I really want to get this going....

'NOT LONG ENOUGH,' THE MINER SAID

2011-11-21T05:05:00.001-08:00

316. 'NOT LONG ENOUGH,' THE MINER SAID:

Mail the picnic card on time and slurp your broth with shuttered lips but never do two things at once for something has to suffer and - just as well - don't think while you're doing the one for most things will simply recur and all the girls will come home once more for it's a crazy mixed up world and they only want so much : lip-smacked Garbo smiles and all those similes of love arms and legs a'kimbo with features entwined and faces together as the world holds on and stops itself to wait - 'I recall the time I was speaking to the Society of Flagellants and their donor cards all fell onto the floor between courses of two entire meals' : nothing ever came of that stuff anyway : 'not long enough' the miner said.

I HAVEN'T SET UP FOR TUESDAY YET

2011-10-02T06:36:00.000-07:00

315. 'BUT I HAVE FRAGMENTED MY LIFE SO AS TO SEE IT IN PIECES' (I haven't set up for Tuesday yet):

There are so many things I never really wanted but ended up with anyway – but that’s probably the way it is with things like that and it all reminds me of the guy buying two-by-fours in the lumber yard while figuring that with a little planning and some few more purchases of wood he’ll soon have that entire extension to his house completed and yet three months before he wasn’t even sure which end of a hammer was used to hit which size of a nail and nevertheless in just a little time it’s all about finished and over and he’s got no clue what he just did but dangling so high like that over a precipice can make anyone nervous and the only quote really worth uttering is ‘que se rompe la cuerda’ which actually means ‘let the rope break’ by which is MEANT ‘please help me by letting this cruel illusion end and let me see really what it is I have done and what it is that I am walking carefully over (two tiny feet on a thin thin rope) and before I say help let me NOT lose all hope – for letting this end will at least bring me to my senses’ - and it’s like that living this life (for the crap piles up the tasks grow higher and the rivers and bridges are soon either too high or too low for any real passage) but I have fragmented my life so as to see it in pieces and now it appears as if every few days I review BEFORE THEY HAPPEN the things which will occur the next day : I see spiders in their web – centered in the hot Summer’s end and two days later I see the very same spider (illustrated and all) in an article about spiders and their webs in this year’s wet warm season YET I see this life as a work in progress (as in Philip Larkin’s memorable phrase) – ‘smaller and clearer as the years go by’.
-----
And do then why are you running like a madman past five hundred things I see the eye and the eye is watching and all of this life is nothing but a moment a sieve something leaking high and mighty on down from above - which is only a direction not a time and place - and all the circumstantial evidence leads only to the scrim of the stage : the one dark spot where the ladies linger dressing in their stage robes and commingling with the oasis and the workmen who make the scenery they are about as well and talking to one another sitting and grimacing the twisted faces of the demented the declined the lost and they flail about as well as anyone and the men with scripts are walking onto the scene but just then the stage opens up the orchestra rises on a mechanical platform the lights come on and the walls and the very edges of even the room disappear all is light and gold and everyone rises as one and is swept away : so so yes so so far away I witnessed all that on an oriental stage in my passage and then I re-opened the book to where all the words were gone and missing and someone had scribbled in place instead a large handwritten broken word 'LARA' with no meaning and I never did understand any of that what it meant or why.

SLOW BY MEANING (nyc westside piers, 1968):

2011-06-27T17:36:00.001-07:00

314. SLOW BY MEANING:

I was never slow by meaning and as I went along most things fell right into place for me - a rather quick understanding of what I'd see and because of that what is called a 'quick-study' or something like that was often applied to me although the truer meaning of that having something more to do with 'Jack of all trades/Master of none' as that saying went - no one ever spoke that precise phrase but it was always there : someone who knew how to change a tire quickly or lube a chassis or change a plug and all along the westside piers that sort of thing was always needed for there were without fail broken down trucks or old crummy cars having problems and back then it was a different situation : carburetors needed constant attention mixtures and chokes and fuels had to be just right so that these cars and trucks could withstand the brash punishment of start and stop and re-start and go again under load and then without load all of those things together for the case was always thus - nothing was ever knew and all these cheap and battered hulks were really just hanging on often well past their point of value but these old jobbers and truckers would run anything they could and run it until it was plain out and out fried and dead and anything that could be done along the way to keep something running was looked upon as a favorable boon to be taken advantage of : all-night news trucks sagging on their springs and leaky and rusted old lumber trucks and food carts and vegetable or fish wagons all that shiny and leaky stuff would eventually need some attention and there were gasoline puddles and oil traps under most everything - all with seals and gaskets gone and foul seepage dripping down the sides of warm oil pans and engine blocks fuel backups flaming out carburetor tops and mostly always and everywhere the clouds of blue oil smoke plumed - bad piston rings and broken-down adjustments spewing oil and leakage everywhere while miraculously these things still ran and there was always a few dollars a day to be made from scrubbing or fixing or adjusting something - spinning tales of repair and renewal to which no one ever really followed up as long as something was still running or running again and for a long period of cold months that was my prime day job too - stalking these gasoline heaps and seeing what and if anything needed doing and all the while making things us talking fast stealing what I could and pilfering whatever tools were needed to get the task at hand finalized finished and out of the way.

TOMMY AND LENORA (nyc, 1968)

2011-05-17T11:31:00.001-07:00

313. TOMMY AND LENORA (nyc,1968):

Tommy and Lenora Vicks were two people I'd gotten to know from down along e12th Street - he was a stage-construction union guy for some of the big uptown theaters and she passed her time waitressing and trying to put together some sort of dance career - which never went anywhere that I saw - and the two of them were pretty normal in all other respects and by the time I met them it was surprising to me to be able to find two NYC people in a close age range who actually did live fairly normal lives from their own nice apartment - flowers and window-sill planters and a decent little garden spot out back nicely furnished rooms and kitchen and all the other amenities I'd normally have thought about for some older uncle or aunt somewhere - but they did this pretty well and I guess really the only thing they'd not acquired was a car - urban New Yorkers took that in stride and never thought twice about it even though it did stand out a bit to me - but Lenora's paradise was 14th Street and all the stuff it offered so that I suppose from that spot most of these things appeared and back in those days it was still the sort of environment where 14th Street yet held some dignity - fairly decent dress and gown and linen shops and dishes and stuff - whereas now it too has degenerated into the usual Chinese junk and imported trinkets sold by immigrants along the way - acres of cheap paper products and detergents indoors and ten dollar shoes and watches outdoors - and the rows and rows of carts and booths which now distract the eye and ear (and nose) were not there : another funny thing about old New York is the fact of the now 'glorified' charm of the old pushcart vendors who sold along every street their wares and fruits vegetables and most anything else in the early days before the establishment of sales taxes department stores and compartments and sections for selling this and that under roof and ceiling - now that same 'once-so-charming' outdoor sales effect has degenerated into trash merchants redundant up and down some streets and certainly any historic 'charm' has long ago been cancelled out : but Lenora partook of all this stuff and from it made a nice place and Tommy - always busy - just came and went as he needed and it was a pleasure to visit them - 311 e12th if I recall - the few times I did but before that Tommy Vicks had gotten into some sort of scrap with the law and had a few precarious months as he put it in jail or Rikers or somewhere sweating it out but he was always the same - direct and strong-willed with a foul-enough mouth used mostly on the job but it was all something he'd say you get used to real fast if you're 'gonn'a survive' and because of his skills he'd built a few really nice shelf-cases and tables in the apartment which added a nice touch but there really never were any books about - they'd load this all up instead with decorative stuff I guess called 'furnishings' or something that she'd get out shopping along the streets and it was nice visually but never meant too much to me to see and I did always rue the lack of books there - one day he came home with a small sculpture as I remember from some production or other - a form made of sticks and wire - some sort of human pose supposed to be evocative of something and he plunked it in the corner on a small pedestal he'd brought - it stayed there a while but the next time I went in it was gone so I never knew what happened : I was never much a theater guy but they always had those little Playbill books laying about too for any of the current productions and they were sometimes fun to see - especially the ads - and Tommy would say he needed them for work and from them he referenced names and titles and locations where he could at any time be sent on a job - made sense to me - and then I learned later also that 'opening night' Playbills or sometimes opening night Playbills signed by a cast member or two were very collectible and considered sometimes quite valuable - the 'opening night' specials were often sealed and stamped in a corner especially to denote their provenance or uniqueness or whatever - anyway I learned later that the root of Tommy's problem had been in forging signatures and falsely sealing and stamping playbills which he and another person had amassed and they'd been selling them as original 'opening nighters' through some form of mail-order or something for the theater crowd - they'd gotten caught and had been charged with forgery and theft-of-services mail fraud and a few other things and for a while it had looked bad (serious enough charges) but after a month or so in jail and after a few hearings they'd been able to buy a good enough lawyer to calm everything down - Tommy's biggest fear was in losing his job and his union card and all that - so that nothing much came of it all after a while - funny and totally unique story to me at the time.

I'D WANT YOU TO KNOW

2011-04-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

312. I'D WANT YOU TO KNOW:

It never had been my contention to avoid the contingencies of life along the streets here where I'd narrowly averted - so many times - catastrophe : the lingering feeling that somehow my number was the next up the aggravating feeling that somewhere there just around that corner lurked the spectral something which would soon have me - engulfed finished and forgotten...there was therefore at all times a feeling of suspicion about me : sunlight daylight evening too.

OH BADGER MY CONTINGENT

2011-03-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

311. OH BADGER MY CONTINGENT:

The collected works of everyone are sold by the pound – for if you can do nothing wrong you can do no good – and wagers placed at windows of solace never come due and ALL BETS ARE OFF as the end of this labored world approaches so soon and (“Hey! Charley! you left your napkin behind!) and the words of the long lost explorers are just now found in the Central Park caves and all they translate as is ‘Misunderstanding and all the cars are violet’ and of course no one of the modern era can figure that out so two guys in grass jump from the roof of the glass-tomb of Dendur and they shatter on the icy ground below but high in the sky above us runs the spacecraft crying and lowering itself down with twisted arcs askew it roars out a warning ‘ALL BETS ARE DUE!’ and with that the whole world screams but the screaming makes no sense at all and the doors and windows of everything I see are slightly askew and yes really there is the man in black holding a bible aloft and screaming out : 'repent now for the hour is at hand and God himself returns in a chariot to take away all good men' and then the man sits down and hangs his head and I realize the life has gone out of him and he has turned to nothing but a presence a Being of no substance and knowing I had heard him I at least felt better and across the way two men come out of the doorway talking intensely as they get into a car and the bigger one of the two motions to someone else who then comes over and gets in to drive and they drive away - some late model oversized chariot of their own never knowing where they're headed but heading nonetheless and as the car drives off it is leaking something or leaving anyway a trail of liquid behind and I feel for a moment as in some fairy tale where Hansel and Gretel or someone leaves a trail through the deep forest so to retrace their steps and return but of course that never happens and just like that I realize too that for myself any trail I would leave would lead right back here no matter what else or where I went so why bother and something like a disappearing snow would cover over all my trails and tracks anyway and the enfolding and folding over of time and matter for me always does bring its own singular and far-different results so that by the end my equation is different than all the other equations and my personal math as well - new numbers never learned and colors never seen - but anyway that's how it has always been all this never knowing from where nor from when.
-
It was William Blake who said 'I must create my own system or be enslaved by that of another' - and I guess that's true as far as it goes but enslavement wears many faces and if you think too much about that stuff you're only going to get hurt : spacemen intruders visitors aliens and all that I mean who can speak for what's really going on and memory impaired is most likely the best way to half-remember those things which would be only too startling to realize fully anyway if we could for what really shatters things is the harshness of knowing you are pretty helpless on a stupid clod of rock.
-
I woke up dreaming it had rained and was raining everywhere and every window in the entire realm was open everywhere and no one made a move - there was no one that I saw actually - and all these open windows took in all the rain ever and always and whatever rain fell wound up soaking nothing at all just entering and flooding and overwhelming all the barren and bare and open windows the world over and no matter I thought nothing of it nothing of any of it and just went about my ways as if all was normal and the rain kept falling and that same rain kept coming in and seeping over everything but the world was its own place : all the usual automatic cunning and rotation and moving and marking of things time and place and objects and huge boulders and slabs of minerals and large beautiful crazy gemstones everywhere and all of them suddenly in the rain suddenly having absolutely somehow no value at all : and I looked up skyward and all I saw arrayed silently too was a long line of objects hovering - spacecraft boulders rocks asteroids vehicles whatever - just hovering in place slow lights silently blinking as through all this the rain fell and nothing moved and nothing seemed to care nor any others either and all these objects high and silent in the sky in lines and lines and rows and rows were up there simply and silent just waiting.
-
And from that point it seemed nothing mattered anymore as I walked through the elevated rampway by the porno-pit at the end of Christopher Street some God-awful shithole of a place covered over with XXX graffiti and offers by men to men and women to women and vice versa and the PATH hole for the old Hudson Tubes was spitting out people in groups - all those crazed Jerseyans out for barter and barrage seeking escape on city streets puking over Hudson swarming towards the Village dens of Sheridan and Bleecker and MacDougal and all the rest of the shit and I never knew why any one of them would ever come here and then once they did why they would ever leave but it didn't make a difference they came anyway and it was like an open invitation to something unknown and I'd not know anyway and the filthy sleazeholes of this part of the Village were filled with nothing so much as the mobs of gay and close-to-that the masses of those who clung to each other and boldly tried re-defining the cultural gap as if it mattered but it never did and there was never any gap anyway one is what one is and the rest be damned and that's where pride comes in truly - someone proud enough to keep living is proud enough for pride and the innate good sense and the beauty and poise of any gay man's musculature speaks enough for itself anyway - Christopher Isherwood to Hart Crane to Auden and Ginsberg too and shit I knew them all or feared enough to and kept on my own way : horses like silver and gold and the grand steed of the vegetable man whose cart was pulled slowly by one massive horse the guy with piles of coal on the flat shaped wagon behind him all that I witnessed as they each died away - a time was passing and I knew it I sensed its way : my time once spent doing old things no was good no more for those old things were all gone away and the only thing one could do was learn new things or forget about movement at all : everything I ever did citywise had become outmoded and grown into death : but once all that was over what good was anything left ? all that metal and steel and gold and iron turned to plastic and junk and outlasted crap gone already before it began.

THE WORLD IS A VERY LOST PLACE

2011-02-19T08:02:00.000-08:00

310. THE WORLD IS A VERY LOST PLACE:

And I had a butterfly in hand but lost it sending and I had a hummingbird in view but it flew to other nectar and across the twisted bridge I watched you enter some other land and understood immensely what was going on and the high grass managed to hide nothing but the water’s edge as the old station house painted in oranges and blues stood like a hellion on the old abandoned hill and fifty-five broken gravestones gathered and fell as I walked through their debris and kicked at remains while trying to read old words through the never-ending moss but all went for nothing and INSTEAD OF ALL THAT there arose a cloud and a cloud of light transported the bridge and the world around it far back into me and you and without knowing we understood it all but voices crying were still calling out and heard and we gathered INTO OUR HOLY CLOAK everything we could as some Noah on acid of old so TWO BY TWO they went and they came and we went and took them with us and reseeded renewed refound was ALL the world (and a more generous and gentle place too) and before long once more we were standing on the old brick wall and around us everywhere it was falling but for where we were which place withstood the whole entire onslaught and more (and it was then I found your name inscribed amidst the clouds and the masses of heaven arrayed) "but we’re running out of time I’m sure of that" you said as the sky above darkened in early Fall and tried (as it were) to go away but all I said back was "all to black must fade – wouldn’t you agree?" and you nodded (one twice three) and said back "yes but you miss the point for it’s really not the color I’m concerned about" and I understood at that moment most everything else too and watering troughs and brick-stone wells were placed half-miles apart for miles as we traveled but without thinking why we went on and you said "once long ago they had horses for everything and by them they traveled and these were their stops all throughout the day" and we laughed to decide it was all like a gas station would be today - that blemished and that stupid and that prevalent and that overlooked and (in our shrugging) we realized anew that the world is a very lost place and something (found) but not without little value.
　

I WAS JUST THERE ON TUESDAY

2011-01-21T04:49:00.000-08:00

309. I WAS JUST THERE ON TUESDAY:

I may have taken it all to heart by way too much the way the lemonade frosted the refrigerated glass the way the people were looking in at the Chinese grocer killing a duck and the view from beneath the bridge on East Broadway - the lined up buses to other cities the one-dollar bus to Washington DC the trek to Philadelphia - all of this (beats me!) kept me befuddled and confused as well and I turned to nowhere and saw instead the everywhere of time and place and the old soup kitchen I remembered so well was gone now and in its place two hankering half-boys eating hamburgers and some other westernized piece of toady food all dripping and wet and two drinks on the table they sure were so cute they sure were swell and people in a line waiting for something - more about food and more about where to be than anything else and then I'd lost my wallet I'd lost my place and the old cinder block bar-room I frequented was just then being torn down by a Captain Marvel lookalike just as I blew in and nothing had moved away all the same the very same where the Pilgrims had left their hats the new settlers had simply picked them up and ran : tall buildings finance kingdoms emporiums of doubt and distress the long torrid trail of money the Federal Reserve of the reservation the blooming idiot kids all tattered and torn and then just like that I stopped ! I stopped in at the antiques yard the place where everything salvaged from destroyed buildings was kept and re-sold and displayed and I found wonderful gargoyles and pictures of this and that old bus station counter and signs the ivory-topped coffee table of the centennial Hotel blown through by desert sands and forgotten as well the blinking sign of service and - on the very last shelf I looked - the blind and beautiful picture of you or so I thought a looks-like-someone-I-knew picture of the beautiful girl sitting on a stool and milking what appeared to be a very gentle cow but I left it there it seemed so nice not to disturb what I couldn't understand and the words below : 'Milk us for any information you may need ! boy have we got it in for you' : never could as much as I tried figure out what that meant or from where it may have come and I traveled the land years later still thinking of that little scene.

TOO DAMNED LONG

2011-01-10T18:00:00.000-08:00

308. TOO DAMNED LONG:

Not everything that is important can be measured and not everything that can be measured is important Albert Einstein said that and by God if it isn’t true or at least true enough for me to carry it along at least to the degree that I often remember it when presented with some silly fact or statistic about any of a million world-weary causes and prompting efforts at fashioning something either for or against a situation and isn’t that only such an ‘adult’ thing to do having to take sides or force someone to go one way or the other about an issue as if there weren’t anything gray in between or as if no alternatives existed which shaded the issue just a little one way or the other but isn’t it that always what disgruntled cranky adults want ‘certainty’ about everything and ‘don’t disrupt my world it’s running along just fine’ but in whatever case the world is a lonely place and if you’ve got no others around you it can get to feel pretty sad especially if you’re isolated or unpopular in your own beliefs enough as to annoy everyone else and piss others off and then it just becomes the sort of scene where constant carping takes over everything else and no one becomes happy so what then happens ? well they say war or disaster or fire or illness ? or at least I say that and misplaced energy goes into everything else and you wind up with entire energies of industry building rapacious cars and vehicles or countless junk and stupid objects to be consumed and collected and by which to judge others in their having or not having them and in that nervousness you start the endless talk and chatter and gossipy crap that you hear most people on trains and buses and wait-lines going on about like they’ll never ever shut up and it makes for stupid kids on the streets walking around hitting each other and being real loud and being totally without reference to their past or whatever and T. S. Eliot’s Objective Correlative be damned nobody gives a shit about that especially when they don’t know anything else anyway - which is mostly how things are now in a world full of ignorant and stupid scoundrels just going on about themselves - but nobody wants to learn anything anymore for it TAKES TOO DAMN LONG to do so and ‘we want the world and we want it now’ my God how often I’ve heard that crap and the message that comes with it and it’s always the same loud stupid and boorish people doing the same dumb stuff always all the times no matter what (and nothing but worries nothing but worries is the reflex of worrying) and in a way it’s just as important to ‘place’ oneself in the scene of one’s life as it is to live that life for without a knowledge of where you are or to where you’re heading and where from you’ve come then what good is anything else anyway and that is best of all which lends a focus to life and gives a person a particular personality otherwise you’re just a big gray wash of nothingness and anxiety and vagueness so it’s better to be a pointed and hated character than to be bland enough to be loved or liked by everyone and two shades of meaning mean just that - two shades of meaning - so that apparently is what is meant when they say ‘everyone has somewhere to go’ I guess it means that there’s a place for everybody to call home and no matter what else that place is whether it’s decrepit or wealthy it’s at least a place where you can say really say whatever it is what you feel the way things REALLY ARE to you and you can speak your mind and no one’s going to throw you out or take offense and so if that’s my lesson today than there it is and I take it with me even now as I’m walking up the stone steps along the big old New York Public Library building and the two people with the big-ass camera are sitting aside over by themselves carefully scanning the crowd which mingles there in a broad blue sunlight and every once in a while I guess when it seems that someone strikes their fancy the two of them get up and walk over to the person or persons they’ve seen and ask to take a picture NOT JUST any picture but a picture in which the woman - some fancy-assed blond model type with a nice personal bearing and seemingly pretty comfortable with the camera and with beauty too - positions herself next to the one or two people chosen and the fancy-assed camera guy takes a few careful pictures with them and this takes a while because it’s one of those cameras which demand lots of preparation and calculation of light and exposure and f-stop and all that and the woman has yet again to properly situate her striking red scarf and fix her hair and have the guy carefully go over her face and lips and make-up and all so that after a few minutes only then they’re ready to go and in the meantime I’m wondering what the people must think who’ve been asked to be part of this as they simply wait there not knowing what’s coming up or why and I guess they talk about it first for they must have some questions I’d figure about what’s going on and to where the picture’s going and if they too can get one or if they’re being paid for publication or whatever but it never seems to be the way it all just happens and then it’s over and the two photo people go back to their chairs off to the side in the sun and start again to watching all the people go by and the crowd comes and goes getting larger and swifter and smaller and slowing down and two little oriental kids come by with their brother or father or something and he sits down and starts reading a magazine and the two kids wildly take off and start chasing the pigeons every time they land and each landed pigeon is immediately chased back up while the kids scream and make noise and all of a sudden there’s like 30 pigeons all in the air right above our heads and they’re scurrying around and flapping with no place to land because of these kids’ aggressiveness and there’s a big commotion and the kids don’t stop and soon all the fluttering birds are gone just moved away flying into nearby treetops I guess wondering what’s going on but being pigeons before long two by two they’re back on the ground checking things out and it all starts happening again and the father’s oblivious and lost in his magazine and I can see everyone nearby now start getting annoyed at the kids and thankfully eventually someone does say something to the guy and he gets up to round up the kids and off they start walking still making a squeal still causing commotion and isn’t it funny how no kids are annoying if they’re your very own and this was a pretty good example of that I suppose.

