POPE - ART MUSIC DANCE BULLSHIT

76. POPE - ART MUSIC DANCE BULLSHIT – ALL WRAPPED IN ONE:

Restaurant names Springsteen and Dylan and entertainment Guatemala Egypt old sky religions living memory in a tree ‘coffee cup’s on the counter jacket’s on the chair paper’s on the doorstep but you’re not there’ [Crap] and everything else whatever’s better than a prayer I said to myself and I noticed too it was raining like the first rain in three or four weeks and the ground and the streets and everything were just eating up the rain gobbling it up in huge draughts and the street was throwing off steam a thin white steam that floated (probably like coffee smoke in that stupid song’s cup) and I said to myself ‘what a fucking monumental waste all this insipid mourning and expressionistic warbling over the dead whether it’s one person or two thousand eight hundred some it doesn’t matter for it’s all the same the dark cloud of death passes and by God let it go' (Poe takes a ‘P’ and becomes Pope - there’s a joke) and Hugo Black did you know was a Ku Klux Klansman before he was a Supreme Court justice and as a nativist he favored separationism a curious doctrine meaning get rid of other inferior races and keep America for ‘Americans’ whatever they were (are) supposed to be or have been and LIBERAL Protestants (I love that root ‘protest’ in there) were convinced that their public schools were neutral with respect to religion (hey Alton you listening?) and as a result they unwittingly ‘imposed a nondenominational Protestanism on New York’s schoolchildren and today such ideas as school vouchers (for instance) may be considered neutral because the vast majority of them are put to use in Protestant Catholic or Jewish schools but what will happen to this fabric when applications start to flood in from religious traditions outside America’s ‘current sacred canopy’ ? will the states willingly cut the checks for tuition at Scientology Hare Krishna or the Nation of Islam schools ?’ CHAIR = Cahiers du cinema and ISLAM = I slam.

And yeah that was that but there’s a lot more too and I’m simply going to beat you all over the head with it ‘Message in a bottle that’s got to come out’ and I’m looking at myself in a mirror not liking what I see but seeing nonetheless what’s there in total and I realize as I age that there’s a lot happening to this old face growing tired and sunken perhaps lined and beat but more importantly it seems bumps and bulges are rising up little marks upon deadening skin blemishes and things I’ve never had before and they make me sad they beat me down they make me know I’m passing like a frightened flight of frenzy running out of time and out of steam but here I stay walking piecemeal between things ‘Pillar to Post and all in between at most it’s the natural order of things’ writing like the sky like that comes out of the sky ‘I felt like a part of me was being ignored’ and underneath the changeable sky we watched the wispy clouds reflect the updraft of evening so that it looked as if some great eddy in the air was drawing everything upwards towards Heaven as a concept and the slowly evolving orange from blue on the evening made contact then with the later depth of night and it opened up the sky to things like stars and the moon and I gazed upward in the middle of mountains ringing me and thought back some years to when I would watch the comet day after day in almost the same location as it swept across the early nighttime sky Hale-Bopp Kahoutek any of those names I’ve already forgotten but all I remembered was the sense of diminishment instead of largesse and feeling not how small WE were stranded on this earth but instead how puny the passing comet was and how little it ennobled or uplifted and how overblown all the astronomical hype had become and it was essentially just a passing slow light in an ordinary sky and I watched it nightly for near a month and only later on realized what it represented more than anything was the immense difference of DISTANCE between our ‘now’ and the present ‘now’ of whatever that comet was for it was so distant that even with its movement it essentially appeared in the same location each night for THERE WAS NO coming or no going based upon its presence and only a trifling vague feeling of something passed me by ‘under the elm trees along with the linden trees under the archway coated in green the fir trees caused silence the winter’s nights idled in bliss dark and open and oh so serene’ but what is it that makes these things happen ? “I don’t know and why you ask that is beyond me I am a songwriter and nothing more and I don’t think it’s easier for me because when I write I usually have to be very drawn or moved to express myself and it’s quite a deep process for me but I feel like I’m learning how to engage with another or writing in a way that’s more accessible to people instead of going off on my own trip” well I don’t know about any of that but the girl who spouted it I’d met in a Starbucks on Astor Place as I was scribbling between walks and she came over to pretend interest and then started talking responding to my question as my way of making small talk mainly since I was tired of listening to her free music and she was sitting there between things with her stupid guitar and she said her name was Beth Hirsch and I figured ‘oh good another Jew genuine folk-fucking singer out on her own like all the rest him her or whatever and that’s probably not even her real name it’s probably Heidi Menklwersch or something I get so sick of these tired-eye Jews pretending their persona makes them what they are and instead I felt like saying yeah I know Dylan and Leonard Cohen too and they both suck dick and make shit up two faggy-assed whiners like all the rest so go on run around with your authentic folk-song queries and hats and shawls and pretend to be what you’re not you know the entertainment industry is filled with you bastards and always has been’ YOU HAS BEEN but I said nothing and she said “I’ve had a lot of time constraints and things that are just now passing away and I feel like I can get better here at what I’m doing and songwriting is something I want very much to advance with and it’s a new part of my life I’m not yet secure with and the last few years have given me a lot of feed for the songs I want to write because inevitably an artist is whatever he or she lives or fantasizes about but it has to be a part of what the artist lives to really touch the heart - can you understand that?” and I nodded and said “yeah okay” and she stayed there drinking her coffee as I turned silent just about ready to spit something back at her but as I realized what was going on I gave up and again started to get really sick over these endless ‘everybody’s got a true song in their heart’ show-business types whether they make it big or not and they get all stuck and caught up in the little shit they construct around themselves and it all turns out to be nothing later on but a bunch of silly and dumb words strung together things of the moment and anyway I always think that once you get it made for yourself there’s nothing you can do wrong any more anyway there’ll always be some other jerk probably another Jew too who’ll be willing to write you up as a ground-breaker genius and read into every other utterance you ever made your connections to the deity and all the world’s wisdom big fucking crap deal and the next thing you know they’re running movements or testifying before Congress or having foundations named for themselves or hanging around Asbury Fucking Woodstock Park New Jersey watching ponies be born on some billion-dollar farm they own from which they get all their small-town earth-bound wisdom COUNT ME OUT because nobody will ever say ‘you’re wrong that’s junk’ and if they could bottle your farts and sell them for money they would but here she went again vain stupid bitch that she was “I got a publishing contract from Polygram/Universal and one of my tunes ‘All You Need’ was used for a German bank commercial which has been running for a while now and so there are royalties and other stuff here and there and although I’m not supporting myself because of these sales I can get with the scene better and just start performing and smiling and maybe making it happen” yeah right I think to myself yeah right.