I THINK I DREAMT OF SHULLSBURG

302. I THINK I DREAMT OF SHULLSBURG:

When I’m happy I’m sappy and there are no eyes just a series of mouths – either of these statements leads me to the belief that I indeed have reached certain conclusions which are specifically perfect and most generally CORRECT but the problem I have is forgetting all the rest of the little things – things I should be remembering – that would make everything perfect and not merely CORRECT and I want to subsist on nothing but black coffee and endless air and I want to find a series of books and do nothing but read them and I wish for nothing else to ever interfere with things and I certainly don’t wish to mix it up with outside concerns and whoever or whatever controls my water controls me formaldehyde fluoride arsenic entered into water at will but any some series of images BLACK DARK AND HOLLOW like a film-noir kiss secreted somewhere between a wood-paneled wall and a telephone booth in the low semi-dark and the heated slow sound of coffee brewing and liquor flowing and food on plates and all of that together the wild hum of live loud music and the uninterrupted solace of people and things Lara Tara or Dara the new girl hanging around learning to serve learning to talk Margaret Bourke White herself once arrived to this place and started to laugh just laugh with her Speed-Master in her hand and the actor guy Jared Orrish jumping up on the stool and emitting a loud barf sound and declaiming “Oh Jesus I’ve forgotten my lines!! How humiliating can this be?” and falling drunk to the floor flat out clunking his elbow and then his head on the way down and I even I seem to awake right then from some stupor dream-like haze and I begin thinking about the packets of Turkish money in my hands small gold packets with circular tops heavily etched with designs and ancient symbols and the guy walks up to me this fellow named Napoleon and simply staring straight ahead he says “hello” with a lilting effeminate voice the kind which makes you think right
off of queer distant party queens living in a country heartbroken yet cultivated and “EVERYTHING is thought with the testicles” the guy said and I nodded and thought to myself ‘my country ‘tis of thee I sing queer bastard’ but I let it go figuring instead that homotextuals consult Marx like homosexuals cruise parks and their poems start ideologies and their country is a bomb and VOILA ! here we are again at point zero ground zero whatever it is and I remember the guy the other guy walking the street alongside me saying he was from Arizona where “there’s Tucson to every story” and suddenly everybody was laughing and the two old women who were walking very slowly stopped and turned and said quite simply “young man do you know that we are proudly heterosexual?” and seeing as I most certainly did not know that I acted surprised but they laughed it all off as Fourth of July fireworks started blattering away in the hundred degree heat amidst leagues of people and fire and tongues of flame and people alone or in clumps drinking beer along the street holding pizza slices which wilted and they all were leaning slowly on the old rugged bar at Pete’s with everybody talking and nobody saying a word “so that’s what it was like and suddenly Lazarus rose up laughing and as he looked back I could see his cloak was torn but then I realized worse than torn it was simply rotting off his body in the massive stinking sullen heat but he’d only been dead for what a few days ? I couldn’t even remember that and he turned around in place as if his entire body was right then made of jelly but some sickening rotting dripping gel of death RE-RISEN unto life” and then the room got silent but just for a moment and nothing was said in that moment but I could still hear the distant roar of thunder and firecrackers like of old were chopping the air nighttime circles and huge round heads of glistening color things which passed as quickly as they began but no one seemed to notice anyway and I began reading posters on the wall: ‘Peter Adams: a Few of the Legends Portraits of Another Day Tamara Lischka Figuratively Speaking’ and the picture at the top the picture with the brown ink caption said ‘I was visiting some family in North Dakota a few years ago when I discovered an old school house which had been abandoned but was still equipped with the desks and piano and books that were once the center of the lives of so many children…’ it went on but rhapsodies are one thing I hate so even I passed on that semblance of profundity as it was presented with the heavy intention of meaning and depth and I instead rose up to stretch and then noticed the midnight parade of revelers passing me by and going past the window strolling past the doors arm in arm with each other was every imaginable creature and pretension of creature one could ever find but all together as one so sweet and so refined and ‘whir’ slowly the old fan moved about and its blades seemed to break the space between the wall and the portraits of boats and people nearby they all together seemed to be viewed in some miraculous stop-action time of make peace and thatchery William and all that and a voice to the side of me said “you spend a lot of time listening don’t you?” and I whirred about and said “why yes yes I do and what do you make of that my lovely fucking where-you-been stranger for that’s the joy of exploring which is better than the joy of death isn’t it or was that perhaps the joy of depth I can’t recall but even if I did I couldn’t tell between them but hell then this is the place YOU SEE I knew about this place the Odd Fellow Hall and I went to Shullsburg primarily to photograph the hall and I went to talk to the man who was the head of the lodge and he also ran the creamery in town so I went to the creamery and I started to talk to any number of people about where to go in a small town such as that in order to find the non-Wal-Mart things around to photograph and he took me to the lodge but even then you see I felt funny saying Wal-Mart for it made no sense to me thinking instead I should be saying W. T. Grant or Kresge or Woolworth or something but I was suddenly afraid no one would know what I meant and wasn’t that a funny feeling?”