MAGICS OF LEMOSTER, pt. 1 (nyc, 1967)

2010-12-05T06:41:00.000-08:00

307. MAGICS OF LEMOSTER, pt. 1 (nyc, 1967):

A million fashions of bowler hats walking sideways along the water down by the Battery over by the ferry slips, along the waterfront downtown dives : it was all a makeshift dream a twisting of the real a notion made from nothing at all and then while I was standing right there this guy comes over with a wedge-shaped picket and stares straight at me and asks if I'd 'like a fuckin' day's work?' and all I had to do was give him 6 or 7 good hours of labor shoveling debris from the pit of an old basement into nearby waiting trucks and I said OK and we walked on - not knowing what I was doing but figuring thirty-five bucks would be good enough to find out with and we walked over to a row of very old buildings along Water Street or Front Street or whatever it was called and I could see immediately what was going on this old brick building which essentially was falling in on itself had gotten filled within with rubble - straight-out plain old rubble like a bombed-out Berlin apartment or something and the rubble had fallen straight down from the three or four upper floors - walls, doorways, plaster-paste glass wood metal the whole thing and the first thought that came to mind was that this guy was or must be operating on a shoestring because usually this kind of work was done by organized crews of workmen with a bulldozer or two or some sorts of power equipment skimming right over the surfaces but not this : one by one piece by piece makeshift block and hand-held tackle so to speak and nothing but grunt and groan poor-boy prison labor if you think about it really but here I was already hungry like an animal and probably headed for more with so much as nothing in front of me or in me for that matter so I went ahead and this guy gives me an enormous crazy-ass shovel and shows me the procedure they were keeping to - there were a few other guys in pretty much the same operation I was about to enter into - and he says 'just keep yer' face down and shovel but while you're doing so look at whatever you shovel watch out for things that look special we're looking for anything money jewelry coins anything that looks out of th'ordnary - you get it?' and I said yes not figuring for nothing that I'd spend an extra minute looking and as it was hours later nothing had transpired : piles of refuse and junk and heavy carrying and moving things about in fact one large long boring day of labor and as I later found out the old building had been a waterside brothel and tavern grog house hotel of sorts in the old days with legends of treasure and booty hidden within its walls and if any of this was to be found it would have to be there still which of course seemed unseemly more than a hundred years past and since the last squeak of the mattress there or straw-mat or whatever they did their jumping upon back then : nothing as good as the sex trade ever was to bring forth the promises and the magic of love's lost lurid lore leering : and anyway if I'd found a gold-encrusted silver-diamond necklace under wrap and key and lock and bolt anyway you think really I would have told him or anyone else about it?

THE NIGHT RED DARLINGTON DIED

2010-11-07T05:48:00.000-08:00

306. THE NIGHT RED DARLINGTON DIED (nyc, 1967):

I wasn't doing much of anything back then except waiting for planes and trains and all the things of that nature which took me nowhere and the lamplit bowels of Lexington Avenue called me forth often enough - all those old stately mansions still piled up before late destruction : the brownstones and the walkups where many interesting people lived until they died and then the real estate interests would swoop in and take nearly a block at a time fronting the avenue and wipe it out and one by one each of those gravely interdicted plots of oldest New York were gone and in the monied filth of the new mid-century real-estate barons replaced everything with junk just as quickly as they could fill it up : defended by hundreds of lawyers and more every word of their mouths was spoken to shut down real life and replace it all with deadened and dreary commerce - apartments and densities piled one atop the other packed with people needing somewhere to live and not caring - thus the transformation began and the age-old sequence of new-world replacement of old-world pride did eventually ring the curtain down on the real Manhattan which once before had been in place - and even for me this was quite obvious but for others it was deadly and Red Darlington was for sure one of those : Red had come in a long time back just after the war in from Oregon or somewhere like that and he was a no-nonsense very gruff painter I'd gotten to know and his loft faced Lexington in the 30's between cars and trucks and big old homes and over its own time it had been used for varied purposes - a piano factory a furniture-storage loft a hat retailer and only by Red's time was its crumbly soiled nature bringing it into its real and perfect use : his wonderful perspective on it has art cans paint and canvas and brushes and everything else that goes with it splattered all about - the right light and where not the right lamps and platforms and work tables and in the far corners each were cots and beds and tables and a small refrigerator and a desk and shelves and chairs - all in some perfect form of hideaway to which I'd attach myself for days at a time - I used to think 'Red takes no prisoners' meaning that he just rolled over and moved on leaving everything behind as he spent weeks at a time toiling over some large-sized canvas the makes of which I often wasn't able to figure out until it was done HE said it was done anyway - zany lines leading to patches of color and deep spots within other colors and along one edge or another the geometric sudden pattern of lines dropped in as a seeming afterthought or a means of finally ending this jagged piece of color puzzle - Red's work only occasionally sold - a few hundred bucks here and few there and yet he managed to stay on always seemed to have enough ready cash to keep it all going and was always happy enough and plenty nice to me too and friends would come and go small parties were held people would hang around and yes things would get done and in his own little personal freight elevator there was always kept a bicycle or two for any of us to use - Red never cared and they seemed always to get returned - and we'd sometimes the two of us together just walk around - getting coffee or some food and he'd be looking at things or grabbing stuff from the gutter and talking about lines and patterns and we'd look along the big shopping streets for things left behind - back in those days one could get rich doing this almost - and long long nights sometimes went into mornings too with art-friends around here and there or forays down into the Village or someone else's pretty much the same loft somewhere else and round and round it went until done : a wonderful and nearly completed circle of intimacies and connections in which everyone ding pretty much the same things knew everyone else involved and there was a small level of perfect competition to see who would finish up best and first and the most right but it little mattered because it was all friendly together in the work of some frame of art some deeper other world I really wanted to become part of and eventually did too and that for me was a satisfaction deeper than anew Cadillac or a house in the country or whatever premise people valued other things by NOT ME I'd never care : separated by need and kept to the distance by the loved of the heart which brings forth goodness these were my times and these were my people and then one day all of a sudden Red was notified of changes - whoever owned this property had decided he'd owned it long enough and it was time for money to take its place and Red was given five months to pack up and get out move off the premises and bring everything else out with him sad to say Red had nowhere else to go and no plans to go anyway for as he said 'this was life the only life I got and the only life I've ever needed and beyond that point I ain't even thinking' and at the end of the fourth month : unbeknownst to everyone and to me too : one night Red just blew his brains out on the loft-studio floor and called it 'Red paints the loft Red'.

LOTHAR'S EVIL KINGDOM

2010-09-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

305. LOTHAR'S EVIL KINGDOM (nov. 1967, nyc):

At the readymades where really there was nothing : car tires and truck tires piled together and the countless juices of whatever slips through as rainwater and grease and seepage and toil - all of that stuff below filthy windows through which one could hardly see and I knew that as I knew the forcefield that kept it all going - up above the elevated highway falling apart and crack-crumbling where the vehicles flowed like emanations from Lothar's Evil Kingdom or somesuch drivel by a rabble-rousing fate but within myself I felt nonetheless settled and in one place where I wanted to be and the river-wide smokes of a few fires and factories - the sort of stuff that fouls a river drips its poison into the water uses the water as a runoff stream of filth and vile - they curled over the mad Hoboken horizon far across from me and even though now maybe it's all gone back then back here where I'm speaking off the Vietnam-killer-force incremental dread and all its matter ran on through morning light and afternoon brilliance and the slow shading of dusk like death towards evening - nothing left but loud voices and the enchantments of anger : girls in crystal berets parading from Canal with fatigue-wearing guys as fatigued as their clothing : weaponry on display and all that mad revolution in the air going nowhere and the shouts and slogans of idiots countered by the shouts and slogans of idiots from the other side I paraded Broadway I got dragged to Whitehall I was tortured and taken in and then thrown right back out incendiary 1967 nighttime daytime unreason kill-a-cop torture-a-prisoner wipe the slate clean reasoning the kind the Government would use to make a point but without involvement I walked away from everything unattached and I cared nothing for the makers nor what they made : train tracks lying in wait the daily commuters hoarding their briefcase time struggling lowly over stairways and doorways and stepping over whatever in the way could hinder them and the fine sheeted girls who passed by looked for all the world like young mirrors of lovely time while the men dragged through their muck carrying both their time and the maggot-infested regrets they kept : slime-ridden memories military-cap-wearing soldiers on leave playing something anything along 42nd street bowling lanes and ski-ball outlets walking sideways through the hookers and fags and whores on display while cops twirled their sticks and the maddened black-Muslims hawked their papers and scorched their pavements and in that dark December night it always seemed that - no matter where I was in whatever part of town - what came to the fore was the Lie that all existence was NOTHING more than a Lie shading and wrongly filtering everything we think and do and assume to be and all that's left when the final dawn does finally break is the strange confusing red sky of another morning just waking to be.

MY STREETS TOO

2010-08-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

304. MY STREETS TOO:

[There was by this time a conclusion made as to the reason and place from which these actions had been taken and the ideological fervor with which they were implemented and various scientific papers and political statements were introduced to the public at large in order to defend the necessary actions and security moves which had to be taken and airports were locked down ports shut building security was made extremely tight vehicles of every sort were stopped and searched at all bridges tunnels and other crossings – this to the great consternation of truckers and shippers everywhere not to mention the huge business underway having to do with travel and import and export and transportation and movement - and in turn other cities implemented by national standards their own measures and people of various profiles were marked for signification and it came to pass that in that time Herod….no just kidding…] months later I recall passing a window still pasted with memorials to the dead and missing and yet it wasn’t just the random haphazard memorials but there were varied organized sites along the way Grand Central and Penn Station for instance each featured kiddie walls or so they seemed where school children in their mock-sham version of art with broad brush school colors and disturbing looking watercolors were set free to let their feelings out with scrawled messages of remembrance and praise and thank you’s to fallen heroes and all that and the bleakly garish and distorted drawings of weepy people fallen buildings crashed planes fiery buildings office workers in flames bent planes lit up flying through the air towards two strange rectangular buildings with people jumping from them and licks of flame running through streets and flower portraits of firemen in flames and wrecked streets and cars and messages to the missing and in one place the Daily News page itself pasted in place with a message of dismay ‘WTC Widow Commits Suicide’ and the little caption stating ‘neighbors said she was deeply troubled and not herself since Sept. 11’ and these broadsheets seemed everywhere to be not worth the effort the vague palliative of energy raising its head from ruin and I asked Kausch what he thought of all that and he said “you know it was Richard Nixon in ’72 who stated that the American people were like children in that you can’t always tell them the truth or the whole story you have to make them accept the lie or the half truth because they don’t know any better and haven’t got the resources to be filled in on and made to grasp or understand what’s really going on and just like children too if you tell them you’re going to do something you’d better well do it for if you don’t they’ll never forget and they’ll simply keep asking for it over and over and all of that message as I see it has a lot to do with what’s going on here you see these idiotic people have to be given their free rein to express their stupid emotions because it’s the only catharsis they’ll get and all the while the authorities will undertake whatever they choose they must do to rid the problem of its essential qualities and whether that means more pure and brutal destruction of the next guy more bombing more slaughter it will be undertaken with reams of our own just-as-stupid-as-kids young men ready and willing to fight and die because they’ve got nothing better in their heads to take their time or thought – there being no education left in this damned nation nothing but a cess-pool of good-feelings and sentiments and entertainment drivel and we’ve reached the point where our values and meanings are made into plot and drama into little weekly crap for people to laugh at – so why do they feature approved kiddie walls for grieving why ? have you ever thought of that ? because it’s harmless and by making childish sentiment out of it they can push it all out of the way and go about their more nasty work – but for me I’ll never sleep another night knowing I’m about to go to sleep without having done my work for that day without knowing that I’ve used my efforts to change and to countenance change through creativity for just like these perpetrators of destruction I too am committed to re-forming and destroying the brute source wild blindness that plagues this land and yes if it takes a gun to do it I can well understand that too for blindness has no eye like blindness and vision alone can surpass what cannot be seen and if this is the formative moment of my old life I’ll accept it and I’ll accept just as the fat beefy man at the bar accepts the sports game on above his head on the TV screen sitting there slobbering drinking yet another Southern Comfort and soda water and he just sits there one after the other and like him I can accept my reality so vast so different so artistic compared to this fat and bleak existence and around me swirls the land of a nation gone bad now burning yet THESE WERE MY STREETS TOO they burned” and you know what you know what I said I said “yeah Kausch I understand and I probably do agree with you there.”

'AMONG THE DEAD'

2010-07-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

303. MANIFESTATIONS OF INTENTIONAL COMMINGLING WITH THE POOR AND DESTITUTE : or (‘AMONG THE DEAD’):

1. WE NO LONGER NEED:

'We have already evolved - a few times - to the point where we realize we NO LONGER NEED to exist and we can just imagine that we do - and deal with those eventualities alone and we are all Godhead, each, and our part of that eternal is the activity of a constant creating acting witnessing advancing and processing – which circular motion brings us back to another go-round of what I’ve just said : we are already evolved to the point where we realize we no longer need to exist and we can just imagine that we do and deal with those eventualities……'
-
There no talent worth repeating and nothing that makes any sense ever comes from trying too hard and because of that (it would seem) everyone I once met had a story to tell and they also harbored some false hopes for a future some tired reasonings from the past and in between a bevy of contentious prattle about the present day : however it means my next prize or whatever it may signify is not to be composed of limitations and closed rooms and sealed windows outside of which the light enters from another place - static and warm and still - and I dreamed all that on one night of horrible dread amidst a situation worth nothing except avoidance – the handcuffs were quite heavy heavier than I’d ever thought they would have been and they hung on my arms like leaden weights while I had to watch the pitiful lineup of misfits and stalwart low-lives creeping morosely along the wall until they each were fingerprinted and apprised of their rights and situations me included and then let one-by-one into miserable cells with a single toilet in the center and we sat there for hours while various police creeps came around with clipboards and lists and charts and names and spelled out for each the amount that had been turned in the sickening name of some slimy lawyer type who’d been sent and arrived to ‘represent’ them as if a hearing in the presence of some God itself would suffice for passage to Heaven brought to you only by some articulate greasemonkey attorney possessed of an Esquire alongside his name and dollar signs for fingers and a pointed dagger for a heart - it was all like that and everywhere the same and I said ‘I’m tired of all this just take me out and shoot me’ and then I asked for rope or a knife or something with which I could end it in place and those around me snickered and watched instead the girls go by and they too were in the same situation as we were : wharfside cockroaches caught in the act – stealing fucking soliciting shooting up sleeping in puke taking a shit talking sass or burgling and the rest - yes even girls do that and sometimes harsher too - but there was really nothing about it exceptional Weehawken Street the Westside Highway Jane Charles Mortimer Horatio all those streets with peoples’ names Washington Street the whole bunch of Westside places which back then thrived on crime and destitute actions by destitute people - mattresses piled up in the back of an abandoned truck like a dormitory of sin and swagger with people passed out all hours and seemingly forever but all it was really was someplace where the dead came to pick up their mail and the women inside were apt to be busy and cars which came and went held some Harry or John of no real consequence to anyone there – a set of organs and pipes and place to park whatever you had to park something to get money from and there it was I slept standing up with people like John Halter and Larry Smirk and anyone else who’d come and if someone didn’t have a name someone else gave it to them and all we did was look at the river and watch things come and go – sometimes there’d be a couple of cargo boats or whatever and they’d be loaded with something wrapped and bundled or on pallets and we’d get hired for five or six hours to help unload and being as we weren’t really dockhands or any of that it had to be done quickly and sort of on the sly in case ‘others’ took offense but we mostly managed and sometimes too we’d be able to stash this or that aside so as to pick it up later - sometimes tins of ham or bottles of water or soda or booze bundles of crackers or anything like that but that was the sort of really loose living and easy confederation that was prevalent then and it was fairly easy to get by – I think a lot of that’s gone nowadays in fact probably all of it as everything is secured and guarded and everyone’s on edge and nervous about everything and besides all that hip traffic on the small-scale we knew is finished as everything’s huge and containerized and used with cranes and lifts and on really huge scale and this older-day means of transportation which I’m writing of had disappeared - there was a time too when the Hudson was used for all that agricultural and farm and apple farm transportation on barge or boat and both sides of the lower Hudson here would be filled to teeming with people scurrying about and horse-pulled wagons being loaded with fresh produce and stuff but that too was long ago – a really long time ago in the old Washington Market days which actually had replaced once already the older market piers and stalls still farther downtown along the Westside piers – the old Lebanese section then and the area where once the Twin Towers stood - that’s how many layers of genuflection and color are beneath the streets and avenues of New York City – it was all convenience and commerce and whatever worked worked for a while until it to was superseded or worked out by the next place or thing which worked better or was more convenient and eventually everything was replaced by something else and as a fact now it’s all gone all over and the resultant pile of leftover New York bears little or no semblance of anything of what it once way - all over it’s clean kids now and style and fashion and fag night-club scenes and genteel ethnicity ad it’s all rotten and overpriced too - but no one knows nor gives a damn either.

I THINK I DREAMT OF SHULLSBURG

2010-06-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

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.

EVERYTHING FIRST HAS TO BE SORTED

2010-05-02T06:22:00.000-07:00

300. EVERYTHING FIRST HAS TO BE SORTED:

You must first make order out of the dilemma separating everything as it need be separated - realizing firstly that all things are not alike and they each bear different burdens of their own in carrying the load of the greater will and without language you must learn to speak and within bounds you must un-learn boundaries - for there are none past that point at which things become impossible without solution BUT the main thing is study : study and observation where there is nothing else except the absolute dedication to that alone and that allows you to see and to proclaim the world as YOU see it - untarnished and without anyone else's burdens put upon it AND you must get beyond definitions and beyond categories and past the point where simple arguments keep everything bounded sour and small ('Man gave names to the animals and by their type and form he separated all things only after he was introduced initially to all that is by the God who presented it all to him') and my own order right there and then was in walking along 44th Street and watching what I thought was the distant surge of barge and river but only later turned out to be some huge piece of dredging equipment which was pounding the East River floor (which equipment I only understood as I got up to it) and walking then uptown and out towards the land's edge I was able to sit and observe what was before me and I spent some good ten minutes or more simply cataloging in my mind all that I saw - thinking such an exercise would clear up my head and facilitate something else for me - and it became more and more obvious as I did so that the world is itself filled at every instant with such a myriad of things which are constantly undergoing change and movement and alteration that the utter futility of keeping up with all of it is very soon apparent ('evening came and the morning followed') but what most interested me there (as usual) were the comings and goings of the people who frequented the small eastside park - the elderly gents in their white socks and polished shoes the women whose slow arms were held by maids or nurses or people hired for the specific purposes of tending and accompanying them and the occasional child whether silent or screeching finding joy or delight in something and the driver the courier the walker the chef any and all of them out and about taking their minutes of calm to rest on themselves and absorb the world around them - whatever it be - and amidst all this there remained such a quiet solace and a quiet sadness and the two somehow conjoined for me to acknowledge nothing but the futility and the eventual passing of all things ALL things except the stories they are graced with and the tales we graft upon the stories and then the personal witness we each give to the entirety of all that - and that is the LIFE which we eventually pass from and bury and leave traces along behind - perhaps traces of the what or the who we once were but most certainly (if we've had any) our works and that I supposed is what I was seeking in all that I did THE WORKS of man and the works of mankind where they ever may have worked together - but I found it hard to think of pleasantries and beauty as I thought of these words instead : 'cursed be the ground because of you and in toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life and thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you as you eat the plants of the field and by the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat until you return to the ground from which you were taken FOR you are dirt and to dirt you shall return' but I thought too that most people must have generally lived their lives putting all that out of mind and finding instead the small pleasantries which make living bearable between people for by any other means (certainly if we stayed mindful of that) life itself would perhaps be unbearable but no one listened and no one answered anyway and as I watched even I knew then that those around me had lived out their time and had passed their meaningful years in some subservience to something perhaps which they now reflected upon lonesome savaged sad or solid and in their last years I knew they'd want completion - and I watched their transparent skin turning again to white bones and their staggered shaking hands grasping air and hope and lung and I noticed their frail bodies with the addresses of (already) some other place being imprinted and I understood again that all life is but translation unto ourselves of the unutterable and the nefarious untranslatable form we carry within and the completion of life is the completion of that form which then bears its own markings and meanings and instructions which soon supersede us by far and we are gone leaving but the faded imprint of that newer form behind as memory and image and magical thought in the minds of everyone left - and like clay ('the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life and so man became a living being') we build with all that is left of others malleable pliant yet stern and strong too - and I looked about me too and saw a hundred other places and the steamboats and the factories and the asylum halls and the parkside trees smokestacks and statues and realized again that all this was mute and but a testament to the workings of man beneath the blue sky above and as hard as I sought meaning - perhaps it could be found everywhere or perhaps I'd find it nowhere - as long as I sought it I was still alive and the power which powers time to pass was rolling by as I sat there and witness to nothing I was witness to all and I began humming or singing or reciting back to myself a something I once had known - a mad jumble of words from somewhere - : 'the whole thing might not in the end be the only solution - but at this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts and it slides down this anticipation of itself already full-fledged a lightning existence that has come into our own' but I could no longer meditate just as I could no longer dance for all the pangs of belief and expectation had left me and I was utterly barren and alone worth nothing at that moment except the stretching life of regret absence and nothing more with which to suit myself but I remembered instead the old red brick doorways wherein I once huddled confined to the night and fighting cold air and seeking comfort and shelter without again words and the only respite from the worlds of hunger and cold were the momentary delights of someone anyone giving something away - be it a nickel a penny a bowl of cheap soup or some thrown-over coffee without even a name - but those days long past seemed rejected as well in memory and now camouflaged in some jacket of fog and made denser by anguish and sorrow and want all over again as I looked out on some other stingy world - one made of nothing now but the meager modern day and one moving along without even the thought of any of what once may have been AS WE ALL each and one died singly alone and together making no matter of the act or no matter of the destination and the old river roiled and rolled spinning past me like some decided jackpot of some decided winner who'd taken it all and I knew that such it would be and so never stop - and I sat there DEJECTED and most decidedly in shock just thinking of what may have been.

