook (eh.)
You know, you have very beautiful vistas on the trail just to the rear of our site. I smell cookout fires and (I think) marshmallows. We haven't lit a single fire, and I don't think we will. It's simply too dry around here, and I just know if I collect wood I'll be covered in sap.
Tonight would be good for a night hike in the form of a site walkabout. Cars keep rolling in as the day gets cooler. I think we may be full up, here.
The increase in elevation from Zion natl. park makes it a little better to live with. Still dry tho', and now it's Chris's turn to get a bloody nose.
I inspect my receipts: Lunch at Wildcat Willies (veggie burger and sweet potato fries), Red Rock Grille at Zion Lodge (pasta and quinoa with veggies and red wine), a few sundries from Sol Foods.

I want to write poems on the backs of all of them. Then I want to put them into the fire pit and remember them by forgetting them.
We record songs and sing and read aloud- harmonizing. An accidental worship of the thumbnail moon.

Cool enough now for long sleeves, jeans and a sleeping bag wrap. (Still so warm in the car!)
Up on the ridge at rim trail. Into the view beyond, a small line of orange lights gleam like adjacent campfires down canyon.
Chris puts his guitar away and goes to take a look. It is after 10p, and the ranger/host has made his last rounds. We have finished our beers and washed our dishes and teeth...
Memories swim neatly as I prepare for dreams. Last night I slept in until late morning with nonsense so vivid I thought during the dream that I must be dreaming.
It is a realization that changes nothing.
-
I couldn't see any stars yet, but the air was dim. Pink and forgiving with breezes.
My headlamp around my neck. My brother fast asleep with the water jug nearby. Breathing soundly near Sedona spring reserves.

Thursday night I review some maps I take in the awe of our 1st day in Zion. We drink the last of the beer at our free camp site (thanks to Charlie in Kenab, from whom we bought a book and a tea kettle) and I look forward to soymilk over cereal for breakfast and PB and celery in the afternoon.
We have consumed our PB and J's at Antelope Beach this past morning- many hours and miles ago.

A couple camps beside us. A man's murmurs audible. There are other talking sounds from across the way... there seems to be owned land or a homestead over that way.
The sun is gone. The trees are loosely packed where we are, and where we are is also littered with bone fragments and pieces of a long-ago chowed deer.

The road is a little washed out and I kept worrying I'd bunk up the bottom of the car getting up and down- beautiful but sketch terrain for a car that's been stuck in the sand 2x so far and lost an engine cover! Oh well, I worry about the low clearance and the breaks that need to be worked on, but we got the oil and air filter changed today for 50bux and Chris says he's golden on cash, so that's good. And we're still at a half tank of gas. The annual parks pass too is already saving our ass from a bunch of fees...
We are dirty kids having good clean fun.

http://youtu.be/pmqpmp8z6No

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Back in the break room we talked about babysitters.

He and his brother had one that tortured them, threatening to slit their throats and who he one day "moon"d. This gained him little favor, but made him feel better.

I don't tell him about "Sayword R.", the 16 year old Pittsburgh suburbanite with the weird name and fascination with our Michael Jackson's Thriller record. Her penchant for following me around and into the garage, only to catch me eating chocolate covered pretzels out of the deep freeze which, in the morning, I'd discovered she finished off.
I was twelve at the time and she didn't look much older than me. This caused some resentment, of course.
She went on to total the family car and probably have a bunch of her own obnoxious children. Such is life.

However, I do confess Veronica. Who is, after all, the best and most important one.
The first night she was over one of my parents homemade wine bottles exploded all over the kitchen. She spent half the night cleaning it up and was mortified.
Later, she would bring over "Joey" from time to time. Her scummy dago boyfriend. Sometimes her younger brother Allen would babysit when she was unavailable. Allen was 17 or 18 at this point and kind of cute and I'd woo him with my parents rock record collection. He lamented that we didn't own Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

Veronica's smile and spirit and laugh were infectious. She told us about a class trip to Spain- Valladolid. She had asthma real bad and wheezed. She chewed gum occasionally. She may have had freckles.
When she was younger she hallucinated snakes and spiders on some shitty allergy medication and feared them interminably.
I saw her one afternoon, over in her tiny room in her family's trailer, trying on for me her royal blue satin prom dress with the gold chain for the strap. Her firery red hair flowing past those same pale shoulders. I thought I was looking up at the queen of all my dreams.

And finally the blow of her last visit. The last one I remember.
I am much older. My mother has asked her over for some reason, to give her something maybe. Or she is in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by.
I am excited to see her. But the wind goes out of my sails as soon as I do.
She is massive. She has blown up in size to rival that of her mother. Well over 200 pounds. Maybe she is pregnant too. On top of all this, she has a blonde 2-3 year old boy in tow. I feel insulted by this entire scenario. The boy pounds on our piano and wants his mother's attention constantly while she's talking with my mother, which my mother tolerates as she gives it to him. No discipline. I observe all this, and I guess that's what I see.
There seem to be a bunch of icky feelings I was wrestling with at that moment.
I took Veronica to be much prettier than fat. I didn't think she deserved it. I thought she'd go on to travel some more and take over the world. Proof that I could get out of here and do the same thing.

It doesn't matter. People can't get away from their families, and they want what they want.

Wherever she is now, I just hope she's happy. And healthy.

Friday, June 1, 2012

eleven.thirteen.eleven

Today I burned the last stick of incense my grandmother brought back from Japan many many years before she died. I watch the smoke uncurl at halfway and the ashes meet those of a dollar bill in a white ceramic bowl.
Yes, I am trying to call a phoenix...

Tonight I'm the little match girl in high heels. Too-large wool coat and tied up hair about to be let loose. Tiny sparks for jewelry, the pumps are wearing nervous sparkles onto my skin- baby blisters- that won't be so big I can't handle them in the time it takes me to get home.
My clutch: lipstick, pen, paper, money, tissues.

There was a woman I passed on the city street a while back.
The cords of her earphones were neatly tucked
underneath the strap that held the breathing mask/air barrier to her face.
She made eye contact with me. Her eyes told me that from under that mask, she wasn't smiling back.