ENAMORED OF THE LAMPPOST

301. ENAMORED OF THE LAMPPOST (nyc, 1967):

I took a solid object and made it disappear : any object it could have been anything but yes in this case it was a stern black sky it was a glass-fronted old building it was a donut it was two slabs of meat - my life was like that it the point I'm here covering and I'd stay alert to anything usable every cast-off piece of debris every off-cut piece of wood (I wanted to coat everything found in the thickest layer of clear gloss epoxy I could find and I spent endless hours putting together a museum of my own - a collection of hundreds of weird found objects coated in thick gloss - screwdrivers small rocks a windshield wiper a book nuts and bolts twisted pieces of metal a single leather glove someone's broken eyeglasses (my one real wish to be able to find a glass eye) pieces of bone an old cup - I could go on and probably the list could be endless because this crap was all around me and all that I lived amidst was beckoning so I took) - and hunger was always near thirst for sure although it was easy to slake with water or coffee but other times the body was just searching for something other than those liquids which is how oftentimes I'd end up in any of the small bars and taverns scattered everywhere getting one beer which always was able to lead into someone else getting for me another and another - talk was the currency I used and all those crazy tales you've maybe read hereabouts by me or any of those stories that make the rounds everywhere - those cranked-out barroom loudmouth adventures well they're all true believe you me - and any streetside tavern around here had its share and my friend Jim Tomberg back then too he was a big drinker and always left things around and all those tunes without a composing book I ended up drinking (it was just like playing another man's instrument it was and he never cared) - hell we was oftentimes so sloshed anyway he never knew and he was just as glad as anything just to have me around to drag him home or make sure he at least stayed standing while he talked - for he did have a preference it seemed to fall over dead-drunk and continue talking and not just talking but demanding an audience that would listen to him and stay attentive and - shit well yeah - care! - which of course no one ever really did it was all a game and this room-to-room jumping around always brought with it the specifics of the situation every situation being different Jim would nearly die just pass out dead drunk and then awake a little bit later for some more and strangely enough to and opposite of what you'd think this somehow always brought out the woman in a woman to love and nurture and take care of old Jim and he'd thereby (I noticed) get more'n his share of the ladies - which I could never figure out but never cared either - and many a night was the wee-time early hours that we'd awake and there'd be one or sometimes even two other naked female bodies bundled around and no one would ever really remember where they'd come from or who got where and how but it never minded and that went for me too and Jim would say 'well if they're good for somethin' they're good for something' - life was like that sometimes in the places we'd go places like east 7th street where some of these girls seemed to live or uptown a wee bit up along 14th or 17th or 21st streets where many of these people ended up it always seemed having these great big expansive half-industrial places in which they lived and did their work too - big photo places rooms of easels and art and lighting couches and fabrics stools and set-ups and it always turned out somehow to be in some form of magazine photo or small-scale art or film projects whatever I never really knew and there was always music and props around and down below there were freight elevators with maybe a garment or a trucking company with garage space and loft-storage for all these goods and Spanish guys always hanging around leering or looking just funny-stupid all the same and it all came down to just being a real strange and busy form of some proto-industrial daytime work the sort of which I never did get to the bottom of but as I reported a few times before it sometimes often got me day-work when I needed it a cash 15 or 20 bucks at the end of a day of hauling something or dropping off a truckload of this or that - dresses coats wood metal bales boxes into places like waterfront Queens and Long Island City right across the Queensboro Bridge (I learned real quick that just because it said Long Island City it didn't mean no big-long traffic trip way out to Long Island somewhere - it was all real close and nearby and still called Long Island City somewise) and Jim he liked to work with big pieces of metal and steel like I said so we'd oftentimes be going off to some scrap yard or another out in Brooklyn or such and be coming back with these big hunks of metal - oft'imes just about to heavy to lug - but we'd squeeze on the subways with them and walk them around and then he'd get them down to the Studio School sculpture pit and get to work starting all his cutting and welding and sometimes for a few days that would be all he did and the place would be a'blaze with his fires and torch-smells and all that and he'd start getting as drunk as all get out and stumbling around and all but still making his stuff and then the finishing work too - the cleaning and polishing and stuff well I'd get all involved in that - while of course doing my own work upstairs some too - oil paints cutting and stretching canvas gesso-priming things working on some paintings one or two at a time hanging around thinking and cleaning brushes and getting (purloined) tubes of paint from here or there and staying busy way enough with my own stuff too sometimes right through the nights and just sometimes going across the ways and over one stairwell to take out a big portfolio size artbooks and page through it reading on the vacant art school library carpeted floor until I fell asleep and sometimes I'd only wake up when Mr. Rush the morning janitor would wake me up with his noise or his voice too - he never minded and we got on just fine and then I'd have to go down and see what had become of Jim - sometimes sleeping in a corner or a crevice there or sometimes (I could tell) just passed out from drink hours ago and just fallen where he fell and was - never moved a muscle just stayed and slept and maybe I'd wake him maybe I wouldn't depending on how things looked and how I felt and nothing was ever said - we'd just start all over and do another few days of the same and old Jim I always felt old Jim he was always an adventure to be with in and of himself.