MIKVAH (nyc, 1970)

2010-04-06T04:46:00.000-07:00

299. MIKVAH (nyc, 1970):

It's a difficult thing to realize Murder is murder but when organized and undertaken correctly it's called policy or foreign policy or even statesmanship or warfare and even Machiavelli wrote about it right nicely and as seen for the good and seen all on a larger scale than the ordinary undertakings of ordinary life but try to explain that to anyone on death row try to say that to a murder victim's kin and see how far it takes you - leaky boat on an embroiled sea for sure - so putting that aside I never faced off the issue but just went on my way never really thinking more than a bit about it and I spent hours along the old Hudson waterfront - the old one before it was cleaned up - fish-shacks truck sheds piles of tires metal heaps old buses and wagons splattered around with the crumbling highway overhead and people by definition only people in a daze - slobbering walking sleeping dying and every medicinal herb this side of Cochise you'd ever heard of - that river that place and space was really all I had right then and the profusely curative powers of that river became something for me like a wash a bath something to redeem all my sins something that ran concurrent with and alongside of everything never talking back never judging never pointing a riverboat finger towards anything but just running ice-jamming splashing slashing and that was my first city companion the first I remember anyway : late night mid-night shadow play dark stage of my dreams and peoples my hideout and deliverance and there I felt as if I LIVED! bestride all things - only years later of course did Death itself become a style be seen as a style and a made-up way of living and dealing with things and in fact entire industries now have grown around it - entertainment and music and the rest essentially worshipping at the altar of Death and its sidekick Money and all their negativity and mayhem - but that too is for others to say not for me ('haven't I said before 'I don't judge' but hey I don't lie either') and for purposes of and in order to be right to not pre-judge the doer to not drown in my own dumb human pulses I walked straight along an observant path as if I'd have willingly walked upon the water had I been able - to watch both what sank and what stayed afloat next to me - the steady river flows while things come and go seemingly at will or at times and choosings of their own and the time I'm here writing about wasn't yet overtly concerned with all that drivel we now know as 'living': these were days of a certain compunction when people still had the roles and the rituals of expected behaviors and the ways of how things were supposed to be and all that being still in place ran things and coalesced everywhere into concepts and rituals strong enough still to put society correctly in its box but long after that but not so long it all began falling apart and there was just nothing to be done putting it back together - it shambled and collapsed the way things happen when bad weather rolls in big time bad weather to spoil the picnic and blow all the tablecloths tables food AND the ants too away it was just like that and whatever did become left of this older society was then only to be found around the edges HOWEVER (and ran ran the river still ran) the time here I'm talking about was still a time when the fragments of the old society were still about : grandparents and toddlers together a few generations of people yet able to tolerate not so much each other as much as each other's concepts - which were not yet each self-canceling and confining and suffocating to the point of cultural clash turning violent even among family and everyone you'd meet you just knew came from a storyline of folks deeper and more stolid than your (my) own - I'd come from a wreck a fragmented nervousness amidst which I lived and had been brought up - a scowling boil-pot of issues and intrigue and petty jealousies and angers which had by then already taken their weird toll on my psyche and from which I wanted nothing so much as divorce and distance - great heaves of distance - to displace my past with some sort of bold new future and I guess like so many others before me ('wash me oh wash me in your eternal waters!') and my own new and more fantastic lineage : it was to be found in ones and alone on the streets of New York City part of nothing and certainly not American - in a patterned way of living that sought to be almost European in its unconnectedness to anything tawdry and 'new world' - the mess Americans had made of their land was almost pathetic and here in Manhattan there was no giving attention to any of that 'historical' stuff nothing of the past as it was simply all rolled over torn down rebuilt paved over hidden ignored disrespected and destroyed on a daily basis - unlike the hinterlands where the 'new' simply gets set up in places where 'nothing' (so to speak) had been before here in NYC everything that went up first took down any connection to the past - witness 52nd Street (I note how it is 'dry' land a land which changes everything) witness the financial district witness any of the once-discreet and countrified lanes and avenues of the past - the carriage racetracks the caves and hovels the shanty villages even the hills and rises - everything had been leveled and destroyed and taken dawn to a poor common denominator and a level at which people could be more comfortable in their distance BUT that was another entire group of people (all those movers and shakers) from what I was living with and the avenues of my growth were to be (hopefully) along the oldest and most shadowed lanes and alleys of the real past that I could find - which endeavor did really mean I was the loneliest man in the city and a complete solitary : but besides all that I was paired right now downtown with a bunch of characters on their own and rightful indignants with each their own tales and stories from Judy Tenenbaum to Andy Bonamo to Billy Grosbard at this point but three of my lone posse yet I spent my own time in pieces everywhere - I would often sit in places seemingly odd to wait out the cold or to nod on a bench and by odd I guess I mean 'open-churches' like St. Francis Xavier and another one somewhere in midtown then - - the Little Church Around the Corner which had been set up somehow a long time back for show-business people (or at least I was told) and in which location there was an odd little priest fellow who often tried to coax me in and take me under his wing as it were (euphemisms here abound all among these people) and the book he was always peddling to me and which I did eventually spend idle time reading was 'At Play In the Fields of the Lord' a 1965 Peter Matthiessen title which this Father Janowski had somehow taken to heart in his way to use as reason and being of his 'mission' to bring forth some form of vital and active God to the streets and I listened and nodded and I read too as asked noting carefully Lewis Moon and Martin Quarrier both and making comparisons in the work and activities of these two with the Brazilian Amazonian Indians whom I transferred to the street-class primitives of my days and all that sacred versus profane stuff that balancing of two worlds that exploitation of one thing by the older that endless ballet of the new supplanting the old - it all was mirrored for me in this book the causes and the conflicts the quarrels and the dilemmas and between myself and Father Janowski there ensued many long conversations in this vein - me trying to get at his approach to spreading the word and he trying to fathom my entry and my point of view into the world and tracing the path of it from the world I'd left : seminary days boy-to-man crap and all that and all of this too had a sort of 'show-business' edge to it with him as did most everything (in the way now which is much more open and accepted in this time and which I only now can see again as that endless dance of homosexual craving from him towards me - completely in the dark about what was happening as usual) - and who were the outsiders and who were the primitives in his telling of the book I never did get to the bottom of but we had many a strong discussion over topics from it and I actually liked the issue itself always having had an interest in the 'leftist' idea of the labor-priest movement (not quite the same but close) which would have been a street-level mission to engage the flock - so to speak - among the usual dockworker and truckman class of people the congregation least expected to conform but I dropped that idea too as I saw it had already been done to death - all those waterfront movies and worker-priests meddling among the other classes - in fact an entire stupid movie had been made of it (On the Waterfront) and within that naive and dumb movie was all the scenery I ever needed with which to find reason to displace any yearnings I may once have had to be that way : one of the most-hated characters I ever held was that ridiculous priest figure in that movie played to its paradoxical catatonic hilt by the feverish and naively childlike forced optimism of whomever it was who played that character (Karl Malden) and all the blubbering naivete regarding personal responsibility to credos and believes and rightness and that priest guy I knew never really did a thing in his life that was worthwhile just walking around all the time emoting and dramatizing and sermonizing before his stupid parishioners local Hoboken idiots ensconced in fortress-church as if it was mother's apron strings all over again and the only thing about that movie that mattered probably was the walk-in-the-park scene with the bum who recognizes Brando's character and then the very ultra-cool but dark and onerous fiddling with the little white glove and putting it on his hand that Brando does with the Eva St. Marie character's glove - strikingly tough scene that for me in some way always reflected the real dichotomy of any issue - the while to gentleness versus the stupid bumbling will to reality upon which we must all hit our foreheads sometimes if not all the time : and you just knew that if Kazan meant what he'd set out to say he'd have blown that church sky-high with all those people in it but some sort of stupid reticence somehow kept him from that step - until the final and melodramatic fight scene when we are led to believe finally that violence - even if taken for the sake of movement and plot-advancing and (in this case) closing - that violence does in and of itself serve and end and a use and a purposes one way or the other go figure it out for yourself : but how to explain something like this to yet another stupid gay fag theater priest guy hanging around dank church halls lighting candles and playing at afternoons of holiness (after all is not the picture of understanding first a mental association everywhere?) and so I decided rather just let me be and never went back again - even never revisiting until just recently and just now that At Play in the Fields of the Lord book thing and anyway I've learned since then that once you make friends with inauthenticity it's usually here to stay - you can't shake someone's fakery someone's fantasy the glib falsehood associated with made-up life-stories and situations that don't exist but yet let's face it the entire world is a fantasy a chimera a vivid picture made up to supplant image with a certain form of moving reality which we can alter as it moves along and all that is the story-line which we live : no more authentic than that is what I tell you to be 'ooh-wee' as they say.

THE BILLY GROSBARD STORY, PART 1

2010-03-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

298. THE BILLY GROSBARD STORY, Part 1; (nyc, 1967):

'Let's face it - you can't understand me and that's good enough for me and I can't for sure figure you out' I had just said that to Billy Grosbard who was standing by the doorway along Second Avenue after he once again had tried telling me the story of how and why he was hiding out from the Colorado authorities - having thrown a wife from a car while driving at a good rate of speed around a mountain pass somewhere - the point being she was dead and he was the killer - but apparently that hadn't stopped him from any other pursuit of his personal life which at this point had brought him face to face with me in some lowball not much good ice cream dairy stall next to the Fillmore East where endless streams of joy-faced innocents came in nightly between bouts of their listening to the riotous sounds of rock and roll music from the likes of groups with names like Moby Grape to use one example and I always was on the lookout for the better names the ones with the crafted use of abstract language to catchers and the grabbers with names you'd never hear again 'Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys the Fallen Angels the Scarpeto Singles F U C and the K's the Larimor Tendons' - all those ribald concoctions of bands which most often turned out to be nothing more than a few neighborhood friends blasting away in a nearby garage who'd taken their chivalric pursuit of musical anarchy to the next level simply because no one ever really told them to shut up pipe down or - simply - slap them down and take their equipment away - but be that as it may this steady stream of indecorous flagellants would come stumbling into this little store-counter for food or drink ice cream hamburgers anything to feed their pot-smoked frenzy for taste and texture and we - or at least I - had to put up with their sluggishness and stupidity while Billy dealt with their closer matters - getting their orders taking their money and the rest - all I was was the background guy the hired hand to clean and keep order mostly after hours - it was an all-night late-night overnight if necessary gig for me a few night weekly as I was paid in cash at the end of a week pretty much no matter how much or how little I worked and the whole idea of this time was a sort of fluid irresponsibility a balloon of promise held aloft between kids and management and owners and workers just so that at least some money was made some pay was exchanged and some form of completion and order and satisfaction was meted out between hordes of loudly-musical in their own minds hippie kids and the establishment next door so that for theatrical purposes if nothing else the entire pilgrim-mass-movement-youth-force lower eastside anarchy love-power acid-daze factory-induced anarchic fantasy could be kept going - Newsweek and Time and all the rest loved it for sure and one or another cub reporter for some nasty article-baiting lower-than-life newspaper or magazine could always be found slinking around for a report on the hows and whys of all these kids whether runaways or exiles from their long-lawn shaded paradises in Long Island or New Jersey : it was this time of society when everyone was afraid and perplexed at the same time : draft-dodging kids pleading for freedom while others were slaughtered or maimed with their own enthusiastic participation in one or another military donnybrook in the fields of southeast Asia or the slime that was soon-to-be in Laos and Cambodia (only more in a long tired list of such travesties which churned up kids and youth at alarming rates thru the use of propaganda lies and deceit the likes of which still parade today as patriotism except that now with no draft the kids enjoin themselves by choice even more willingly into the sloporific stupor of military service in a machine-state of police and military tactical assault both physical AND mental AND never-ending) and any of these reporter-types with their stupid notebooks endlessly transcribing trite little passing interviews with kids would have (I knew) stopped DEAD in their tracks had I simply turned and said 'well yes in fact my friend here is a runaway murderer from the fine state of Colorado having killed his wife Miranda and come east to partake of the fine hippie lifestyle whilst working for small change at this nicely-established Rapaport (Cy Rapaport the owner by the way does really own at least half the businesses on this local area and lives himself in a fine splendor in Long Island - he can be found should you wish further information in his suite of business offices behind the Rapaport Coin Laundry down the street some - on the left - nice guy always happy to talk) establishment dispensing ice cream and snacks to the wandering groups of theater-goers from all points but Billy here my friend has other goals too - one of course being the continuation of his evasion of evidence and authority in this murder previously mentioned - having to do with maintaining the salacious satisfaction of all desires both monetarily and sexually by dispensing not just food and beverage but lodging sexual satisfaction drugs pot and all other forms of information to aid and abet the runaways and draft-dodgers here congregating and if any of you need more information why I'd be happy to dispense' but of course I knew no one would ever take this idea up as all they really wanted were the usual fluff stories and cuddly interviews by which they could inflate their own stupidities into tales of danger and damage to hordes and hordes of the nation's youth now being dumped dangerously and in despond into such cesspool hellholes as Haight Ashbury and the lower eastside San Francisco and New York City respectively but in reality none of it mattered because it would all pass away before long and besides it was all infantile and a daydream and I was having no part of it - I told Billy I'd maybe see him later and turned and left not really wanting to be around there any longer at that moment and I knew that behind it all there was some form of a Long Island Jewish mob that pretty much ran the block and they could dispense justice in their own way if and when they found it necessary - just as simply as Billy dispensed food they'd dispense a wicked from of justice if it meant they could trade him or information regarding him for the proper amounts of money and favor - I quickly found out it was all like that - Italian mob a few blocks away and Jewish mob here feeding off all those old and ancient indemnities of tribal curse and religious-infracted matter by which these Tompkins Square old-line immigrants mixed up their leftover lives while waiting to die - they could be seen dail sitting around like squash on all the broken benches within the park - talking and exchanging useless gossip and attitude about the world around them and all the people who passed - but I always thought WHO CARED for them or their weirdly out-of-date concerns and how'd they get here anyway ? and when they died they just died (I'd seen one or two over time dead just dead right there passing out keeling over collapsing dead-solid as an old fish in the park while walking or sitting) and I sometimes felt the entire place was the waiting room of a big outdoor morgue - a silent one with only a low and sentimental background buzz of people's hammered talking covered by a sound-absorbing cloth of guilt and doubt and despair which resulted in nothing more than tired and very-hushed and soft voices.

A SLAVISH DEVOTION TO NOTHING AT ALL

2010-02-23T04:29:00.000-08:00

297. A SLAVISH DEVOTION TO NOTHING AT ALL - (a streetside cinema, nyc, 1967, pt.1):

It's not the same when the wheel comes around again and everything has changed : anyone is able see that : lyceum sticky-tape on the borders of very old books and the Fourth Avenue book guys all withered and lowdown lurked in the crevices wherever they could - cigar chomping longcoats with tophats to match the guys with the book covers under their coats - picture books of rare dalliances and of girls and women at play - some bucolic yet ribald reflection onto an older America now long gone when the country-skirts and the farmgirl nymphettes could play amidst innocence on the swings and fences of countryside houses and only the leer of the stranger understood what was coming but that was Jacksonian and back in those days it wasn't really that far off (time changes perspectives change what once seemed far away now looms up close) and I look down myself to see the ground just making sure where it is I am and reinforcing that black-shoot of my own existence I stand up willingly just to watch the black police car come slowly along the curb and stop right across from that guy holding the signpost and without really anything I could see first they just whacked him up the side of the head and then they bundled him into the back of the car and rode off - quiet and without much ado and certainly without any police noise - and whoever that person was or what had just occurred it never did seem to matter and what was to become of that representation I never got to know (movie-time movie-myth pretense) for it was the slavish devotion ever-present to cinema fantasy anyway which ran so much of the streetlife around me : if I really knew where I was at that time I would have had a far greater grasp of situation and possibility but accidental matter usually rules things and most of life by those means is a question of timing of one big lucky moment where sometimes for no reason except being prepared the world breaks your way (never happened here but the preparation was widespread) and I recall once seeing Charley Chaplin walking silently past the nicely spired Renwick church (Grace Episcopal) at Broadway and 10th Street but back when that intersection was famed and vital and a heart of the beating city around it - the water trough built into the fence at the corner and its small trickle of water and Chaplin as it were cinematically too I remember stopped for a moment put his hands into that small water spray filled his cup hands with water and slowly in a moment out of time rubbed lightly his own face with a perhaps refreshing dash of water or anyway one would have to think and then resumed his idle walk : I watched as if I was the director of all that streetcorner motion - megaphone in hand shouting directions pointing the scene directing the next move - for I knew it was my movie and all these actions were my actions and then (by that) I stopped and thought suddenly 'well then if that is so what really IS this life anyway?' for if we are pushed and moved around by out-seen forces and invisible directions than what really is our fault of judgment in any of it to be and how by those means can a person ever be found to be at fault and ! EGADS MOST! what is this bastard thing called free-will to which we so ascribe the pride and penalty of all Mankind ? is not that only nothing but our own Pride (one of the Seven Sins too) running wild on a field of its own imagining? had not that police action just witnessed been but a scene out of some pantomimed film being undertaken for the (unseen) benefit or pleasure of someone or something or at least some already-written and undiscovered script to which by our actions we each attest our fealty ? a morbid and dire Predestination of means by that old American fashion ? a quaintly religious moment doing homage to the oldest ideas extant - what is it the young want I found it to be communitarian - any collectivist impulse suits them and all the labor-movement 'solidarity; stuff all those political movements of socialism and feel-good together turn out in the end to be nothing ore than the youthful ideal of collectivist thought all oneness togetherness let's unite ! all that crap that seeps from the pores in reality it's nothing but the normal bullshit of youth and innocence a bad badge that fades with age and at least in his way this Chaplin guise never fell for any of that and at least this 'Little Tramp' character was always lonely and aspiring and on his own and my water-spout image of the single face washing but itself stands stronger for me internally than any of that collectivist impulse crap which usually then gets usurped by powers that take it over and run with it and make it all into systems that harm and hinder - control faction rules and regulations - witness that solitary Chaplinesqe man I just saw getting smacked on the side of the head and taken away : police may not need motives but I do or perhaps whatever 'motives' a policeman seeks are the sort easy enough to simply make up on the spur of the moment as needed to apprehend and the rest be damned ('we'll worry about all that later Mulcahey - just get the bastard in here round his ass up and bring him down to precinct - the only rights he'll get is the right to use the cell door or the right of my right hand un'nerstand now?') and thus it runs - narratives pile upon narratives in this land everywhere and this skinny little notebooks of antics just gets fatter and fatter : Predestination killed the cat ! forget curiosity.

THE BANNISTER

2010-01-17T16:49:00.000-08:00

296. THE BANNISTER:
(John Street, nyc 1967) -

...Only once, a good, wild sleep... (Being the tale of a youth at wild imagining time-traveling through this world - with lessons learned and somehow remembered).

I have said all this before (in my sleep) and I'll say it again I'm sure : there are ten million ways to waste time YES to waste time and a few good reasons (sometimes) to do so - one of them for me has always been to simply walk and the walk along John Street was always a good one because it allowed me to trace the progression of Manhattan Island's growth and people in a most obvious fashion starting from the base along the East River waterfront area (once much closer) and walking upwards or uphill past all the remnants of what once was - the old places the streambeds the rocks the old original church-settlements and the waterfront homes and buildings and trade terminals and - in their final extensions - the very last remnants of a time and place now long faded yet in all of these endeavors it was always possible for me to simply let the mind wander and find its own traces of time and place within which to dwell - for I have found the mind to be the one part of the human being which can still connect to the ether and bring forth communications with what is no longer and for any practical purpose - were someone to see me - I would be not there but somewhere else mingling and dwelling along the old paths and clumps of wood meadow fen and swamp past the old trees bent and drooping along the dirt paths where recently the Indians last passed and which of a sudden were being cut and dotted with small huts and dwellings of a newer sort and the wanderings of the sailors and dock people as they trekked inland and up for the hostelries and inns and taverns where they'd spend their time and find their passing pleasures and all and every part of me was able to make manifest the urges within which were left to merge with the times and places of my own choosing and - as I said - had someone tried to reach me they'd not find 'me' instead they'd find some other being representing me in passing and only in a wan manifestation of what inhabited the more modern day of our new-found pestilence and I'd rather sit alee of a tree or stump and watch the smoke from some chimney wire its way skyward than I'd want to co-mingle with the foul emissions of roadway and building which today has despoiled and ruined the pleasurable craft of living which was then prevalent and if it can be found again I'll bring forth to you the particular notations of those exact visits in time and place as I experienced them and recorded them in writing - witness of what was lived and what still exists just underneath the fair layer of reality we now so solidly and famously call ourselves and our day - unmasked it all is nothing but it's a fable and fiction we must by term live with today in order to make this mess work - and deep within everyman is the knowledge of this and the realization that NONE of this needs to be (if only we can disconnect that fabric which connects it all).
-
From the drink the drink there was nothing - swarms of fish and the bent over figures of men with nets or workers toiling through the mud banks bringing up whatever catch was there - on top of or under the mud : clams mussels oysters and fish - all the rest of a shore-side feast of the sort they used to hold for celebrations or seasonal festivals among the landed gentry - all those settlers of old the men who made the city the same ones now dead who linger on the edges : graveyards cemeteries and potter's fields filled with the indigent and lost - I am walking and thinking and going past the old generating station where Edison first transformed New York into his multi-volumed dream of light and energy and I'm watching the men as they go by me - today's men of the sort we make now - no more of high-hat and topcoat but instead the stern and the sure pacing themselves in a new time forged of money and all its muck - men who devalue words men who sink in that mud of old story-lines forgotten names and words of lore long gone and no one to care remains anywhere - to them it's all a figment of dollar and trade and percent and return and too bad for whomever is lost or loses no master for them these silent soldiers stare back sullen and forlorn in the savage knowledge of their time and death - nothing really to be gained by the gainsay just spent time a few moments more to mire in the passing fancy of imagined gold I RUE these men I laugh at their backs for they are reckless they are lost they swarm stairways at speeds unsafe with nothing to hold them no bannisters no foundation NOTHING to grab onto : lost minions and lost millions whether minutes seconds time or money it would all be the same for them to process : lost dogs surly sick distempered mutts and just as in my own life I pilot and pivot and turn to speak so to them I hold out at the least a hope for them of something : I am a Goodness Merchant I want to sing I wish to tell them to NOT despair that life goes on whether beleaguered rich poor or broken whether King or Knave no matter they can have it all and the spattered noise behind my mind is of gunfire staccato and all those who will die in fetid Asian swamps as they jump forward without thinking soldier to sailor and back ('where are you going ? where have you been ? what have you found to say to me ? - if anyone OH should ask me I am prepared (for their very simple souls) to speak : 'so here's the deal: life makes me squirm: life makes me laugh: life makes me sad: life makes me nervous: without it, in so many ways there's nothing at all with it in so many ways there's nothing at all I am - I persist in this - the sum total of all my parts' and I watch them to wonder how numb they really are).
--
It isn't like one is climbing Heavenward mind you reaching for some star with nothing to hold onto - we HAVE signposts and guidelines to grab we have golden bannisters unsullied in their ways by doubt and pestilence we have guiding golden lights AND at the same time we have the steady plow of Evil cutting furrows around us - each direction holding its row - something not unlike the man who raised an ant colony from Hell and found himself awed by how it had taken over the entire world had fixated him had grabbed him high and holy and unknowing whether it was - actually - an Evil or a Good (as if to sense the difference is all one ever needed) for there are shades of meaning everywhere : I slump at Fraunces Tavern thinking of this dream I sit at India House to watch the fat bankers roll in I gaze outward to watch the girls slide by - awakening in me each as they do some outlandish fancy thought of love where I want to be I see the dead soldiers recruiting their own : dead dead napalm-haze men in a trance I note how those who've returned fit right back in to the mordant dead Hell-Hole of Finance the means and the way of what they live : I squander no time ('59 Chevy grazes by like a minesweeper on patrol darting hedgehog curbside fury blowing the cover of each man within us) I see Pal Perini the baker as he steps down from the flour wagon heaped high in burlap bags and in his jump and step I note is JOY real joy a living loving man at work : Oh if only that I could be ! all that is a part of what I felt as I marveled in the negativity of what I lived amidst and while walking along all I could was to continue maintaining my position between two cultural places in order to stay focused on what it was I felt 'truer' to be part of - which was of course the older kingdom - and people of course marvel at this idea of transporting time and walking between things but it CAN be done I'VE DONE IT! to exclaim - for as we've previously expostulated TIME DOES NOT EXIST and only its agents do - much as in a dream-time sequence we find ourselves parading past and paddling through the scenes and memories of other times and places just as vivid as the now but varied and slightly wavering from what we've come to know but yet ALL the earmarks of what we consider 'real' are present and identifiable and - in the most arresting fraction of the endless moment - are MORE real and MORE sensibly concrete than the morning's pale and mirrored light we must inhabit upon awakening anew to the devalued ken of sadness and doubt in which we find ourselves living ! yet out of that fog-haze of time I came ! and the first thing I stumbled upon was the ramshackle store housing Larry Demarack's 'House of Antiquities' which had been in place since 1881- an obscure but untraceable date to be sure - under the purvey of a full four generations' worth of back-ownerships within the Demarack family (of Dutch origin hobbled together in this country and wedded and founded to early mercantile culture of the sort represented by Van Nostrands and occasional Montenegs yet salient nonetheless in their continued business acumen as Demarack by whatever means AND their continued claim to fame was the collected font of seafaring and other supposed 'antiquities' which only a merchant family of 200 years worth of work could amass and have accumulated on this New World shore - the windows of this place shone with no light except that of the18th century as it was first reflected off the obvious dews dusts and webs of time and light and casting only old shadows these lines were ephemeral yet as strong as a ghost could be and shelves and cases of old wood were stacked with things of wonder (and I NEVER heard a transaction nor the sound of a cash measure be made in the place and so marveled all the more at its resilient and continued existence) clay pipes pottery shards statuary clamps clasps hasps and brackets glass from distant places bottles of deep color and hue markings on glass spyglasses peep-eyes patches hemp rope twine rafts floaters old sailing jackets pots barrels cans cutlery plates dishes drink ware books hand-written journal ship logs transit bills lading lists cargo customs inventories maps itineraries stamps and ports of origin stamps colors books passports passes charms amulets religious figurines bells klaxons whips chains hooks pulleys longbows weapons knives staves daggers shivs bolts-barrel guns cannons pictures metal tintypes bawdy faded photos daguerreotypes of sin and shame dead-bolts dumb-bells caskets coffins wrapping sheets bales of canvas and twine heavy blankets hats tophats shawls capes boots ties-rags bloodied bandages splints plaster casts arm-braces finger-splints canes walking sticks lanterns throw-lights eye-patches bird-cages peg-legs death certificates birth reports cans footlockers travel-cases --- and seemingly on and on it went and with each item there stirred a long story a tale some heroic situation which for the willing could all be told for a sitting and a spell and amidst all of this came and went oddities of nature - wounded people old creatures bent-over and lame blind or crippled sad slow and sorry types age-old criminal sorts gun-toters drug-runners addicts reformed killers broken preachers ladies of the night creatures of leisure fallen girls and the men who'd fallen them hook-armed veterans salty dogs with eye-patches traders merchants swindlers and crooks ALL ALL in one place at one resolve passed through the timeless edifice the shaded place the unknown pedestal of mystery and subterfuge - the amazing and hawking John Street crowd all those who joined nothing and came from nowhere to their way somewhere else and they walked about and amidst the richness of the very same squalor which bore the squalor of its richness as dumb and as high as anything else and they traipsed in with their dirt and filth their spittle and blood their screamed obscenities and devil-may-care attitudes and they swept past the portals and joined the stairways in disarray and they flavored and sang of John Street of old the black church the reformed the chancery house the counters the customs - all and all which they knew by name and number as they knew the stars which were millions and the paths of the sea and the paths of the oceans as they are marked and whittled in the passages of the deepest and the darkest of nighttime skies AND as anywhere else in Manhattan the highest ground the rocky high spine of John Street the top of the graduated ascent housed a church and its spire - in this case a Dutch Reformed church with Negro members (of course 'Negro' was a meaningless phrase except for landed Americans for on the sea the open sea all men are dark and swarthy and tan and strong and wild matted African of ancestry and outlook too) and this meant nothing other than a difference of color and comportment but the rocky heights and the splurging garden grounds were wondrous to behold and next to the down a bit through the trees was Ancetta Da Palovera whom I'd gotten to know and she was abandoned there and lonely by her last past love a sailor from the Chilean Navy who'd never returned from the sea and she wished for more she wished for all but in her licentious beauty and charm she'd found more than enough ways to survive and wait and stay quite busy but often she'd walk to the river and gaze out longingly towards he distant ocean in hopes of seeing some sails rolling in BUT disappointment was her only stock and she'd slowly amble back and return again to her idle work and I'd find her too outside of Demarack's standing in a shawl on the side of the path and sometimes with a basket filled with coins and other times with a gentleman lackey sea-dog sailor arranging her time for her and THEN the basket was full and she'd saunter off to be gone until next seen and her face and hair shone and glistened and her fine body took shape beneath her layers of obscure fabric and her manners exposed both charms and temptation in both the same measure and she remained in that way for years - even until much later AGE itself made her much less the attraction but present nonetheless - and now she lies buried 'neath flowers in the small graveyard right next to her church and her man from the Chilean Navy never did return.
-
I collapsed on the John Street ground knowing I'd traveled my time and in seeking that clime had only now (barely) returned and I made my way to the side of the nearest building and right there on the ground - still flying loosely with but nothing to hold onto - stairway to this or stairway to that never mind - I sensed my living body and leaned back with a breath : one GREAT breath : and on that ancient building decided to settle in and (I swear) like some other Van Winkle amassed in a time - I slept for a hundred years unbothered by any.
　
　

THE THOMAS EDISON PAPERS

2010-01-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

295. THE THOMAS EDISON PAPERS:

[A. Varied Shades of Brown and Red] -
I will do nothing more ever again except read I shall remain silent in solace and without discourse for the current of all other mankind does not mix well with me and I am within the spot of deepest memory or deepest other some realm of reality which speaks softly only to an inner voice and place so again I shall do nothing ever anymore but remain silent and read and listen perhaps to strands of music celestial things Brahms-like in delicate sweetness for I shall swarm and swim and swagger away from and past from everything which may touch me as I want it not I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's you can have anything you want if you just ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice or you can ask for nothing and get nothing in return ? is that right ? as I think about it I don't know if it's worth let alone right and don't care in this darkness either : things which I am thinking about the old fuel shed on the side property in Plainfield which shed has now been torn down for quite some time and only a grassy field remains but while it was there it was quite an interesting if very small building sort of a glorified shed with a very heavy looking roof and a glass one serving window approximating perhaps a fuel-buyer’s place of purchase as they drove up each fuel truck well perhaps and I am thinking of you out late again without any I don't know cares in the world may it never come crashing down on your head in that fashion but remember all that you create comes back to haunt you so I will never move again for I am seeking to attain the perfection of solitude no movement no mention no desires no wants no recompense I am thinking of the old gasoline station in Ithaca which I used to walk past high atop the college hill and read the gauges as it was always seemingly closed or never very busy and the old pumps looked very worse for wear and were almost as broken down as a gas pump can be especially in 1971 before anybody thought of it as anything more than a mere convenience certainly not a global player and certainly not something which would take a bite out of one's wallet but all that's moved along and the world still functions even as we never thought it would back in those early 70's years when gasoline like this suddenly went to 59 and then 69 and egad one dollar per gallon before anybody could stop it !'how we gonna' pay for that, Charley?’ was like on everybody's lips even the little girls who were soon to be bigger girls and then women and who by now have been broadcast with seed for sure and have probably propagated their 3 or 4 kids each and know the ways of all the world singing and shopping and driving with that two-buck thirty gas to every little store and office with kids without kids with men without men on their third or fourth husband in many cases neck deep in penis and pain all in the same measure well anyway what did we create and who cared then or now but we all moved on and even that fire station which I am remembering in Elmira Heights which housed two red fire trucks back when they were most often always red and small not like today's massive behemoths in bright yellows and horrid colors and huge and loud and big all for the same reason but differently done - like oh so many other things - like even the girls I just spoke about have had their sexual moments in the same manner but different probably out of boredom or maybe even the profit motive it opens up vast possibilities into nearly every opening and orifice in the sweet human body and allows deposit of fluids and semens onto and into most everything but then again isn't it that we men have the hose truck and the hook and extension ladder and all that masculine fantasy stuff about putting out fires with huge jets and streams and squirts of water or liquid it's all balderdash quadrupled with love and intentions and that's what makes the world go round if it does only and anyway that's what I was thinking about like the snows of Kilimanjaro but this was the snows of Ithaca there for a moment and I remember the new building there atop the University hill the Agronomy building maybe I can't remember although I know where it was and can exactly place it in the geography of my mind it was made to rust and was constructed in sort of an unfinished steel iron metal that weathered and went in a few years from a gray silver to varied shades of brown and red into almost a rust I wonder what the advancing mathematics of the rust deterioration is and what therefore the expected lifespan of that building was considered and designed to be as it eventually rusts away to a non-load-bearing situation where it will be deemed unsafe and collapse onto and into itself who will be there then and how did they get that idea and design past the censors I wonder don't I you bet when that happens I might as well be in Rio for all it matters to me that's what's called relativity in action as it depends only little on my distance from it right now and will probably only affect the forty-five students and professors within it at any one time and they will then have absolutely no inkling of the genesis of the building and all they are experiencing because relative to their point of view they know nothing of it and I am thinking of people I once knew there and the girl who swam topless in the rock pools of Ithaca's high waterfalls and the students who jumped from the chasms and bridges to solve the problems the solutions of which they could not solve by any other means so actually such an action is merely a wrong answer on a college quiz nothing more and I often wondered should I have jumped with them or now but I let it pass I am too happy deeming myself happy as I read and continue so to read another bout of Tristram Shandy for instance and May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude - the use of that article 'a' always throws me - not a particular solitude but rather 'a' solitude or I guess 'a' particular solitude too much to bear and as I read I am alone and my feet are straight down as I sit or perhaps I am reclined to read and the eyes are working hard and the markings move along the page and no one shares or partakes my being alone which is the okay factor with me at that point or I am thinking of Kenilworth in New Jersey with a small but steady strip of odd one-after-the-other buildings on a wide car-prone thoroughfare making up their business district but without any coziness somehow cold and barren and of course seemingly Italian too and I recall so many other things that I decide I cannot go on because memories are the burdens and the baggage of this life yet where do they go do we take them with us if so what and where to are we therefore never alone if their are dual and multi-faceted experiences going on within us at all times perhaps even after death as we relive or try to make right what was not so before and we look back on things with a new-found eternalized wisdom with which we try to right everything maybe that's the key to theology and the summa theologica - remember that - which we all keep missing but by whatever factors we consider eternity this is factor we miss - the importance of all things - the importance of all things - the importance of all things.

RED LGHTS OF THE TALL GRAY BRIDGE

2009-12-21T04:45:00.000-08:00

294. RED LIGHTS OF THE TALL GRAY BRIDGE (1997):

Then it is as if everything happened all at once - 252 E. Clinton Avenue the big stone house the rolling yard covered with plantings and the old concrete statuary and the advancing night coming up from Fort Lee and the high rises on the cliffs and the taint of a town that wishes to still be but a village and cannot any longer be so and the CNBC Building with its big giant letters once at 2000 Fletcher Avenue and the pillioned iron struts of the gigantic vacant busted but running still George Washington Bridge and the grassy advances to it on either side and the pin-heads of those walking the vast great span stretching between natural rocks and man-made rocks on the other side and the cars rolling freely boiled it seems in their own oil and dirtied by the air and dirtying the air at the same time and the whiz roar and hum of traffic and blare of horns growing louder at the toll booth quiescent in its slumbers the addled lines of the numbered and nervous waiting to buy lined up with cash and change to flow the theatergoers and crossers to New York anxious to dine anxious to meet their reservation seating zipping drinking dancing holding lovers hands to heart in the car-seats bursting strapped with companions and dates and friends and lovers and partners and couples and everywhere it seems people moving intent to move and the awesome fearsome lines and lights of the great city laid out before us invites us to walk on and peer through the woods and at the glens and rocks of the old fort and the revolutionary war lookouts and peerages and even the lighthouse far down below and under the bridge on the farther other side as all the lights come up and the outlines of the dizzying buildings change for us and the rows and hedges and caverns and bars and restaurants of old Fort Lee breakaway from time and its reality now the dusted fields cobbled and broken with rocks and waste the 7-11 the diner the Hiram's and Callahan's of the heart the finely attired oriental waiters waiting between things and tables white with linen on their arms and scones and pastries ready for the tea and the tasting and the wholesome sound of cash resounding between every hill and rock and canyon on both sides of the Hudson which flows and tinkling peal of laughter and coin and cash and those who've got it amidst those who haven't and they squander what they will as it turns to food and vintage wine and goods too precious to describe yet go on go on and the bridge rails seem to support the whole entire world as they rise high above and the pinpoint prick of the roadway becomes but a dot in the distance and the high school and the funeral home and the gas station and the kosher deli everything seems to sit and squabble at the rubble'd lane where used cars are sold and others rented and the buses tumble from above as people walk every nation every color represented like some stupid juice of the world dripping on and on and the road where it splits offers two vistas and more and 9W the highway paces north and the palisades tremble and we are off just like that ! departed northward and Alpine and Tenafly and Cresskill and Closter tumble haphazard by with no order except the order of signs and places and trains and shacks and weeds and woods and the rock house still sits and from its yard I look up and watch the patterned all returning planes and jets and airbuses and turbine'd engines rock and tilt the nighttime sky going and coming somewhere from to the citadel of Newark the airport of shackles and God beckons I guess the light within the sky and the great jets carom and turn aloft and below the grounded lights of buildings and cargo and trucks and homes sit still and shine and all the upward stars are dissolved by human light and almost nothing else is seen and the great rock house sits with its broken deer concrete statues warily eyeing the road and great-neck geese in concrete sit atop each ledge and planters and shrubs resound and the squared-off room behind filled with plants and greenery a cactus of the heart like a distant-landed-Arizona forgotten but between lives and in silences recalled and the rolling land the hillside the yard everything comes together at once some fiery hallucinatory conclusion made too fast and in haste so it goes on and I sit on the porch behind the vastness of the stone house and I read in its brick and stone and wood the 70 year old story of all its time and place how it got here and how it was built and who lived here and how they grew out and left here and who replaced them and the photos and the mementos and the interior landscape eerie air the rooms rich with old time and memory the slow crawl of all we live inside each place the very paper on the walls to speak and willing relates itself to me still I sit and watch as the whole globe world turns and changes around me I feel as if new never here before with the wind and the trees around me I witness at one with all things and my mind own mind rushes back itself to other places and like homes I've walked the ruination chorus of destruction where windows are fallen and boarded and rooms and stairways are broken and blasted to death and crumbled down I have visited places in silence and they stand until they are gone then disappear in the slough of time and bulldozers remove this trace and that and what was there is not any longer and new homes like rakes scratch the land and piled up squat or tall ugly or not the new things cannot abide the old and the world is thereby ravaged and the places transformed and I sit back in this gasp and silence and awe and wonder on and on about all things and there behind me somewhere blinking the red beacon lights of the tall gray bridge.

METAPHOR ALLEGORY WHAT'S THE WORD?

2009-12-13T16:12:00.000-08:00

293. METAPHOR ALLEGORY WHAT'S THE WORD? (Clarkson and the Crazy Man):

It was cold out and finally and it always seemed that once the cold really set in well then it was in to stay - two weeks straight of 15-degree days freezing one's poor ass off trying to keep warm get warm looking for somewhere to be and at that point words never mattered because whatever you said or meant to say couldn't change the reality of you're just being cold and a hopeless sight at that - dangerously thin again and close to some form of rotten freezing death a death not fit for rats since even they get scraps and garbage to pick through first but that was my situation that one time long ago and the only friends I had were the ones who'd offer me something and I often tried to show appreciation but what can you do what can you show when you've nothing to give or show for : blatant miserable down and out caterwauling poverty straight from Hell - a Hell of choice and abandonment - one had to figure (as I did) that I'd done this to myself) and I've always thought that if you're going to say something you might as well say it bold and not without a certain stance and if you really do have an opinion about something you should just get it out there for the world itself is already quite tired of the same old shrinking types who just go along and if you've managed already to meet your 'double' and come to terms with that other half than in order to facilitate your more complete personality you should - by rights - engage the world in what you're thinking or saying or doing and I know it's not always the way to make friends or meet people but what the hell who cares anyway and what does any of it matter - but all that's a luxury of those with something those who already have a life and if you don't what difference does it make ? nobody wants to hear from you there's never any sense in the sensible and everything else should be put aside in the dedicated pursuit of what it is you've SELECTED to do - so one day to keep warm I'm sitting around paging carefully through a bunch of John Ashbery stuff in that old crusty bookstore - essays about other people Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror Donald Duck in Hollywood on and on - and I was rather enjoying it all too as someone sidled right up to me and introduced himself as Wayne Waddle (pronounced Wad-del) and said that he was glad to finally meet me and that he was currently a friend of a D. E. Steward who was once a friend of mine and who still lived in Princeton thereabouts somewhere and said hello too but this fellow begins saying that in my last letter to Steward (was there really a letter?) he'd found me to be in error about a 'Clarkson' fellow who laid out the university and all the rest but he did think there was a 'Clarkson' College somewhere and of course a Clarkson Street in Manhattan and that maybe I was confused over them or perhaps there really was some connection between them and if so did I know - all these obscure things which I've found to be quite the rule when people whom one does not 'know' come up to you because of who you are to them and who or what you represent and begin peppering you with obscurities or in fact psychoses over this or that tiny little matter which seems then to hinge so largely on their lives but the fact of the matter here was that I didn't know this fool from Adam and was just listening in to see if there was anything I could get and I remember another time with some other fellow whose name right now I don't recall but I do recall his visit unannounced to my basement hovel and I still know where his place was and all the rest but the most astonishing visit it turned out to be as he completely turned on me to my face as 'false prophet' bad messiah and all that evidently being under his own impression of something I was to do for him in my guise as poet-leader-guru-guide-sage to him and evidently it certainly didn't pan out although it all was unknown to me but he came forth with a vengeance in his judgment of me by it and in much the same way I had to have him leave bitter and disappointed (if his name recurs to me I'll be sure to drop it in these pages) and this new fellow referencing D. E. Steward and referencing my reference of Clarkson was sort of appearing to me like that too - on the edge and making me wary of his next move - and by this I've always known what it must be like to be a 'public' figure upon whom so many hinge their wishes and desires for it is impossible to fulfill all of them or even many of them and the edge of betrayal and bitterness is always there and that can lead to so many other things (just think Judas Iscariot to Christ - speaking of betrayal and bitterness - Judas expecting the imminent worldly Kingdom and a political revolution with Christ as leader and when none of that started materializing and he began to see differently well then BETRAYAL was immediate and imminent and that same betrayal was unavoidable according to the already written storyline - if one was to believe all those nutcase religious types) HOWEVER the fact of all this lunacy was that this guy was crazy as all get out and maybe knew me from not knowing me at all - just imagining for some moment that he could arrest me with his visage but all of this makes you want to say 'HEY! I never said anything like that ! you're reading your own wishes into it!' and these people are very dependent and actually quite weak in their stark raving madness about demands and desires they have of you as a figure of their imagining but it all can quickly get pretty messed up and very confusing so right here and now I advise you (reader) that if any of this ever occurs to you don't say you weren't warned - and Clarkson whether or not it's incorrect or correct or something I've completely made up is my choice and my selection and I stand by it all.

THE OPPOSITE OF FATE

2009-11-15T17:25:00.000-08:00

292. THE OPPOSITE OF FATE:

All I can say is don't go racing for conclusions before all the information is in - you'll be fooled like a fool and look like one too - and there's a supple movement within the mind which knows just what's about to come and come it does - one way or the other down up or over sideways or frontal silent or loud : step aside or it shall run you down : and in his book entitled Social Contract it was Rousseau who stated 'man is born free but everywhere he is in chains' and so is his language and all his deeds and words too for the reflection of one thing strong is in everything else and what is it that keeps MANKIND shouldered with the yoke of burden and responsibility THESE CHAINS so beforehand mentioned ? one is not fit to know but the soul sacred within the place would attest and know distinctly 'these chains are the heart and the heart of toil and sweat as we strain beyond compare in attempting to see all of that which we cannot see' - such a quandary within a paradox of time and material energy perhaps it is THAT which keeps men working - pouring the concrete for bridges and roadways building schools and enforcing their rules erecting to the sky the structured heights of room and office where others so glibly fit in and take their place nodding beneath the lights of some broken-spaced and artificial nonetheless GLOOM - 'but this can't last can it - it all must he dissolved away' (some guy said that falling forward from the roof nearby) and the tin-can collector man alongside me too had just uttered this exchange : "Mister whatever can ya' spare me some change?" and he said that with a nodding head to me of course unknown to him and I whipped out a twenty and put it at his nose and said "see what this is it's yours if you just tell me you believe in something" and he smiled like a slave right back to me and said "yes sir well right now I do believe in you quite well" and I gave him the note and said "be careful with this it might be your last" and he smiled and sauntered away and I figured why not what else should I tell him who wants to hear my fraggy story of woe - no mother no father a life like a horse two trips 'round the world and a passel of learning of this and of that - why begrudge the man his simple pleasures and don't I know I've got the money to expend so IF I DO what of it now and then? (but a part of me wants to say right back 'then why not die while the living's good why just stay and waste it away?' but I shrug and find a stairway to hide in).
-
537 Park Avenue : this doctor had a catharsis and was taken from his office on a stretcher being rolled by two men while a female EMT with a plasma bottle held high walked alongside them and they were all chattering strange numbers and words I could not understand nor recognize but I knew the situation as well as any other for it isn't always that the 'Doctor' of the house goes down as the patient and gets taken away by the ambulance himself and (I wondered) 'where to?' does one go in such a case - the light blue flicker of a computer screen illumined the interior rear of the medical wagon as someone else was crouched at a keyboard plotting in numbers and information and - I'd supposed - awaiting results or instructions back and all this even before they entered the flow of auto traffic which whizzed the street and not knowing where they'd be headed I understood all too well the haste but the same would be said for anything along Park Ave's majestically reputationed denizens and doctor's offices and psychiatric couches and chairs : everything medical was here pronounced real and sure and true and actual while to so many others everywhere else in the city it remained a distant fantasy a glimmer of something else a chimera one hoped never to need to face - that chasm that yawping hole that gaping wide-eyed destination DEATH that which slaughters us all - and with no one speaking I kept a watch at the least at what I saw (the languorous rump of the female assistant held the allure of assertion that - to me at least - proved still I was alive!) and they entered their wagon and slammed shut the doors and a siren pronounced its intention to garner attention and away OFF! they sped (sprinkling in between some cars and a lone workman's truck) while faces looked up - that old gent by the median's flowers the woman in a gaudy hat punishing her dog with a leash while looking back to what had occurred - but they all still passed as moments and people do : some tidy assertion of sidewalk and premise or occurrence and chance or doubt and dishonor and 'there but for fortune' go you or go I.
-
Whatever that all was SOMETHING I knew wasn't right and it seems that - in spite of everything - I've become a man somehow that even I wouldn't like (and this is myself I'm talking about after all) for the lot of other men is beyond me and I therefore remain alone and aloof : I couldn't care less if someone died or was run down by a truck nor would it matter to me if some pernicious plague at this moment came through and wiped out an immediate sixty percent of the world's population especially including all those around me - it simply couldn't matter : for I refuse to believe in the material of this world and the sights and sounds which come with it nor the flagging annoying flapping and cloying tongues of those fellow creatures ceaselessly yowling around me and I read the signs as best I can IN FACT I read everything - William Carlos Williams and his stupid red wagon to his stupid cold plums and Blake and his idiot 'tyger' and Poe and his stupid bird to Whitman with his everyman vague banter and homo-erotic elan FOR NONE OF IT STANDS and it's all filled with crap and perdition and calculated stance and raw ambition - nothing graceful nor meaningful in any of that Emperor of Ice Cream included (and those who insure it too) and just like every koala bear is a girl's cartoon of gentle ease and every pirate or star-warrior marks an aggressive boy's future - so too (for myself) I mark the pages with bookmarks of blood and spots of bile and spittle that dry yellow on the tendentious pages I've read - pencils and pens and the desperations of men - AMERIKA! : for that's what the supermarkets sell and that's what the idiots buy.
-
Sometimes I've got nothing to say and other times I do - not much of a position and pretty useless too.
-
I juggled moments like circus guys did bowling pins and the same clowns who ride the old cars there are the same clowns walking the street with me : there is no generosity in falsehood and deceit - no grace in dancing nor sadness in tears (it's all for nothing everywhere) but like they say at the gravesite 'he WAS a good man' it only makes you wonder why the past tense ('it is all imperceptible - who made him my enemy?') and nonetheless we walk on encircling the wagons while flames lick the wheels and every story (I find) is the same old story of the wise-eyed old person thinking wisdom is cheap and knowing it all then imparting to others all that was missed the first time around "listen fellow - if I had it to do again I'd head out from the very first I don't know how you live in the northeast anyway - mosquitos and swampland Italians and beggars humidity and cold - I'd go somewhere else where the living is GOLD like gold anyway and find me a lassie to SWEEP me off my feet - love her and love her and make babies complete and there's a million ways to do anything but it seems we always pick the way that's the worst" - that's the kind of crap I'd hear but no one realized who I was and I'd walk around the New York streets pretty much like I pleased bumming and drinking or just sitting about watching and nothing came of it - towncars and expensive dinners if I wished but I never wished - I'd just as soon have some cheap sandwich at some Grand Central concourse sit-down and drink coffee while the niggers passed and I'd watch their bad behavior and the old women with bags the suburban freak with Yankee shirts and names and numbers the Rangers or the Mets and all the rest - car names auto shows sneaker brands PEOPLE really ARE idiots you know and they'd walk around in a daze unknown and then I'd found it's the very same daze no matter where KANSAS TO FRESNO to Memphis to Maine and New York City's just the collection point for that drain - no matter what else - and things always ran through my head things I liked important things I wanted to keep 'but they pulled me out of the sack and they held me together with glue and then I knew what to do....I made a model of you a man in black with a Mein Kampf look and a love of the rack and the screw....so daddy I'm finally through - the black telephone's off at the root the voices just can't worm through' and this suicide rap was always without fail so perfect and I want to print here the diatribe all of it and someday I will 'daddy daddy you bastard I'm through' and this old life's but a theater and I have walk-on roles whenever I want but no contract and no lead and the stage is falling through and the kleig lights dangle and the ceiling crumbles down and people in the audience are bleeding and dying screaming through their pain and I throw daggers to land where they will - in hearts and minds and palms and brains - and I delight in the scream as paroxysm of success cheap and tawdry but success nonetheless and we wander far from home but to find home again and the saddle of every horse is made of thin paper where the sweat breaks through - wet crotch dripping back rollicking good time no money no fees just mad mad love and abandoned love ABSOLUTELY like a martyr and it's that KIND OF CRAP one hears at every turn ('...and the heart gets harder...') Arab Jew Chinaman Pole Frenchman African Indian Mexican Mayan and Troll - every nation known to man every station in the land 'turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer - things fall apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.'
-
So the more you live the less you know - so what : I looked at a star map today - I know where Jupiter is in the night sky now SO WHAT I know where Mars and Cygnus are not SO WHAT I looked at a star map today to see how close is the most distant galaxy SO WHAT!! I know no more than that I be SO WHAT!! (all men are idiots and bastards and slaves).

'I celebrate myself and sing myself,
and what I assume you shall assume,
for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.'
---

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM AND A BODY TOO

2009-10-27T18:35:00.000-07:00

291.FLOTSAM AND JETSAM AND A BODY TOO - (nyc, Sept, 1968) :

Like having an apple off the cart or purloined from a grocer's counter I fed the junkman's horse its oats while waiting in the street - the dark light of assemblage along the watery end of west 16th where the piles of wood and crates were pretty much all that was left from the pre-dawn unloading and truck-loading which emptied out as soon as it was done - all of to points east and north the 'everywhere' towns which peppered the area and the smaller carts and wagons nearby too were filled with their local delivery items as the junkman (Harmon Pauch) stood idly by with a Greek-cup coffee feathered in his hands : likewise I too lingered - waiting between things for something to do and before too long I'd be going off to the usual 8th Street lair wherein I kept myself amidst piles of stretcher bars and canvas and paints and painting but first the lure of the street kept me steady - a few dollars each day made from helping load and unload along these westside wharves and trucks dens was all that kept me going : potatoes pens and pencils and paint were just then the 4-p's of my existence and to which things I kept first allegiance - a fire in the barrel or a fire in the belly made no difference - as the later hours of morning approached I always moved on.
-
Coming towards me I saw one Jackie Lanekay -an odd fellow usually wielding a hammer with an apron and something vile atop his head - this time he saw me right off and came forth to say that 'before long you know they're gonn'a put a stop t'all this shit - and it's us who ain't gonn'a have nothing to do' and I didn't know what he meant and said that and he replied 'every frickin' day it's something new again and this morning wouldn't ya'know they got another dead guy from under the wharf by Denagal's truck bay - the bastard was so dead he was stone cold white and stiff and as my aunties favorite you know what - dumb bastard'd been cut up good - now they're swarming and we're WE're stuck God dammit in place!' - seeing as how I'd not known any of that I wondered what to say but nothing came and I did see the assortment of black cars and detective types standing in place (which I think was one of their modes of operation anyway) : NYC cops pillars of all that's good and dainty always made the most sense to me when they were deeply entwined in a horror-mystery-murder-case like this anyway and usually it brought out the freaks and ghouls but seemingly not this time - even the couple of local whore-girls (or whatever) I knew to be about had suddenly disappeared (or were busy with the cops - who knows anyway) but it did seem that the day had certainly now gotten off-track and just as I started moving away to head out I too was stopped in process by a cop-fellow with a badge wrapped around his neck who asked who I was from where why and how long - all the usual cop gibberish that as always so easy to answer : 'I'm always here in the morning I do some work and get paid I know lots of these guys I work and leave and NO I saw nothing and don't even know what went on' and after the obligatory 'leave your name with Brenda and a place where we can reach you' I was let go and I learned before that that it made no sense to make these names and addresses up because these goons will always find you if they've a mind to - repeat behavior on all our parts - so I walked off watching now two patrol cars come slowly blinking up the wrong way street they'd decided to drive on and I only hoped they'd notice the horse I'd just fed but I didn't even stay around to make sure of that - went sideways instead into Connie's to get coffee and a roll and stood there watching from a distance as they dragged a bag from the wharf to the Cadillac ambulance parked bear there - no movement I could see - but then the dead stay pretty still unless they're forced if you know what I mean and probably this guy anyway was lucky he wasn't just fish bait in the river by now - I turned to Connie and said 'another day another collar - 'cept this time there's a dead body attached' and she smiled grimly and said 'Hell I'm losing customers left and right ain't I?' and we laughed.
-
Noticing a body beneath a tarp isn't a great achievement I suppose but in this case someone had done their homework and concealed the body just enough so that it wasn't stretched out there in the open yet was not - as well - so artfully concealed as to never be found - so the message had to be that someone HAD a message to be given - some idea of getting a point across by this deed and whether it was money debt crime betrayal gambling women guns or freight there had to be a thread somehow connecting it all to the place and the people amidst whom this dead-bomb had been left : the Police figured as much and so did the people around and probably the only unaffected partner to this was the junkman's horse - whose use for and need of oats continued unabated - that old oaken bucket was always near-to-filled and I was usually always about to make sure some of it was passed the horse's way and there was a certain tenderness in feeding the horse - a tenderness which came across even over the bleak streets the workhorse plodded over - morose sorrowful and dark perhaps his horse-breeding AND horse-brooding too - but I tried to salve his conscious and mine by being some mad-mercy poster boy for excellence in tending the junkman's horse - it brought the best of me out (what little of that there was) and offered me an informal entry into these people and pals who'd otherwise warily stay about at a distance just watching and wondering what I was doing there : this horse (named Dogget for whatever reason and a truly uncomplaining fellow) represented for me the poetry of the streets and the old ways in their passing for both the Dogget AND myself both knew his days were as numbered as mine as all about us the street was changing - the old wharves and docks were disappearing the roadway was getting all slicked up and what parts of it were not were by contrast crumbling (above us the elevated portion of the road was a constant westside danger to be heeded and remembered) and before long (I look back now from the old salad days) the decade(s) would change and everything would be lost IN FACT the only trace-semblance left of what I'm telling you is the fact alone that I'm telling it - this is entirely gone all finished and in its pace now (I shudder) hideous walkways fashionista-design houses hotels cuisine hovels and all the rest of that now-today modern day and YO! though we must we live through what is thrust and don't do much about it or counter the flow of mad-history's amble through time - I digress.

ONCE I PERAMBULATED CONSIGNED TO DEFEAT

2009-10-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

290. ONCE I PERAMBULATED CONSIGNED TO DEFEAT (nyc, 1967):

There actually was a day when the streets were treacherous when ice rolled down the sides of that Winter's sledge hammer - a frozen Hudson clogged with huge slabs of ice rolling and resounding piece by piece into the lower bowels of the churning harbor - when trucks lined up at the water's edge and dockhands threw cargo forward and aft loading whatever they could into packeted jumbles of fleet and indy - little guys driving little trucks and big guys with bigger trucks - and the streets daily aflame with protest and a certain form of violence which took the workday just to the edge of things and then pulled it back : construction crews taunting anti-Vietnam protesters waving placards and shouting in response fists occasionally flying and young-faced boys in line to be sent off to their other dominion of following orders learning rules firing weapons and killing or being killed and great maps of napalm and flame and the horrid sorties of mega-bombs showed up on every newscast along with the rolls of the dead and the maimed and wounded and that was what was left of the vast American jumble - a war-state creeping towards its own new totalitarianism - claiming its own patrons by murdering its own citizenry in the ostensible service of a false Freedom and a wish for gold - lucre on top and huge mechanical corporations underneath trying to fabricate market-share expand the borders of trade and forcibly recruit the world for inclusion in its own lousy dominion and it had its tentacles everywhere and everywhere it was they tried to reach and the story I tell here is not unlike a thousand other stories of another time and another place past but yet recent and living on yet in the fevered leftover minds of all those who lived through it though hard to get across to the naive denizens of today's far-paler corridors : 'They'd finally caught up to me one day in late '67 and away I was waltzed in handcuffs to the cheap remnants of the Whitehall Induction Station along lower Broadway to be grilled as a common criminal for the mischievous infraction of non-registration for the draft or circumventing a military edict or running from death and the killing of others or whatever phrases they were using in those pathetic days of yore (it's different now - people sign up willingly for all this piffle to kill and maim and get generous benefits for the rest of their days and ain't that a lot of crap : socialist statist pig-living ways of going about one's own enslavement but we pay for it all and they live high on a hog for the rest of their days having joined as an employer-of-last-resort the Military to engage) to cover their own asses and I laughed in their faces and told them to drop dead and said I'd already fucked all their daughters and what of that ! and all it did was anger them more I got roughed up a bit pushed around and rumpled but survived 2 days in a common hole getting fed whatever slop they could induce me to eat and then they bussed me off again to Newark NJ oh fair fucking oasis of slime and grim petty bullshit creep-ass trolley town of death and mayhem and maker of nothing and they let me off there to for further questioning and then the shrink the ever-present shrink who arrived in the room as I sat there and asked to me my very own questions from a list all about what was wrong with my why and how and what did I expect and how they could if they chose just send me off tomorrow morning to some deep jungle blood pit to be never heard from again and was that what I wanted ? well was it ? and I responded saying what if it was anyway it was none of their business I could get there myself if I'd a mind because tomorrow morning as I could see it was way too long to wait I wanted to maim and kill right NOW get started immediately don't you see and the first thing I'd do when I learned to kill was to turn the weapon on the very person who'd just taught me to use it and how would YOU like that now thunderhead Dr. Fucking Demento how would you - and it went like this a long time papers and checkmarks and things written down and scribbled and one or two other Dr. types ambled in and took part and before I knew it it was all over I was gone free'd taken off the chopping block they said I was demented needed help should be put away here's a bus ticket home can you get to the station all right yourself or should we get you a ride and I said 'No No No ! please I'll go myself skipping wistfully into your dead-eye'd space' and it was winter it was a cold November and they threw me out and said they'd be contacting my parents (believe you that!) and having me put away blah blah fucking military bullshit blah and I believed none of it but was more than willing right then to blow that entire place right up AND down to the ground too - military cockmouth dickwash bastards that they were - and to this day I can't believe that people live like that and profess such bullshit my country 'tis of thee and all that : taking deep breaths for fucking non-existent Liberty brain-washed master class of school and home and hearth televised fiddle-faddle idiotic crap washing over in waves the enfeebled and captured minds of tens of thousands mannered mindless stupid dumbfucks tripping over themselves willingly backwards into their own trash and praising that too ! and to this day every maddening recruitment shed I see every military asshole poster I see every time a crooked mouth with a crooked voice proclaims the job of 'Defending Liberty' I still and again fucking croak and puke once over and once over again!'
-
How distant the day when one had to relate in that manner the uncertain fierceness everyone was living ? really not that distant at all.

I ALONE TO TELL IT VENTURE

2009-10-04T15:21:00.000-07:00

289. I ALONE TO TELL IT VENTURE: (wglein*), nyc, 1968:

I was trying to work this constantly like a mule in the mud a handful of hay in a storm - something to hold me back - and it was only the day I found the old doorway in the rear room of the old Northern Dispensary that I took real interest in anything and it led to (after a slow creaking opening bereft of any oil and crusted with one hundred years of silence and neglect let alone any real working hinges) a small stone set of stairs down into a mud room which led in turn to an old wet muddy path out of what seemed the building and along into the streets below - as it were UNDERNEATH everything I'd ever known - and I followed it through the wet darkness and tripped and slid and wondered about the air and the light and everything until I came after some fifteen or twenty minutes to what I sensed was a deeper area of water and reed and some form of pooling sludge or whatever and slipping my way through all that too I espied before me the low marsh of the seeping riverside the very Hudson I'd known and loved to find and realize ONLY THEN THAT MOMENT that for all these years while the world above had been a'building with tar and concrete and wood and mineral this place far below had remained the same and what it apparently was and ever had been was the way of salvation for runaways and criminals and slaves and the like - a secret underground passage from the Village Dispensary right down into the shore-depths of the North River now pretty much referred to as Hudson and what this was was the freedom passage for so many to secret-midnight rendezvous plural to waiting boat and ship which would scurry them away and over to the Jersey shore for points north far and away Canada eventually after Catskill and Adirondack and Vermont border towns and all the rest : one glorious subterfuge by which so many had been saved and fled to wherever it was their salvaged lives took them - Underground Railway Elizabeth NJ Buffalo NY wherever points north Hudson and northwest beyond that : I'd stumbled onto a Manhattan secret and even to this very day TO-DAY as I passed the Dispensary now all savage looking and tired and soiled and abandoned yet still in place and still there awaiting whatever I nod and I know what beneath it lies and these days I speak of now are 40 years past the day today but this still lives REAL AND VOUCHSAFED by me alone as far as I have heard tell at least I ALONE TO TELL IT VENTURE and it was here in those beleaguered earlier days too that Poe himself has stumbled and struggled for treatment in and out - a form of early socialized civic-medicine for the indigent and the broken and all those in need and now this post-society form of breed and the compunction by which its punctilious ways are forwarded has erased all this from memory : contact industrial and corporate and municipal ALL of that has rolled over and taken down the old person-to-person reverence with which we once lived and this old dispensary building all its old red brick and slumping steps and narrow crooked entryway and even its weird triangularly placed plot at the convergence of other now more-modern streets all combine to make it somehow the something it was not ever and is not now and the finding of this underground passage of great fascination was to be as if the foundational steps of Heaven itself had been stumbled onto all Heavenward and skyward and all that and I of course immediately went in my thoughts to some Mark Twain Injun Jim Huck Finn grand litany of story and escape and adventure and loss and gain but all to no avail for I needn't have done any of it as the reality of it all made pale by comparison anything I could conjure up and only now by some secret compunction of mindless interference do even our subconscious longings grow any better tales than this : the midnight rendezvous the grand escape the secreted shuffle to transient and transit points : I too had miraculously myself escaped from a backwater of the day to a place far richer and dense - a place where the old resounding bells of the past were still ringing far-sightings distant and bright - men and women on the run with a sliding passage of wagon and carriage and mud and boat in secret dark moments all pledged between people in agreement on their mission to safe and to free those in other bondage and it went and I stayed down there as long as I could wondering too what behind me I'd left ? a closed door that would not open for me again a sealed hinged not ready to move ? was I stranded here within ? I knew none of these answer and so because of that instead I strode straight out into the running water of the Hudson's murky edge and after adjusting my breathing to the cold and the wet I made my way up through mud and marsh to the higher ground above and once I knew where I was again I boosted myself over the low trucking fence by Washington Street and the end of Spring and made my way landward once - and happy I was in the twilight's mysterious awakening.

*Whatever 'wglein' it was the name or the letters scrawled in a common hand in some black paint or something like it across the top left of the doorway I entered onto the facing wall opposite.

WAR CRIMINALS ALL

2009-09-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

288. WAR CRIMINALS ALL – MADE TO SEEM SHITTY BUT ALL THAT THEY KNOW IS THE SAME NITTY GRITTY:

Oh well there’s a slacker in the kitchen on some tear and with a mission – eating cauliflower on the run YET no never mind I remember it all and still see the bright white cab riding off towards 33rd with three people inside and everyone talking as much with their hands as with their mouths – traveling foreigners dignitaries with panache open-mouthed malarkeys who defenestrate at will and call the local gendarme by his name and two other guys reading The Irish Echo outside Malarchy’s where Jack Dempsey’s used to be and I have to ask myself – with a modicum of verve – what stillness it is which keeps me company now how straight can I walk how high can I stand and whatever should be done about bad posture but no answers worth the almighty something ever arise and instead of that THREE TURKEYS IN THE DEN are seen and Frank Middlehut from the Cigar Center walks by smoking and nods my way but the only Cuban bastard I’ve ever seen was Carmella’s nasty father in his limousine (or was it a hearse?) as he rode by with flowers on the roof and me and Carmella clutching under the brightly patterned Spanish sheets and she fucked like a squid and screamed like a toad but really nailed my back like a monster lizard from Hell but no you never mind they’re eating cereal and saltines by the backdoor watching the kids take their very first steps OVER AND OVER on some camcorder tape totally boring and liquid as hell but that’s the way people are now DESPOILED and solid or hidden in the hedges outside Security Steel (whatever that ever meant all my tawdry life now it’s torn up and vacant under a Sunday sun with a For Sale Commercial Lease sign in the driveway and nothing to be done) and Truman Capote himself came by with Rona Marriotte and her sister Sam wincing carolettes grandly in an off-key fashion saying ‘where can we find the grave of Dudley Moore?’ and only I answered back ‘that’s Deadly Moore forevermore quoth the pavement and he’s in the back’ and they scurry off as Capote winks in a big-eyed stare but a ten-spot keeps him quiet in the wintry cold and I’ve gotten so tired it seems of the sacred and serious that I’d joke over the funeral of the Pope himself if only something funny would happen there and ‘how much money does the country hold ? as much as you want and just as old!’ I bet you’ve heard that one before ten million times and more…oh well.

THE SOUND OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

2009-09-13T17:30:00.000-07:00

287. THE SOUND OF THE NEW JERUSALEM (not so dumb):

I was watching the seagulls traverse the deck of that old oily ship I'd stayed on and slept and the final resting place of so much more came down to this : 'Death as a way of life' (see under: ‘Love’) …noise gunshots and shouts incendiary words and mournful laments amidst explosions and demonstrations and heaps of clichés and special broadcasts from the scenes of terrorist attacks and calls for revenge…right there we’ve ‘pupae’d the larvae’ so to speak we’ve fled to the outer limits we’ve reached new boundaries of Hell from Albuquerque to Ataturk and Antioch to Amsterdam (and Athens to Alexandria Antwerp to Alsace Austin to Avenel) AND ‘within the whirlwind spinning and turning in the eye of the storm THERE IS SILENCE and it can be heard ! AND it is felt in every cell of the body writhing within each dilemma encoded with anyone there – Essene to Embryonic – a deepening silence such as one feels in the brief moment between receiving bad news and comprehending it between the blow and the pain THE EMPTY SPACE in which every person knows with piercing certainty all that he or she does not want or does not dare to know’ and then some parking lot tyrant comes by exposing himself (to ridicule to abuse to anything) and stands by the entrance to the hardware store near the pizza place waving two wands ONE the frieze from Wednesday night and the other the fifteen pounds of leftover palms he swiped from St. Matthew’s Holy Name Trade Fair and Exposition held at the Demolay Hall and hosted by Father John Rutabaga SJ who’s just back from Rahway where he administered to the flock all of the murders shootings and beatings he could manage BUT NOTHING NEW TRANSPIRED it had all been done before ‘well done Brethren – for we have entered the halls of God with bold new ideas in mind so let us sing as we pray for deliverance and bring forth the multitudes we need from but ONE lonely acolyte HIM who stands here freezing all alone’ and I hear them applaud as the lights go out and the movie fiction starts again (some Finnish guy in a yellow Ferrari racing towards the catacombs just outside the city) and nothing beats success except more success and its double DEATH so we all move on : and I saw a most beautiful girl coming right towards me smiling as we sat down together and he began to talk : 'I've come from Samarkind and I only want to stay these few moments alone and forever with you ! you are truly wondr'ous and wild and weird!' and I asked her the real name she would use when she had to and she said 'that's it that's it my name IS Real and it's Turkish for 'beautiful darkside flower' and nodding back I said I understood and then I kissed her lips as she went away - it was all about poise and worth and dignity and she had all of them in abundance - and soon I went away to enter Darkside or Navesink or Asbury or NETHERWOOD ! that’s what it’s called ! where the old servant quarters of Plainfield aspire to rise from their graves and retire to WHERE MY Son ‘Flower’ wishes to go (he’d changed his name from Rufus J. right after he had the operation) HE’S A GIRL NOW we have to call him something different but I lift the chair above my head only to see the ladder’s broken again and all the stairs are turned inside out and anything old is new again and two things always happen together ONE THE REFUTATION OF THE OTHER and like the Bible says ‘save now for a rainy day’ and ‘it’s only a paper moon ripping over the madman’s tomb’ but what I say I can’t decide and if ever there was HAPPY it was Mary’s womb but leg o’lamb and rack of pinion WHO LORDS OVER THE LORD’S DOMINION! and all of a sudden there came such a rush and I ran to the window to see what was the matter but all I received was one lethal blow and Charles Foster Kane all ready to go and he sat down beside me and started to sing and just then the whippoorwill cried and SOMEONE HAS DIED! was all that was said [Kane piped up: “you just give me the prose-poem and I’ll supply the WAR!’] and I noticed he laughed to his fat heart’s content and rolled towards the door until OUT HE WENT!! (I couldn't stand it any more!).

DUMBSTRUCK PROFOUND USELESS AND ALL

2009-09-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

286. DUMBSTRUCK PROFOUND USELESS AND ALL - (an adventure along Washington Street) :

“Do you see what they’re all like how can it be that they’re all alike and at the same time how so many things can crumble and fall away to make everything different ? ‘buttle scut or scuttle butt it’s all the same to me’ Joaquin Balagueur or John Betancourt whoever it was he said that on the balcony which only later collapsed with 33 people on it and falling from the third floor to the ground killed 11 – all actual dynamic numbers – and like the footnote to Revelations says (John) ‘1000 means infinity as 12 means perfection as 144 means quintessence as 7 means righteous harmony as 777 means perfected infinity’ and the man in the snakeskin cap says ‘whatever it is you don’t bring that back’ and nothing worse than water has ever passed my lips - what the Gypsy takes the Gypsy gives - and any God worth his salt would know that on the back of every mirror another image lives” so I threw my tender cards down on the Sunday table and closed the cabin door as all four of us settled in for more of something and something more as the latter day preacher took to the floor STARTLING the crowded oasis as he said : “God made something out of nothing (you see) and then hung that something on nothing (you see) so here’s where we’re left (whosoever is REAL shall BELIEVETH in me!) in this reverie (well DO you see?) deciding on clothes for our Garden to be and DO NOT let my heart harden but LORD ‘till I see ! and we each let TOMORROW be” and then shy shy Rita Cooper herself jumped up on the table “WHY do you treat your body as the enemy ? I do really want to know ? why do you harbor such envy at all I wish to know?” and with that she stripped to her nothings-at-all on the little glass table before us DUMBSTRUCK PROFOUND USELESS AND ALL as at once we watched the dilemma unfurl until Father Time introduced himself (‘Earl’) and improved the situation by bringing it to a close and ARRIVING JUST IN TIME as one dimpled buttock of Rita’s pride sagged and the other quite near fell and all losing interest declared “TRULY this passing of time it is Hell!” and as nothing ever came from nothing the street-side side-liner swelled and the shadowed something of TIME’S OWN SHROUD removed any doubt from us and the crowd as just that quick Sunday morning returned wherein I have decided to do nothing and so with that (idleness Devil’s workshop all work and no play make Jack want to stay if you don’t take a chance you’ve got nothing to lose six of one half dozen of another I’ve heard all that before tell me something I didn’t already know Stella McCartney knows the score: DRESS like a QUEEN act like a whore) 15 birds are singing of something on the outside porch where the thermometer lingers and the hanging brush grows and the 3 cars passing are traveling no more as 2 feet up and some red wine in hand I listen to Beethoven (WHO MIGHT UNDERSTAND) and time passes slowly up here in the night ‘we stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right’ and just then a new deliverance entered the scene and ABSTRACTEDLY SO AND OH SO SERENE I listened some more : “to understand Tintern Abbey one needs an eye made quiet by the power of Harmony (who is a left-handed female Goddess of some furious fame) and the true power of joy as we SEE INTO THE LIFE OF THINGS for within a person of light there is light and getting back to the Goddess again (HARMONY stands her name) she had great dreams while I would dream merely of people getting murdered and people counting hamburgers and she would dream about hillsides and beautiful words and if you bring forth what is within you THAT will save you AND ONLY THAT ! and if you DO NOT bring it forth THAT IT IS too which will destroy you!” and then all of a sudden what to behold but ROTHSTEIN rolls in shouting of gold !!! betraying his motives and declaiming his people UNFAMOUS STUPID AND BOLD – “once more we have a new Tyrant telling us everything and a male Tyrant as well DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND ? the severity of all that ? do you not see the mass mindful and controlling orthodoxy which is ripping our culture to shreds NAY WHICH HAS ?” and with that I stood up and said back “let me tell you what I want in the hopes that no one will listen I was born at the Bayonne Bay on the Kill Van Kull which ships transversed like nothing else and laden deep with cargo and fuel and all the raw materials which once went into industry’s passage through time long ago every hull filled with swagger and the juices of work and nothing else mattered nothing had worth except what sweat men produced in making a product for this was a world still reeling and sinking in anger’s debt and the vile note of every hatred then known to man YET no books passed by on those waterways soiled and Sartre and Camus and Aristotle and Locke (and Lao Tsu too) were never entered for life at this table and so it was that I was brought forth from people who knew or made nothing of value but work and its curses and long the lines of men (and their hearses) would pass by my doorways and young and still raw I tried understanding each thing that I saw and every maiden above me or lesser at whichever doorway or floor or vanity or dresser was trying so hard to make something up whether face or idea or family or pup and these were my years in silence and dread that I watched what came out of man’s daily bread and all that I’d heard I was sure was untrue but I put Faith in front of each step with my shoe and so thus protected walked gleefully on like some furious lamb to some slaughter confused and alarmed with every tree’d leaf a William Blake in disguise and something within me felt all those lies and the thousands of memos and white little lies and each man who fell was damned by his tries and still SOMETHING THERE WAS GREW HIGH TO THE SKIES and tower’d infernos and multi-laned streets across from Manhattan like Kipling or Keats I kept that strange eye going to and sent fro until EVEN I learned the language through which I would grow and only that it has been – through all these fair years – which have kept me and made me IN SPITE OF MY FEARS and so now if you listen I’m sure you will hear what I’m trying to say or trying to bear so leave me some leverage still shut on this Earth to make my way forward or (at the least) find what I’m worth.”

…(you can’t put SOMETHING back if you’ve never taken it away)…

A DULL MAN WITH A KNIFE

2009-08-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

285. A DULL MAN WITH A KNIFE (I visit Godel and Einstein in Princeton):

[I can't remember what I said and I can't remember if I said it - all I do recall is the space between hearts and the accumulated intentions of all the things which I'd ever meant to do and never did and the end-results of all of that now are gone : people who have died people who have left me people who are no longer heard from again and who instead become figments on some stage of promise and I stand here and watch the orange curtains flutter and I try to understand the people who pass me in all their different arrays of employment and attitude and even the 'how' they carry themselves with and it all seems so different and there are none the same and I walk the sorry hill to put all of this BEHIND me instead of in front and I arrive (gratefully happily) at the Great Egyptian Needle the wandering spike the Eternal Obelisk from somewhere and it all blends in so well as I am taken to speechlessness by the people around me who all seem to have just stopped and in their long black coats or heavy garments simply gape at the image they see - that weather-marked old festooned thing which rises in place and stays with its incongruous message and image and lobster claws and faded erosions and all the rest BUT even through all that I detect the reverence and the scrambled strange awe which wordlessly stops these people in their tracks and the trail of years and the story of hundreds and the shadows and suns of a million different times still regale us all as they emote their 'selves' from Cleopatra's needle into the sickly modern day - swathed in shrubbery and bare needled branches where the wind-whipped travails of Nature and Mankind seem combined in one mixed attempt at full eternal glory].
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'Every chaos is a wrong appearance' - that was said by Kurt Godel a peer of Einstein's while they both spent time together in Princeton (walks I've traced and walks I've walked) and it was in 1933 - with his great scientific discoveries behind him - that Albert Einstein came to America and spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Princeton where he had been recruited as the star member of the Institute for Advanced Study 'Princeton is a wonderful piece of earth and at the same time an exceedingly amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny spindel-shanked demigods' he'd said (content with his new milieu and taking its pretensions in stride) and his daily routine began with a leisurely walk from his house (at 115 Mercer Street) to his office at the institute and he was by then one of the most famous and with his distinctive appearance - that whirl of pillow-combed hair and the baggy pants held up by suspenders - the most recognizable people in the world and a decade after arriving in Princeton Einstein acquired a walking companion a much younger man who next to the rumpled Einstein cut a dapper figure in a white linen suit and matching fedora and the two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the Institute and again later that day on their way home BUT while the man in the suit may not have been recognized by many townspeople Einstein recognized him as a peer and someone who like him had single-handedly launched a conceptual revolution for if Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity then Godel the younger man had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics - Godel has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle and he was a strange and lonely man in that as opposed to Einstein's gregarious and full-of-laughter nature he was a solemn solitary and pessimistic man (Einstein was a passionate amateur violinist who loved Beethoven and Mozart while Godel's taste ran in another direction entirely - his favorite movie was Walt Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard he pronounced it 'furchtbar herzig' which means 'awfully charming' Einstein freely indulged his appetite for heavy German cooking while Godel subsisted on a valetudinarian's diet of butter baby food and laxatives) for while Einstein's private life was not without its complications outwardly he was jolly and at home with the world but Godel by contrast had a tendency toward paranoia - believing in ghosts and having a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases he refused to go out when certain mathematicians were in town apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him and while others in the institute thought his behavior baffling and unapproachable Einstein told people that he went to his office 'just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Godel' who it seemed was undaunted by Einstein's reputation and did not hesitate to challenge his ideas and as another member of the institute Freeman Dyson observed 'Godel was the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein' but even as they both seemed to exist on a 'higher' plane than the rest of humanity it was also true that they had become (in Einstein's words) 'museum pieces' - Einstein never accepted the quantum theory of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Godel believed that mathematical abstractions were every bit as real as tables and chairs (a view that philosophers had come to regard as 'laughably naive') but Godel and Einstein insisted that the world is independent of our minds yet rationally organized and open to human understanding and the two of them united by a shared sense of intellectual isolation found solace in each other's companionship - 'they didn't want to speak to anybody else' one member said 'they only wanted to speak to each other' -- what did they talk about you wonder? -- Godel was well versed in the subject of Physics and he shared Einstein's mistrust of the quantum theory but he was also skeptical of the older physicist's ambition to supersede it with a 'unified field theory' that would encompass all known forces in a deterministic framework and while both were attracted to problems that were - as Einstein said - of 'genuine importance' which were problems pertaining to the most basic elements of reality it was Godel who was especially preoccupied by the nature of time - which he told a friend was - THE philosophical question for 'how could such a mysterious and seemingly self-contradictory thing form the basis of our world's and our own existance?' (that was a matter of course in which Einstein had shown some expertise) ...FOR...
IN 1905...Einstein proved that TIME as it had been understood by scientist and layman alike WAS A FICTION - as 1905 began the 25-year old Einstein was employed as an inspector in a patent office in Bern Switzerland and having earlier failed to get his doctorate in physics he had temporarily given up the idea of an academic career - telling a friend that 'the whole comedy has become boring' and he had just read a book by Henri Poincare a French mathematician of enormous reputation which identified three fundamental unsolved problems in science : the first was the 'photoelectric effect' or how did ultraviolet light knock electrons off the surface of a piece of metal? the second concerned 'Brownian motion' or why did pollen particles suspended in water move about in a random zigzag pattern? and the third concerned the 'lumeniferous ether' that was supposed to fill all of space and serve as the medium through which light waves moved - the way sound waves moved through air or ocean waves through water : WHY had experiments failed to detect the earth's motion through this ether? yet for Einstein each of these problems had the potential to reveal what he held to be the underlying simplicity of nature and working alone the unknown clerk rapidly managed to dispatch all three and his solutions were presented in four papers written in March April May and June of 1905 -- in his March paper on the photoelectric effect he deduced that light came in discrete particles (later dubbed 'photons') in the April and May papers he established once and for all the reality of atoms and gave a theoretical estimate of their standard size and showing how their bumping around caused Brownian motion and in his June paper on the ether problem he introduced his theory of relativity - then as a sort of encore he published a three-page note in September containing the most famous equation of all time: E=mc2 -- and all of these papers had a touch of magic about them and upset deeply held convictions in the physics community yet for scope and audactiy Einstein's June paper stood out for in thirty succint pages he had completely rewritten the laws of physics beginning with two stark principles First the laws of physics are absolute and the same laws must be valid for all observers and Second the speed of light is absolute for it too is the same for all observers - the second principle though less obvious has the same sort of logic to recommend it - since light is an electromagnetic wave (this had been known since the nineteenth century) its speed is fixed by the laws of electromagnetism and these laws ought to be the same for all observers and therefore everyone should see light moving at the same speed regardless of their frame of reference [still it was bold of Einstein to embrace the light principle for its consequences seemed downright absurd] :
SUPPOSE - to make things vivid - that the speed of light is a hundred miles an hour and now suppose that I am standing by the side of the road and I see a light beam pass by at this speed THEN I see you chasing it in a car at sixty miles an hour TO ME it appears that the light beam is outpacing you by forty miles an hour but YOU from inside your car must see the beam ecaping you at a hundred miles an hour just as you would if you were standing still : THAT is what the light principle demands - BUT what if you gun your engine and speed up to ninety-nine miles an hour ? now I see a beam of light outpacing you by just one mile an hour but to you still inside the car the beam is still racing ahead at a hundred miles an hour despite your increased speed HOW CAN THIS BE? speed of course equals distance divided by time so evidently the faster you go in your car the shorter your ruler must become and the slower your clock must tick relative to mine for that is the only way we can continue to agree on the speed of light (if I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside) - so Einstein set about recasting the laws of physics accordingly - TO MAKE these laws absolute he made distance and time relative and it was the sacrifice of absolute time that was most stunning - for since Isaac Newton it had been agreed that 'time' was 'regulated' by a sort of cosmic grandfather clock as Newton stated : 'ABSOLUTE true mathematical time of itself and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external (in his 'Principia') but EINSTEIN realized that our idea of time is something we abstract from our experience with rhythmic phenomena - heartbeats planetary rotations and revolutions the ticking of clocks - and 'time' judgments always come down to judgments of simultaneity - "if for instance I say 'that train arrives here a 7 o'clock' I mean something like this - 'the pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events'" Einstein wrote in the June paper and if the events in question are at some distance from one another judgments of simultaneity can be made only by sending light signals back and forth - working from his two basic principles Einstein proved that whether an observer deems two events to be 'happening at the same time' depends on his state of motion - in other words THERE IS NO universal NOW and with different observers slicing up the timescape into 'past present and future' in different ways it seems to follow that all moments coexist with equal reality : Einstein's conclusions were the product of pure thought proceeding from the most austere assumptions about nature and they have been precisely confirmed since then by experiment after experiment (yet his 1905 paper on relativity was rejected when submitted) - it was only by an accident of King Gustav V's presence at a Nobel lecture in 1921 that it was brought forth - and at the time that Einstein first formulated the principle in his 1905 paper he restricted 'all observers' [the key principle of relativity is that the laws of physics should be the same for all observers] to those who were moving uniformly relative to one another - that is in a stright line - and at a constant speed but he soon realized that thise restriction was arbitrary and if the laws of physics were to provide a truly objective description of nature they ought to be valid for obersevrers moving in any way reaitive to one another - spinning accelerating spiralling or whatever so it was that Einstein made the transition from his 'special' theory of relativity to to his 'general' theory whose equations he worked out over the next decade and published in 1916 and what made these equations so powerful was that they explained gravty - the force which governs the over-all shape of the cosmos - and even decades later again Godel walking with Einstein had the privilege of picking up the subtelties of relativity theory from the master himself as Einstein had shown that the flow of time depended on motion and gravity and that the division of events into 'past' and 'future' was relative GODEL HOWEVER took a more radical view : he believed that time as it was understood imtuitively did NOT exist at all and as usual he was not content with a mere verbal argument : philosophers ranging from Parmenides in ancient times to Immanueal Kant in the eighteenth century and on to J.M.E. McTaggert at the beginning of the twentieth century had produced such arguments inconclusively but GODEL wanted a proof that had the rigor and certainty of mathematis and he saw just what he wanted lurking in the relativity theory SO he presented his argument to Einstein for his seventieth birthday in 1949 (along with an etching) and what he'd found was the possibility of an until then unimagnable kind of universe - the EQUATIONS of general relativity can be solved in a variety of ways and each solution is in effect a model of how the universe might be and Einstein believed on philosophical grounds that the universe was eternal and unchanging and he had tinkered with his equations so that they would yield such a model - a move he later called 'my greatest blunder' - another pysicist (a Jesuit priest as it happened) found a solution corresponding to an expanding universe born at some moment in the finite past and this solution (since known as the 'Big Bang') was consisent with what astronomers observed and because of that it seemed to BE the one which described the actual cosmos - but GODEL had come up with a THIRD kind of solution to Einstein's equations - one in which the universe was not expanding but rotating (the centrifigal force arising from the rotation was what kept everything from collapsing under the force of gravity) and in Godel's view an observer would see all the galaxies slowly spinning around him - he would know it was the universe doing the spinning and not himself because he would feel no dizziness AND Godel further showed that what makes this rotating universe truly weird is the way its geometry mixes up space and time - for by completing a sufficiently long round trip in a rocket ship a resident of Godel's universe could travel back to any point in his own past - but EINSTEIN was not entirely pleased with the news that his equations permitted something as 'Alice in Wonderland'-like as spatial paths that looped backward in time - in fact he confessed to being 'disturbed' by Godel's universe and while other scientists marvelled that time travel (previously the stuff of science fiction) was apparently consistent with the laws of physics GODEL himself drew a different moral 'if time travel is possible' he submitted 'then time itself is impossible' - for a past that can be revisited has not really passed and the fact that the actual universe is expanding rather than rotating is irrelevant for TIME like God is either necessary or nothing and if it disappears in one possible universe it is undermined in every possible universe - including our own (Godel's conclusion went almost entirely unnoticed in its time) and all of this was received during a bleak time in Einstein's life - his quest for a unified field theory of physics was proving fruitless and his oppostion to quantum theory alienated him from the mainstream of physics - two failed marriages a lost daughter two sons with problems and his 'circle' of friends had shrunk to - essentially - Godel and one or two others : he said "the exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease and I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler" - he died a month after saying that at age seventy-six and when Godel and another colleague went to his office at the institute to deal with his papers they found the blackboard covered with dead-end equations : after Einstein's death Godel became even more withdrawn - he preferred to conduct all his conversations by telephone even if his interlocutor was a few feet distant and when he especially wanted to avoid someone he would schedule a rendezvous at a precise time and place and then make sure he was somewhere far away - he was chary of the honors bestowed upon him and refused attendance at most events but for a 1952 honorary doctorate from Harvard where his incompletness theorems were hailed as the most important mathematical discovery of the previous hundred years - he said he had been 'thrust quite undeservedly into the most highly bellicose company' by that event - and in 1975 he refused to goto the White House to receive a national Medal of Science from Gerald Ford - even after a car had been provided for him - he had hallucinatory episodes and talked darkly of certain forces at work in the world 'directly submerging the good' and he feared that there was a plot to poison him and therefore refused to eat until finally 'looking like a living corpse' he was taken to Princeton Hospital where two weeks later on January 14 1976 he succumbed to self-starvation and according to his death certificate the cause of death was 'malnutrition and inanation' brought on by 'personality disturbance' and although a certain futility marked the last Princeton years of both Einstein and Godel their most futile efforts seemed to be their willed belief in the unreality of time - the temptation was understandable - for if time exists only in our minds perhaps we can hope to escape it into a timeless eternity (then we could say like William Blake 'I see the past Present and Future existing all at once before me') - toward the end of his life Godel had said that he had long awaited an epiphany that would enable him to see the world in a new light but that it never came and Einstein too was unable to make a clean break with time saying 'to those of us who believe in physics this separation between past present and future is only an illusion if a stubborn one' and when his own turn came a few weeks later he said 'it is time to go.'

FAT BOY HENRY - The Art Merchant and Me (nyc, 1985)

2009-08-08T18:05:00.000-07:00

284. FAT BOY HENRY – The Art Merchant and Me, (nyc,1985):

“I am going to cut you in twelve little pieces and feed you to the faeries but that’s not important now for I spend most of my time looking at musculature which includes every piece of the human body you’d imagine and to me you are basically inside out or as much inside out as I’d care to see anyway for the glory of your form is nothing more than the glory of the ART of reproducing that and you can have your stupid moonscapes and landscapes and open-air seascapes and all the rest for as I see it they’re all ESCAPES and what counts alone is the sedate and powerful presence of the human body in its raw naked and powerful presence with every sinew and pore and every twist and bend and every body part and organ contorted suggested shown and exaggerated every Blakean God detail of physicality shown and because of that I am like some Philip Pearlstein madman running happily between places you’ve never seen let alone been seen the Creation the Moment of True Light the extended conversion of all life and its terror and I paint with my brush and eat with my spoon and anything in-between I don’t really care about and to hear what you’re saying causes me pain because you’ve missed the entire point of this exercise EVEN THIS one which essentially goes into to the making of the real art-world you seem so to disdain” and at that I realized it no longer was merely myself and the mouthpiece here or even Miranda and Jacques - whom I no longer for a moment had a clue as to where they were having apparently escaped themselves to do some secretive moonlight kissing or physicality inspection - but instead some crazed harlequin of broken sound some envious retreater from the art wars of Hell someone intent on destroying everything in the name of art so I spoke up once more and continued: “one times one moment here it seems OK whenever you say something but apparently all I have to do is criticize the ‘art as saleable decoration’ idea to be branded anti-semitic or whatever offense you take but WHO buys and sells this stuff on a consignment basis WHO makes money on the works and toils of the artists as the ‘other’ WHO scouts around and selects things only after first scheming in what way this or that can be exploited inflated lied about mis-focused played with or otherwise merchandized in order to get money make money attract money WHAT other than a fat art-fart Geldzahler type goes out after art alone for the PROFIT motive tell me that ?” and I realized that was bold and it felt real good too and just then the little gallery rat did try to throw up on me but missed and then tried to charge me for it but missed there too until I said “why don’t we just call that ART and you can make some coin off that too?” and then I saw his fat waddle-butt leaving the room in that indescribable fat-ass fat-boy art-walk way I cannot right now describe other than picture BUT THAT’S the ART WORLD wonder-boy I knew it was all along and then I heard again Miranda and Jacques panting and moaning and for sure I knew what was up and it was FUCKING PERFORMANCE ART for sure but fat-boy Geldzahler had already left and taken all the cash registers with him too!!

THE SOUND OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

2009-07-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

283. THE SOUND OF THE NEW JERUSALEM:

Death as a way of life (see under: ‘Love’) …noise gunshots and shouts incendiary words and mournful laments amidst explosions and demonstrations and heaps of clichés and special broadcasts from the scenes of terrorist attacks and calls for revenge…right there we’ve ‘pupae’d the larvae’ so to speak we’ve fled to the outer limits we’ve reached new boundaries of Hell from Albuquerque to Ataturk and Antioch to Amsterdam (and Athens to Alexandria Antwerp to Alsace Austin to Avenel) AND ‘within the whirlwind spinning and turning in the eye of the storm THERE IS SILENCE and it can be heard ! AND it is felt in every cell of the body writhing within each dilemma encoded with anyone there – Essene to Embryonic – a deepening silence such as one feels in the brief moment between receiving bad news and comprehending it between the blow and the pain THE EMPTY SPACE in which every person knows with piercing certainty all that he or she does not want or does not dare to know’ and then some parking lot tyrant comes by exposing himself (to ridicule to abuse to anything) and stands by the entrance to the hardware store near the pizza place waving two wands ONE the frieze from Wednesday night and the other the fifteen pounds of leftover palms he swiped from St. Matthew’s Holy Name Trade Fair and Exposition held at the Demolay Hall and hosted by Father John Rutabaga SJ who’s just back from Rahway where he administered to the flock all of the murders shootings and beatings he could manage BUT NOTHING NEW TRANSPIRED it had all been done before ‘well done Brethren – for we have entered the halls of God with bold new ideas in mind so let us sing as we pray for deliverance and bring forth the multitudes we need from but ONE lonely acolyte HIM who stands here freezing all alone’ and I hear them applaud as the lights go out and the movie fiction starts again (some Finnish guy in a yellow Ferrari racing towards the catacombs just outside the city) and nothing beats success except more success and its double DEATH so we all move on and soon enter Darkside or Navesink or Asbury or NETHERWOOD ! that’s what it’s called ! where the old servant quarters of Plainfield aspire to rise from their graves and retire to WHERE MY Son ‘Flower’ wishes to go (he’d changed his name from Rufus J. right after he had the operation) HE’S A GIRL NOW we have to call him something different but I lift the chair above my head only to see the ladder’s broken again and all the stairs are turned inside out and anything old is new again and two things always happen together ONE THE REFUTATION OF THE OTHER and like the Bible says ‘save now for a rainy day’ and ‘it’s only a paper moon ripping over the madman’s tomb’ but what I say I can’t decide and if ever there was HAPPY it was Mary’s womb but leg o’lamb and rack of pinion WHO LORDS OVER THE LORD’S DOMINION! and all of a sudden there came such a rush and I ran to the window to see what was the matter but all I received was one lethal blow and Charles Foster Kane all ready to go and he sat down beside me and started to sing and just then the whippoorwill cried and SOMEONE HAS DIED! was all that was said [Kane piped up: “you just give me the prose-poem and I’ll supply the WAR!’] and I noticed he laughed to his fat heart’s content and rolled towards the door until OUT THE DOOR HE WENT!!

PERSHING PLAZA AND LINCOLN PABST

2009-07-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

282. PERSHING PLAZA AND LINCOLN PABST:

"Well now that that’s over and done with we really should move on'"those were the words Lincoln Pabst used on me as we were walking along the edge of Grand Central Station right after I commented to him how it was that I remembered these very storefronts there as nothing but cheap ruins and crappy bargain sports stores thirty years ago when the entire place should probably have been boarded up and moved away and he laughed back and then said that which I just told you he said while right before that we’d just passed the side streets along Pershing Plaza which he said wasn’t really a ‘Plaza’ just a conjunction of some streets and a restaurant and the entrance to both a tunnel and a ramp and I said "yeah yeah that makes some sense and they probably had to name it after someone historical anyway because they wouldn’t name it after the restaurant or some other commercial venture which probably changes every five years anyway and for ponderous places you do need a right and historical name something people could ‘relate’ to if they ever still relate" and he nodded and said ‘well yeah but most people don’t relate anymore to anything and the kids they say can’t even find places on the map anymore and so even geography’s taken a rare bump on the long road to neglect but what’s to be expected anyway when you look around you today what do you see but a bunch of essential wise-asses strutting their stuff chasing timetables and teams and games and electronics and all the rest of the crap that flows in and out of a culture like this like some black running water of shit through the population and it’s everywhere now in huge horrid globs of overload and these people right here the ones who come into New York from places like Pennsylvania and Idaho and West Virginia what do you think they come here for but to get their own fatal dose of this stuff and take it back to their home towns and implant the same disease in their own friends and neighbors just maybe a little bit behind the times by then but ripe anyway for anything they can get their hands on and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise - there’s nothing out there anymore the old crap about right and religion and goodness and all that’s been swallowed up and busted over people’s heads a million times by now I tell you it’s itself a fearful shame that we’ve got to live with it all here ourselves" and I was listening and watching at both the same time as he talked and figuring much of the same stuff and how he was probably right I started differentiating between the people I saw the - staid and monied New York types going by me were easy to pick out the women with nice faces and proper coats and the detritus of money dripping from them and the little groups of kids and young adults still beautiful to watch and see but another step away distant and then (right outside the ‘Dylan’ Hotel as it’s properly called and named on the windows) I saw the other New York the visitor’s one with the classy out-of-towners hanging out and exiting cars and taxis and stretching themselves over the lobby and the bar and the doorman oozing attitude and all the rest and just outside that along the streetcorners the lower breeds of street types meandering and walking and talking within their own concerns all of that mixed up together in one some fatal brew and that was right then the make-up of some place I saw just like this all of this and it really no longer mattered whatever one ‘Lincoln Pabst’ said to me because (as in so much else and every other thing) I only saw things my way and he his and everyone apart is just like that we’re all separate all living distinctly in different little worlds and only where they overlap are we able to come to some kind of agreement about what IS and what EXISTS and after that point of convergence is passed - be it one hundred or one hundred million times in one lifetime - we again are still separate and alone in our thoughts and reality and we agree that the ‘make-up’ of the world as we see it is what we see all that and nothing more and it’s like the last final dream of our lives (each of us apart) when we dream of those two hands on our shoulders gently waking us from some strange and deep sleep that we slowly and gradually slip out of a trance-state dream-like and fall back gently and softly into once again yet another reality one of long duration and distorted minutes all and even moreso than any dream of life we may each have just had and with that the billowing slow clouds come over and enclose us and cover our thoughts and break us from whatever training we may have had and reduce us anew to something wise and bright and fresh and somehow together and yet alone all alone as one all over again and that’s the dream of life the rigged rugged ribald and raw dream of the New York or wherever streets born and shouldered in reality like this but traveling allover and ever-present everywhere on and within the globe and a million moments together some NEVER equal one simple minute alone with our thoughts YET never-ceasing the ever opening door continues its movement and just never seems to close NO MATTER HOW WE TRY to close it or have it close around us - and that is the struggle that is the work and THAT is the achievement of time and all its workings.

EYES ONLY HEAVENWARD LOCKED

2009-07-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

281. EYES ONLY HEAVENWARD LOCKED ('to win by ignoring your foe'), nyc, 1998:

Walking like fierce fire from Barrow and Bedford Streets down Hudson to No. Moore past the old industrial rail and fire pit of Ericsson Place where everything old had been replaced and the only sight to be seen was the wide-open entrance of new place after new place calling for tenant and buyer the concrete expanse of for lease square footage tenants the hand-painted target of convenience on the new blank walls newly poured concrete where the watchman sits biding his time the target in black and red paint on the wall behind his head and I’m in the pouring rain as he’s looking out with a nod and a smile and as I passed the newly constructed corner scene I could see the blank space within and I realized again how often over and over the same things are done and how and why I’d never know and that in the daylight and dark there’s an entire other world of activity not known to us or shown yet it goes on and even as I walked determinedly in the pouring rain I alone sought the deference of others in their outward presence perhaps gone but shown by memory and image no matter – and if I vouch to you that words are more than sure things to do so all I need here write is that I consider ‘relying on a lust and a piracy on a murder of time and thought to subsidize a play for beauty and in every brick and mortar the ‘platinum’ pallor of blood suited the illusory world’ with all objects drenched in lunar light and near exact to that is a light of day not here now (but instead in the rainy pallor as I rush along) and I see rows and rows of heads dining and they are backlit by the glow of soft yellow light and with spots of such candlelight on each table’s glow that are talking softly back and forth to one another as I realize I am silent only as alienation and distance are silent and so that would be for in what better warfare than this is there a place to greet the enemy alone with no voice TO WIN BY IGNORING YOUR FOE – and as I walk the endless and blazing night I am addressed by the storefronts and windows too of the wild wind off the nearby river the Spring Street song of all hearts and it makes some scoff at truth while others cringe at the hideous lapse of sensibility therein [“so I have heard and do in part believe it”] and in my mental state still wandering aimless in the rain the water is rolling off my face and beads of it hang from my nose with wet head hair ears cold clothing soaked everything wet shoes and outlook and again I begin VOICES same voices hearing tearing into me at once like mesmerizing old quotes from battle-stations and workplaces old and now long gone: “there’s just one street and they can shut it off but I’d have felt safer there than here and the worst fantasies I guess of the organizers would be marchers rolling primitive devices of fire and terror down the street as they walked and I for one have this very relieved sense that I am not in charge” and with that I look up and remember the old Ericsson place that was here the crazed inventor who’d look down upon these oily streets way back when and see only woods and land and fence and until later when the rail yards came and supplanted all that he had his EYES ONLY HEAVENWARD LOCKED and peering through the rain to the streets below I hear him say “glassed in all day like this I keep toweling the windows dry Eamon trying to wipe this fog away that keeps me blind behind glass and unable to see the outside world for what it is and the way things become shadows and blunted silhouettes of themselves and birds only become blurs as they shake a branch when they land or leave or just dash past as a flash of cloud snatching at crumbs and I know too Eamon this will all soon be gone and I find myself like those birds wet and weathered each time as I get up to the big window to clear it again and try to take in what colors are left and all the shapes out there all the living bits of matter that stand in their own ordinary uncanny light until the blurring begins again and I see my own breathing as it does it but Eamon I am not the man to record all this just watch it the distant observer of another sky for I am an inventor and here alone I research the heavens OBSERVATORY LIMIT GRAND ASTROLABE of all my heart alone and silent what can I do and what is visible to me really alas instead I shall remain here until time for me ends its own delight and you know I DO NOT KNOW THESE PEOPLE I DO NOT” and with that the night seemed to lessen its darkness and I heard the distant low growl of tugboat and ship something rolling by me and then by Beach Street I’m taken by something some wild wicked feeling of timeless cold age taking me up and the ghosts of the past wrap around me as it grows totally silent and still and only the one light across the horizon seen becomes the tear the great rip in consciousness and it all opens to other worlds and the time and space of other places those which exist concurrent and just beyond the membrane of this place and this experience and into that we I we all are pushed slowly like thick liquid oozing and time bleeds into time and other things dissolve and the clanging howl of the buttery bell ringing resounds and echoes down the February quarters of the night and around the all this all this city coalesces and comes back and returns and I am silent reading time or silent smoking water or silent I am just silent watching it all unfold.

MODICUMS OF PROP AND SCENERY

2009-06-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

280. MODICUMS OF PROP AND SCENERY / adventures in the slave trade - (NYC, aug. '67):

‘If I had anything to offer I’d invite you in’ – I’d never heard such a lethargic comment before in my life especially as it was now coming from a person I’d known for about a year in various comings and goings - she was dressed in black yet again and carrying a bag filled with fruit – so you see none of it made any sense already : her boyfriend’s name was Lucas and together they’d been seen a few places or at least enough so as to cause some talk - he was some up and coming folksinger on a lousy circuit and she wanted desperately to act - working as she was in the here-and-there of distant off-Broadway small-scale productions which mostly just ended up being readings or dramatizations of things in either large and very dark rooms or in small and very cramped rooms with but the smallest modicum of prop and scenery – costume never mentioned – she went around like this in an off-handedly beggar-like fashion and I knew that – sincerely – if I’d really wanted to go on she’d have taken me right in but I brushed it off and said ‘yeah OK and I guess Luke will be home soon anyway’ not meaning anything by not meaning but it came out anyway that they were seeing each other and she really just wanted to be alone – way alone – and anyway soon after that she was gone away so I never did get up there with her and we parted - it was nearing 8pm and I was once again slinking back towards the west side piers so as to watch the roiling river pass me by and let me think - as I passed the edge of the park and started my way over I was brought back to some sort of life by the idea that I didn’t really HAVE to do any of this and so I went instead down to the basement of the building I was living in – the Studio School main structure which had once been many things – a mansion and then a museum – and it enabled me to spend away another night scrunched up in a form of comfort I’d come to enjoy - reading a book and looking at some art-book portfolios I’d collected down there - it was all by fact simple and sweet and just perfect for me and without any expense whatsoever too and all of these things made it a picture-perfect fit so to speak for the life I was leading : what I called a ‘2X4 life in a 2X4 shed’ and in the grand old tradition of any (stupidly self-serving) starving artist I found myself thriving on the situation - great art whatever it is doesn’t really come from nothing and I figured one had to get hurt be bent be broken and finally and with disgust surrender to all things to make anything worthwhile happen – which is basically and pretty much where I was just then and the smog of alcohol or hemp and dreaming and disaster none of them had overtaken me I was free as a bird but tethered nonetheless yet to some form of too-Earthly lifeline that was still keeping me down and I knew I wanted – if not out – something by which to be lifted and I knew I had to make my own marvels and work at my own work regardless of anything and what else there was going on around me : which is what made it feel OK to leave that girl just where she was and forget about it : no regrets there and if she did have anything to offer me I’d not have wanted it anyway (go figure) – but soon enough the mid-Summer nightfall came and the same streets I just left were throbbing and filled again with packs of young people just meandering around as if every minute was and should be the adventure of a lifetime and it was about this time that one by one it seemed the entire young population of some foiled and aimless country was ending up here – the streets were filled with thousands of lost and abandoned Summer kids - some of privilege and some not so - and all they did was hang around smoke sing dally and love one another in some awkward and strange mist of in-between time wherein no one really knew the fit nor the meaning of anything and amid it was some sort of mass-growing-up ritual happening all at once and the only problem I had with it was how quickly and in what great volume it had rolled in and left behind everything that had once been there before it - tradition and heritage and all of that had simply been forgotten and no one knew a thing and it was all as if it were Year One from the very start and all this something new was beginning just right now and at this moment all the past could simply be forgotten and it was most apparent in the infantile and childish doodlings (let’s say) of the street-graphics that were seemingly hanging everywhere : wavy high-school type posters for this or that show concert gathering reading rally or orgy (for that matter) that any of these over-stimulated street-circus types looking to make yet another dime off of anything falsehood and blemish could come up with and it all just went on : food wagons down at Tompkins Park turning into patchy lines of maniacs figuring the world owned them everything and they had to do absolutely nothing to get it and long-haired prophets of nothing along the sidelines peddling dope or speed or heavenly weed – all that was just the way things were right then and the deep Summer air was heavy with something portentous but no one knew what – it had taken a long time to get to this 1967 point and it seemed more and more to be a point of departure than merely a destination and out there ahead no one was sure what was situated : some bizarre string of unknown Magellan islands or some indeterminate squall that would – instead – wreck and bring to an end the entire mission before it had really started.
-
So anyway she was gone and I never went back to check on her and whether Brecht or Artaud or any of those other theater guys did finally have their way with her it was beyond my comprehension how or why it was to be done and all I had instead to do was keep plodding along running off straight ahead and I became dazed and as deranged as anyone else before long : lock-key smithy thievery along the wharves sleeping in gutters and penny-ante hovels after meeting people I’d never see again and whose names I never did get straight making arrangements and jumping in cars to run up to Beacon or Poughkeepsie or Ossining for pickups and for still further meetings with people holding contraband money or stolen goods – ferrying one or two people running north up along the Hudson straight to Kingston and points after that unknown – distribution of runaways through Niagara Falls into Canada considered then as yet a harbor for any anti-military type seeking shelter – and then myself coming back down into the city with whomever was driving and oftentimes not having a clue as to what was in the cargo we were carrying – and in another direction out along the Bruckner there were strings of 'junkyards' which took anything in or other times we’d have to go to garages and small buildings along the eastside waters where intense fat men and swarthy business-types would look us over look over what we brought dole out some cash and say ‘get lost and don’t come back’ and we’d go knowing nonetheless that whatever happened we were under the protection of the varied crime lords running these operations from a spot just one-level higher than there bizarre moronic idiot types we’d have to deal with - a sort of silent and sedentary code of conduct and business was run in a hoodlum-style by unknown and invisible levels of people and I often wondered if ever and when these people ever met one another – and if when they did only some one or another came back out alive to tell of it all - and so for my part too it was ‘I’d invite you in if I had anything to offer.'

I LET IT BE

2009-06-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

279. I LET IT BE - ('we must reinterpret the world'):

In all of creation (he says) 'has not a square always been a square and a cube a cube?' and of course that is not the question at all but I listen nonetheless and find myself fearsomely fixated (the more and more) about the one hundred names of dread wherein I dwell and I watch from afar in silence as the squaring crowd regulates itself and the strange rhythm of society takes its place over the meshed coil of the matter and the swordsman holding high his sword remains in place as we count the rings on the tree-stump he's just cut - realizing how incorrect they really can be - reaching forty-five before stopping to talk (about what it was when the tree must have been planted and how young forty-five really is) and we differentiate from the rings the good years from the bad years and the rich years from the poor and the wet from the dry COMMENSURATE with some experience of something - and now walking by in two's and three's are people themselves - ringed by circumstance and want in the same way as the trees around us are (we befuddle every step while walking deep in the black dense woods ascertaining but in no way certain where it is we really are and to where it is that we are going) and as it all seems the same to me no matter what anyway I decide that none of it matters and I step back and I LET IT BE and leave it all at the windowsill of chance and the makers of science (those willing to look at the stars) and anyone else like that who lingers and professes to believe BUT I KNOW BETTER 'the natural world's a lie and appearances are never what they seem and sometimes they're less and old iron crumbles like rust and the railroads break down and the bridges crumble and the roadways and tracks shudder and die along the meadows and swamps and everywhere a presumed army of things disappear and WE MUST REINTERPRET THE WORLD at every single other step.'

NO ONE LOOKS ANYWAY

2009-06-07T16:57:00.000-07:00

278. NO ONE LOOKS ANYWAY (nyc/philadelphia, '91):

I was sure of myself enough at least to continue deciding to go forward and I found myself from the high plains of Newark to the low swamps of Jersey in nearly one subtle plane together and alone and traveling with a crowd and watching thin ferryboats maneuver the waters glassed with evening’s light and the sheen of yellow being thrown by wind and water and there were never-ending runs of children and people gathering in places to watch across both land and water and it all was like a dream again to me as distant and far-off in both body and mind as the sand was hardening on the paltry waterfronts as ancient tides rippled out and passed and it all seemed as of some methodical enviro-postulate that the people lived and walked and worked - erecting massive homes along the shore places to which they returned each time and leaving boats of their own invention they lived in new wood and crowded the shores and ruined all that was once there just so in order for them to live the land first was surrendered to a new and uncertain kind of battering ram evil which took over sand and sea and all before it as I realized that so much of what had been erased was due to the erasure by powers of state and everything in a swath had been determined to no longer be Spy House Looking Glass Harbor all the names and every bluff and hillock above the once-used harbor had been stretched and thinned and taken over by ‘Government’ and signs thereof attesting to use and ownership and stipulation and YES YES it’s really hard to bring oneself to be incensed about such matters but I was and for the millionth time found myself repeating within anger and hatred and sadness and want everything at once AS ALL BEFORE ME the pounded sands had been manipulated and moved and all I saw was Evil walking and robots of its own devise and I vouched ‘that step is not mine’ but where can I go for now it seemed EVERYTHING had been taken over and it all lived by the State and pleasant by that thousands of others at each moment did so too but no one cared either – weaving and forgetting what they experienced and talking layers of lies on high and happy for it and along the narrow street the harbor kids were standing in some honky-tonk collection of pride and bravado and the life they led was all the life they knew and poorer for it than they ever knew they stood there idle amidst ruin and for every child there I saw I knew three more were hiding as small harbor towns like this breed nothing amidst themselves except more of the strange and the cheap-nickel lives of the people within them and they live these out squandered and dead and IF SADNESS TAKES OVER NO ONE EVER SEES IT living in ignorance is bliss and blissful ignorance is all of this ‘we’ll remove more sands as we keep this going and remove all signs of the distant past too WE WILL as no one sees what we try to erase for the reality can be forgotten as we cover over what was and breeding claptrap and roller-coasters with high-lights and bar-room fights we’ll call it a place and make them forget and we can walk all over THEN whatever we want’ and I see for them what ‘history’ is a moving template for monument and sign a place to hang a reference for some few years and then remove later for something else and everything out of favor is gone as that ovoid lens changes shape and the shape of what it shows and it’s sad again it’s sad THE EGGMAN IS GONE and all of his house and land and the Spy House become a routine and every other harbor-front mansion household landed home facing water boat-slip landing GONE until all they leave is scraps and then they’re gone made jokes of or complained about like the Fishermens' Co-op not long for this world - but the red sun bleats as it falls straight down and creases the horizon with its light it passes and hands over this world to the thin blue sky of darkness highlighted by the rising moon which too then hangs like a lantern in otherwise distended skies where no one looks anyway and NO ONE really cares.

-
“No one looks in this microphone” I said to myself and then pretending to speak to beachfront crowds I rambled errantly on “no one even tries to listen let alone investigate and whatever goes past us is that quickly ended and finished and gone but let me reiterate the nothingness I feel and I’ve spent too many years right now to let it all pass me by without saying a word about what’s dying and I don’t care a whistle that you can’t understand me or don’t like my form or can’t find the space between all the words to make the sense for you I just don’t care it’s all your own rambling problem not mine and you do so much else so admirably that you should take a moment and try this too” and realizing I was getting nowhere I found myself amused enough to continue and it was just me and Walt Whitman and the other guy from Camden pouting shouting spouting to the sky – about the time the trains came through and took the lower fields away and the day when John Bartram came over to show us the real course of the river right there – not the industrial puss-heap they’d made of it but the one the natives once knew : bucolic and powerful and startling and real : and it all led to another land entire – one where angels played and one where vice was not a gamble but as quickly as I managed to speak more came and the jumble of words was growing and my mind changed to other matters and I moved along and we all just kept on going - past three shanties two big garages a boathouse and a den.

CRIMES OF PASSION - CRIMES OF MIRTH, aug. '67

2009-05-31T18:05:00.000-07:00

277. CRIMES OF PASSION - CRIMES OF MIRTH (aug. 1967):

Two things I learned from living home : Rubberdog and Gloriani and that was long ago : Rubberdog was a little black puppy eventually run over by a car and left dead on the side of the road and Gloriani was the sound of unfounded praise that comes from doing something that you would have done anyway and none of it really made sense which is one of the reasons I left that hell-hole as quickly and easily as I could : points anywhere by any means : and the next thing I knew there I was just roving like a rover and settled like a settler at Tompkins Square Park just holding the bag - and it was my own filled with a few shirts and nothing much else and I said slowly and deliberately to myself : 'you will be what you will be and the points to be reckoned with when constructing your own character are first to remember not to overplay the necessities and secondly not to forget the optionals' - items like timeline storyline emphasis where-you-been and where-you-going and all that because that's the only sort of thing that people care about - linear stuff of which they can make sense otherwise their obliterated little minds go scatter-shot crazy over who you might be and what you're doing right there in front of them : my first few nights were quite alone in that very park one hundred degrees for sure and blistering crazy too August 7 '67 the Puerto Rican girl I came to know I called her just for fun 'Gloriana' too and for that she laughed and kissed me hard which I soon learned to like and then this total suave cool guy comes slinkering around taking names and numbers and that all went away 'my name is Andy Bonamo and I can stay with you if you want 'and the first few nights after that were spent on the floor of some big room above the old vaudeville house on First Avenue where they let us sleep for free and stay as long as we'd like and the big old window - really huge - looked out over the old marque and squared out over the blistering street in the blistering heat - a new city heat a heat that never ended a hundred degrees at night heat which Gloriana of course only added to - great white heaves of fiery love on bundled dirty clothing on the ancient wooden floor tons and tons of that stuff everywhere and down below on the open-wide street all the local landlords (seemed like every Long Island Jew that ever existed) came each week or so to check their holdings see their renters get their money for all the tiny little shit-hole shops and laundries and furniture stores and junk heaps and sundries and paper shops piled high along the street and it seemed really did seem they owned everything from their big black cars parked along the curb left running and sure to charm the neighborhood boys 'so as to know who's Boss' they'd chime in while marking their papers and books - little black ledgers and wads of cash was pretty much what they ever carried and I never knew and Andy never knew and for Goddamn sure Gloriana never knew why someone never just killed these guys dead - her brothers or their friends or somebody - and make off with the money and probably the car too but that was never answered she'd smirk instead and say 'de bastards'll git theirs yet you see' and we'd laugh and figure she knew what she meant and probably probably I'd mention to no one in particular if I had the gumption I'd do the job myself 'cept I'd have nowhere to go because THIS was it THIS place was the place to which I'd already gone and there wasn't nothing left : 'SEE! SEE!' : I'd cry to myself and wander the streets - stealing food and money where I could hanging with my little stories in Greenwich Village cellars where no one knew the difference between what I'd say and what was true - 'wide-open world engulfed long ago my father was killed when I was 7 gunned down by a mobster in Cleveland and my mother never took me back in much after that I stayed with Granma or Uncle Nieto the crazy fucking bastard that he was - all rummied up and horny all the time all he ever did was clamor for more and I lit out early me and Huck Finn me and whomever I fucking chose and wished to be with and accompany : crimes of passion and crimes of mirth too : and I probably knew your mother before she knew you' (that never made any sense but they always loved that line - coming as it was from a dip-shit hot-ass 17-year old kid just a month away from 18 and and and well fame or something!) and I played the music they wanted to hear and these all were nothing anyway but steps baby steps for a very first boy moving first time forward and then I broke one day into a record store I'd gotten access to through a friend and stole a bunch of records a bunch and from a rag on the ground on St. Mark's Place they sold like fucking hotcakes for seventy-five cents each and no one knew no better then me how obvious all that was but nothing ever happened and I let it be - the record business I'd determined was not for me.

THE THIN MAN

2009-05-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

276. THE THIN MAN:

It was the thin man hiding between buildings who so haunted the streets to the extent that there was nowhere people did not look for him - gabardine and leather corduroy and silk long black coat and high-top boots as he went around to each street seeking things from the past like looking for old glass windows with the ripply and bubbled scar'd look of age with the ever-so-slightly yellowed view from them where the modern world descended from presence and became lost in a haze of steam and smoke and sail with the rich smell of clams and shellfish roiling in the air and the frothing mouths of fish piled high atop one another as they were heaved from nets and wriggled to death on the concrete floor and lobsters tried to run in endless circles nowhere as the fish-monger with his great hook ripped and tore flesh to move each crate of fish to be weighed and thrown and sold and piled high atop wet metal trays and the thin light of the outside world pressed through the narrow windows of the huge fish market as men's voices yelled back and forth and screamed weights at each other and sought truck departure times and loaded crates and boxes of fish for destination past the endless meadows and roadways leading out to the strangled and dry world beyond a world where in some places fish were strange as strange as the aroma of the sea and the salt-air of the freshness and the smell and the odor of kelp and seaweed and tide and sand and wet rock jetties running out for hundreds of feet along soaked and sprayed wooden quays where sloppy boats tied at anchor rocked slowly back and forth and where the distant lights from the shoreline cast lonely fish lines of their own to the small men atop the rocks silently and with true loneliness fishing for dreams and regrets all tied together and there there the dead men walking the doomed old men stalking the bay staring out in their loneliness to the lights of the nearing sea but unable as they were to speak they all remained silent with their regrets and hatreds and sorrow and loss for there was nowhere nothing left to give them back from the great world around them as the last beyond was over and the end of all things had arisen for one and each and every so they remained alone and aloof as old men do silent in their beyond and they sat near where the great old wood was piled up high and yet they forsake'd it all the past and their memory and the glowing ember of experience as they missed everything around them and only sought the modern but even that with regret they missed the old brick ignored the crooked chimneys ignored the old smokestacks ignored the rippled glass of countless windows ignored they missed all all all of their own experiences in a stupidity of raiment and mind which was as poverty-stricken as the poor days they once came out of claiming now to only want all things new senseless but new so that the thin man passed and sought instead the Pearl Street Station where once was generated the power and the stability of that power to light at first a small entire city filled with wonder and glory in time and place lit with Heaven's own glow as if a great and Christian light had arisen to enrapture in the hearts of men a Christmas sublime one filled with promise and the new light of all things and the small squat station stood silent set in concrete and brick with no noise but the nineteenth century hum leftover of noises never heard before the click and swoops of power passing pulling powering everything new in a wondrous flash of something no one knew the building quietly in its own fey mist stood there and the bricked roadway around it led down to the water's edge and the wharf where men loitered and smoked and the wet shine of wires and metal and click click of horse hooves on paving stones with the round clang of wheels turning and the long slow creak of the massive door opening and the broad look into a generating station of Hell an industrial pit of new design covered in smoke and sweat and levers and handles and the black web of wires and insulation knitted like Lucifer's sweater itself and the idle men groaning in the flashing light as they reviewed their tasks and watched the next man attempt what they could not and this all still called for brawn and strength a strength which groaned and broke so many men those reluctant to enter the Hell of time and energy and work and light light which was supposed to be so heavenly and good and glorious light enough to end all time but which in time turned out instead to be the light of slavery and work labor's paltry wages and darkness the very light of darkness from dark Satanic mills to black basements of the nineteen tens and twenties wherein people died struggling with work for wages thrown for pennies and dimes while masters lurked behind locked doors smirking with glee the smirk of lucre's vast lust for more the irreducible point past which there is no more to be made for the point arises when the money itself begins to make the money and the need for mankind is gone and thus the great servitude of labor and wage begins and those down are kept down by being given just enough and no more for it is the manager and the owner who seek to make the riches needed for nothing except more more more always more and so the great vast wiry city grew upward and the denizens of dead in five points and Chinatown and Chelsea and West End died and continued to die in their sadness and poverty blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall inherit the hate and they shall inherit the earth and take with them all it has to offer the dirt and soil of death the pit of regret the old and sorry excuses of the lame and the crippled the crowded and those with cough and gurgle and bad lungs and eyesight made rotten by darkness and heat all of that which started before the light but which was then carried by the light and embraced by the light as only later did the great mass of Union Square men demand and the huge rafts of people sought power and wages together in packs and mobs and labor riots and fires which burned brighter than light itself and beckoned men back to a time of mobs and packs of crazed and hungry wolves and there only there the thin man fled and moved away to walk himself the fabled water's edges along the varied river beneath the Roebling Bridge undone by time and essay and legend and fault and upward looking he watched the feet of all mankind divest itself across the span and walk through all its doubts and marvels and leave behind the last of everything and seek only that open future into which they thought they walked but chimera and illusion and hoax and even the fiddle-faddle of broken promises and horrid laughter at their expense they walked to nothing and left it too in their breached silence they clutched at bags and handles in the blindness they sought to walk with hope alone and were betrayed by those whose good eyes saw enough to trip them up and he watched man after man woman after woman descending as they fell from the bridge to the cruel and icy waters below and they cast off along the way everything they had as if to lessen the splash the crack the hit of their body upon the cruel hard water so cold the blood itself did not bleed as they hit they just floated until death took them in and still still the fishmongers were yelling and heaving their crates and jabbing their hooks into soft and soiled flesh the great flesh of all things in all time forever and what was lost was but the skyline view above the brazen shape of Brooklyn the tall enamel towers of Manhattan the basic lights of Pearl and Water and Wall and Maiden Lane the hanging man from the buttonwood tree.

PERFECTLY CLEAN BILLS - the Deck Hand Scams

2009-05-17T17:35:00.000-07:00

275. PERFECTLY CLEAN BILLS - the Deck Hand Scams - (nyc, 3/68):

"Hold it up motherfucker" that was all I heard and all I really had to – the guy was a sailor of some sort a stevedore maybe or a deck-hand all cocked up and rippled with muscle and bravado – and what he had just then mistakenly assumed was that I was someone he should be chasing down for taking something from the deck of the ship – which of course I had but could never tell him or let on about – so I turned and simply said back quickly as I kept moving ‘it’s for Ed Trenery and he wanted it brought down to him immediately – you’ll have to take it up with him’ which was some form of the truth in the fact that yes there really was an Ed Trenery down on the wharf but he was in no way concerned with me nor what was in my hands and it apparently worked as an excuse or at least forestalled any further pursuit at that instant of me and of the two large brown satchels in my hands – which were stuffed with cash and had been sought immediately by three men in a strange black car out along West Street who – I’d noticed – were still awaiting my arrival and that arrival being made (at least long enough for me to get away) I dove into the opened door and the car simply and with great ease I might add sped away into the early dusk of any Tuesday evening and if I was pursued I had been pursued fruitlessly I’d guessed since no one seemed to be following and the apparent ease of the ‘heist’ – if that was what it was – in and of itself was alarming for me : I’d been promised a clean 75 bucks to do what was needed – which I’d just done – and that amount of money-as-pay had just been handed over to me "nice going how you went about that kid – took nerves and balls to just walk up there and you did it with both – good now beat it and stay close so’s we can catch up to you again when needed aw'right?" - I nodded my assent and scrambled out of the black Cadillac stretch somewhere I noticed just north of the US Postal building on Eighth Avenue and everything else – me and them included of course – just merged with traffic - me on foot in a half-rush and them in their black car tooling along pretty much like all the rest except longer and headed towards uptown and not across town and it felt good to have succeeded first time like that and I knew I’d see them again soon – once the taste of this gets in your mouth you just generally want more – but for the moment what interested me was in going over all of what had occurred in my head : the two briefcase-sized satchels had seemed to have had hundreds no thousands of dollars in them and the bills were all aligned and crisp and banded – so it wasn’t just some day’s receipts kind of thing or anything like that – they seemed perfect and clean and new and counted and separated – all that stuff just like a bank does – so I figured they were either bank-stuff already stolen or new bills just – shall we say – ‘mass produced’ and I don’t mean a church collection – I mean real solid-gold class A counterfeit money like ‘if it fits under the counter we take it!’ kind of dough : however what it was doing on board that little cargo ship and why these malfeasant knuckleheads too had an interest in it was beyond me AND why it was pretty much just left there untended and allowed to disappear as it did still wrankled me but I had done what was asked and gotten already my 75 bucks plus the good notion that I could work well and could do more for them sometime soon – I almost looked forward to the day.
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It was only later much later after I’d done this sort of thing 6 or 7 times that I found out what was really happening – and because of finding that out I stopped doing it (at probably a greater risk to my own life and limb) : the guys name was Antonio DeScarpa and he was from somewhere around Sullivan Street I forget but what came down was that one day we were somehow just talking and he was asking me a lot of questions about my interests and what I wanted to do and what I was doing all this stuff for – all of that sort of talk – and I began telling him about my interests in art and writing and learning and literature and all of that and of course it was like telling him I was interested in translating the Septuagint back into a new form of Greek and he just stopped dead in his tracks and ceased talking to stare me down and say – "get the fuck out kid and get the fuck out now ! this shit’s gonna ruin you for life – you’ll never live it down and sooner or later you’re gonna take a fall – y’unerstandin me?" – I had at that moment no clue as to what he was alluding so he explained it all for me pretty much as follows: ‘everybody ‘cept you is in on this heist – this is counterfeit money in a constant stream coming in from somewhere and everyone knows about it – the guy who leaves it laying around the guy who never chases you down though he sees you taking it the twerps in the car who drive you away and pay you their measly hundred bucks or whatever it is – the people on the boat the whole bunch of them they KNOW this is all going on – HUGE amounts of counterfeit money being brought in and distributed – tens of thousands shit hundreds of thousands eventually of money – and the only one right now in real jeopardy is YOU you dumb son-of-a-bitch – you’re a nobody and you’re the ONLY one they all know enough to finger if they’re poked – you’re the stooge the fall guy the whatever and if they DIDN’T want you to take those envelopes believe me they’d have shot you dead the first night and right now each and every time you’re brought back in you're getting closer to big big trouble and fuck all your dreams of painting or writing or whatever the fuck you’re talking about - now take this money and get as far the fuck away from me NOW as you can – I do NOT wish to see your sorry ass ‘round here again!" - and I did suddenly understand what I'd gotten in the middle of and good bad or indifferent as I may have been to it I sensed immediately the danger I was in now FROM BOTH SIDES actually and it was in some respects at that moment that I once more simply had the temerity (fortunately I guess) and stop and save my life.

JAKE JANNSEN - DRIVING WEDGES

2009-05-10T16:36:00.000-07:00

274. JAKE JANNSEN - DRIVING WEDGES (nyc, 1968):

When you drive a wedge you’ve got to drive it deep and hard so as to split the material it is entering - like ideas or philosophy I always thought that perfectly summed up the idea of revolution and subversive stuff : in no way an arms-carrier mind you I often did my share of breaking down the barricades and was never one to shy away from pushing for forms of violence or theft so as to take back what was illicitly gained in the first place - and if you look back at any of the big names in American finance or history you really can find that originally the source of any fortunes always came from graft corruption or some other form of law-breaking : buying of votes influence peddling trading in illicit freight or sanctioned good or – for that matter – making money from the buying and selling of armaments and bullets to both sides of any quarrel and (seemingly) taking a stance which favored both sides depending on to whom you were talking - all those Cos Cob estate and Wall Street fortunes ? all a sham a travesty and the rest - lawyers guns arms and money booze women slaves and the remainder of all that bootleg ancient trade in factors too sensitive to mention let alone the killing and beheading of hundreds of thousands and more of native Americans – called ‘Indians’ here’ who maybe just happened to be ‘in the way’ of all those double-crossed promises and pretenses with which the big military brass and the sovereign rights of the All-Mighty American power types ran through them like a lance through butter – one elongated steady and constant fell swoop as it’s put – and I for myself was never one to believe too much in any of that old ‘American’ nation-building Manifest Destiny Enlightenment Founding Fathers crap even though I knew and saw that it was being pushed at every opportunity by whomever it was at any moment who stood to gain something from it - banks or car dealers or politicians or schools or liars and cheats of whatever persuasion there could be who hung around sales reps’ offices and commercial agencies suspended in a greedy suspension of dis-belief so as to believe any of the bullshit penny-ante crap they were being paid to peddle and if they had to use the unlimited glories and high ideals of the great American Republic then so be it they’d do it - by those means were bodies delivered when needed were huge tracts of land and forests ripped and shredded for more and more stupid highway conversions subdivisions and rows after rows of stores shops malls and fantasy-amusement sham artifice - each one somehow connected with a built-up completely false made-up and concocted storyline befitting what it was they were meant to sell : some smarmy shit-assed Walt Disney like co-option of dream and subconscious in whichever manner those concepts intersected with real-true-daily-American money-making PRODUCTION - life as a sham and nothing more : at the end of 23rd Street there was the old pillar-and-shed construction of a pier long abandoned and in there lived an old wiry guy named Jenck Jannsen – some old Dutch or Swede or some sort of ancient American type who refused to budge and just stayed hunkered down there for as long as he chose – he looked to be about a hundred already but probably was no more than a cool forty-five but I never cared because no matter what he looked like Lazarus fresh from the grave - WWII Army veteran part-time gravedigger collecting a tiny bit of government money from service rendered and age and time but other than that the best he could do was get some change from passers-by or an occasional small heist of one sort or the other and I’d spend many a late afternoons just sitting around there sometimes with him watching the skies darken and the old wet winds come up blowing and in those days all along that west side area was truck freight and cargo depots and ship lines and piers and wharves and the like – and all of them had with them their own population of roustabouts flamers cargo guys heavers builders sailors with the occasional trader or buyer and seller mixed in - they were of course the ones in the most jeopardy because they wee always easy touches or easy types into whose cars it was a simple task to break and then take whatever it was could be found - sometimes cash money or briefcases with goods and samples and the rest - and nothing ever came of it and they never really knew what happened anyway but every so often somebody would get lucky and find a lot of this or that - and other times of course it would go bad and somebody would take a beating or get stabbed or pummeled and arrested – whatever and however it went – and the taxi guys would come around with their cabs and fares and people inside were sometimes unconscious or zoned out or drugged silent or tripping and whatever came of them was their problem and it went from every extreme you could think of to the other – talking here sex theft debasement and even just dumping off - drugs were becoming more prevalent as were the stupid misfits and kids tramping in from wherever and they always had nothing but trouble coming to them - so that even this Jannsen guy even he would sometimes have to look the other way to not see something he’d rather not know about or be witness to and anyway that was how he spent most of this time that and drink anyway and any time I spent there was time spent just watching and learning things seeing how they were done and watching how the graceful dull mantle of Fall and Winter settled in on the great awkward plain of New York Manhattan City as it fell : one time were sitting around together and he told me of the story he’d heard from like a hundred years back when parts of this area were still marshweed and mud and how it was once then the most dangerous place to be and bloodhounds and cops would sweep through the reeds and the flats almost every day looking for one or another thug or Irish dead body or businessman millionaire who’d been cut to death and dumped in these marshes while the family mansion and the estate goods were all looted and ruined and the building gutted and the firemen who all went along with the charade and the Westside crazy gangs who did this stuff – all those weird names I could never get straight – and he said sometimes if you went diligently ‘bout yer’ task you could still here and there find evidences of the old days even if it was just a bone or two but ‘skulls was the prizes the real gold – they can getch’a seventy-five bucks sometimes’ and yeah well I believed him anyway but by then everything had been turned over anyway and filled in with the muck and oil of the modern day but I listened nevertheless – and this went on for some time and then one day he wasn’t there no more and then the next and the next and I never knew what happened but it was the dead of Winter and he probably could have met his own dead of Winter in his own way by then anyway and yeah – for a long while – the old shed just stood there standing and always reminding me of him.

A COMMINGLING ON WHITE STREET

2009-05-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

273. A COMMINGLING ON WHITE STREET:

So here we have the 'powderhouse verve' - a reaction unlike any other something a separateness of living-to-live and Humanity - all of it - growing with every evening spray of light along glassed windows arrayed one after another with pictured logos - the words made flesh - depicting every pose of Mankind known with backlit energy and dingy dark-lit storeroom activities like the cobbler with his Cat's Paw soles bent serenely over the work table filled with shoes his leather apron in perfect shape the small tack hammer the bottoms of shoes turned upward up the little shoe-form work-vice over which he goes about his silent single task - the work of a life without a mask - heels and tips and polish and oils : the stonemason with his chisels and tools to drill and scratch and cut and etch and dig : the seamstress with her needles and sewing machines foot-treadle revolving wheel bobbin walker cloth : the woodmason with plane and hammer and rasp and saw and the polished finish of all and varied woods : the cabinet-maker with his forms the antiques artisan and his collected craft-period furnitures and fixtures the jumble of everything all thrown about on multi-leveled floors awaiting eyes and hands and bottoms : the mason and the writer and the bookbinder and the cook - glue seams paper print woods nails meats sauces crates and bushels the lawman the pistol-seller in his police shop the ragman the picker the dressmaker the dress-seller the carriage trade the horseman the pretzel guy the Chinese store the horseman and the lantern the Ming vase and the candle-shop the lancer and the driver drover teamster packhorse mover lifter weigher measurer accountant taxman preacher the purveyor of everything the glassman the glazier the painter the bakery the club the glass-blower sheet-glass window shop putty mirrors the zinc-baker chemistry man the bleeder the cutter the bishop the undertaker the gypsy fortune-teller open-window-shopfront the gravedigger the builder the plumber the fencemaker and all the rest every endeavor for which Mankind has grown a need and arisen and come to be the fruit-seller the vendor the cooker the cutter the slicer the butcher the farmhand the herdsman the killer the iceman the picker the broom-sweep the parsonage-keeper the sexton the bell-tower attendant and the accumulated everything of everyone existent and present - or - ALL Mankind YES! - it is that for which the graying light descends and tints all the windows with a blazing yellow-gold fire tinged red air and light with people walking to leave to board the train the steamer the ferry the tram the taxi the bus and all the endless rows of people picking through bread and rolls and candies and snacks the tubuler assortment of one vast lifetime of want the people in need and want in pain the aches the itches the rashes the causes and colds the cancers and the breaks the illnesses and the broken bones and limbs and injuries and unheard news and the stories the arrivals and departures the hordes boarding and disembarking the passings to and fro the goings and returnings and it is ALL that all for which the light develops and wanes and returns to color the fragmented glass of windows and cars and cabs and storefronts the newsman with blackened hands the waxy-eyed seller of stories and news the apron'd man the chestnut vendor taking glumly dim behind his wreath of smoke the charm of that smell the wants of kids and parents traipsing through Wintertime city streets or the wet sweats of Summer seeking cloths or clothes toys or trinkets gifts or things - any reason for coming out - the garish display the quiet display the air wrapped around light the sum and all and every total of each thing defining itself defining its season a tone a place a notion all humanity together and apart the words heard from the church doorways and organ musics shouted out careening around corners and passing trucks and buses and the crowds which linger to see what they may have left behind the Fifth Avenue lights the people in long coats and scarves and gloves the mufflers the mitts the boots the long-time destitute wares of all Summers too and Winter's sorry scape of clothing and layer and blanket and wool the sleighs with horses steamy-nosed in the evening darkness codding their hooves noisily and slow along the ancient and hardened street...

AND ALL THAT TOO

2009-04-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

272. AND ALL THAT TOO (nyc, 1979):

It wasn't about time it wasn't about grief it wasn't about anything really just both the place and the time - the very things which sustained me were just as steadily defeating me - and the entire pinion of what moved was wearing out and running thin : lights in the harbor and roadways along the coast EVERYTHING was changing and being taken away as the awful blot of a generic sterility was slowly taking over and one year on the waterfront the big thing was yet again another murder and then the very next year it was something totally different defeating and stupid : like the floating barge onto which the 'flower show' was going to be held - someone's absolutely stupid idea of some effete gentility parading as a sales-option for the fragrance and color of flowers and would people come ? hell yes and come they did - a few thousand of them for sure gawking and traipsing in over some silly green-carpeted gangplank through an area that once before had grandly transported trans-Atlantic travelers to the spectacular berths on their monumental steamships and NOW only now did I realize that the continual erosion of tradition and propriety had brought us to the present : hordes of societal geeks and razor-wired minds with no way out were intent on attendance at something so unjustifiably stupid as this : watercress and tulips in every direction with orchids and dahlias mixed in and an argument every step of the way in a passion of flowers and floral lore having absolutely no sense nor importance in the face of the indescribable glee of destruction and mayhem taking place right outside the doors - a city flooded with anger and evil falling apart on its very self and on the people who had mightily struggled to stay there and then just given up : piles of glass and broken brick old with I-beams and roof-panels from 75-year old buildings falling apart and crumbling down as knife wielding maniacs and drug-addicted repeat felons lurked in every alley and doorway all along the way to nowhere - whores operating out of the backs of box trucks with matresses lined up under the crumbling elevated highway along the westside piers and trucks turned into boudoirs of a very rough sort with runaways from Minnesota hiding out in their 15-year old fears and anxieties servicing sick men just wanting whatever they could get : and then mayhem itself breaks loose - thousands more gay men and gay women affixing themselves to a sorrowful and acrid prescription for death all along the abandoned wharves and piers up and down the westide of the village and Chelsea as IT DID SEEM the entire world was falling apart - I began carrying a revolver in my belt and a knife in my boot as I went about my own tasks there - working at a taxi-stable changing tires on a rushed timer and draining hot oil into tubs on the slick floors and carrying auto parts a few blocks from across the street to where they were needed and then - adrift myself - fighting off the crazed men and the morons who seemed never to go away and the unexplainable 1970's 'working-class urban priests' - the idiots who would walk along here and try to preach their form of salvation and jargon to people whose ears were dead - and right through the eighties all this went on as the cadavers piled up and the great sweep of epidemic death soiled and sullied the rows and rows of homosexual bars and palaces along the way UNTIL in a great heap of silence sorrow sadness and death no one else any longer could make any sense of any of this and everything just stopped : stopped like that ! like a buck-deer shot stone solid dead with a bullet in his head like a clay pigeon blasted from the very skeet-shot skies above my very head - it just went on and it all was just like that and all that too.

IN PRETTY MUCH THE MOST AMAZING MONOLOGUE I EVER HEARD

2009-04-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

271. IN PRETTY MUCH THE MOST AMAZING MONOLOGUE I EVER HEARD - (a jazz story, Jimmy Goodenough, Aug. 1969):

"Well that's an improvement" the old timer said while sitting on a concrete and stone half-wall separating the lawn from the shaded people - it wasn't just the tone of this voice that caught my ear but it was also the accent and his demeanor - both very interesting - so I decided the stop right there and spend a few moments with him as I had the time (I'd been working the last 6 hours or so with Cheng Dao Lee known as Charley an artist who had a huge apartment on W86th where he did his work and this day some of his large pieces needed crating and readying for transportation - which was simple enough work if one could be careful - and it involved building protective transport-frames of 1x2's lumber wood protective covering and nails all the simple stuff to construct around each 8 or 10 foot painting so it wouldn't get hurt during transport) and this guy on the wall looked over to me and said "sit down - what are you doing around here?" and I proceeded to do so as we started talking - this entire area by the 72nd street entrance to the park was always a favorite spot of mine - the geography right there is pretty active - little hills and vistas the wide front of the Natural History Museum and the Historical Society across the street and all those walls and benches and things along the walkway affording interesting views into the park or along the roadway - whichever one's preference - with which to wile away the time or just sit back on a nice day and take it all in : the old guy was just as interested in any detail I could tell him as I'd be in anything he told me - which meant like a half-interest just to help make a human-contact and pass some time - so I told him my current story - the art-school downtown the various little jobs here or there anywahere I'd undertake to get a few dollars and the varied ways and means of my wandering existence (of course I'd leave out the usual jibs and jabs of what went wrong and who did what) but no matter : he said his name was Jimmy Goodenough pronounced 'Goo-den-ow' which pronunciation he said was 'good enough for me' which I thought maybe was a joke but never found out really and he was some old jazz dude from the hep-cat days of 15 or 20 years back and he had for sure a certain attitude of his own to which I listened and was raptly startled and fascinated all together at once and although I'd never heard of him I just let him talk - "...now you've got the opportunity now you're young and should be open to everything you can let's say 'absorb' you dig ? like right so you got to always take a moment and look around - take those moments to boy because they're precious and by God then they just become scarce and just as important it is to listen JUST listen ! no other thing no other sound - just a note like any person would hear if they would if they COULD you see but they never do because the monstrous crossword puzzle of their dull mind won't LET them wherein the wailing and the good sense of all that is and remains hidden by the four-letter word I am thinking of 'MIND' or maybe even 'JAZZ' because they is BOTH you see the very same thing" - I liked the way he talked and it was old and intriguing I thought and hip too I figured probably -strong and enunciated and boisterous and exclamated too all at the same time but sensitive and observantly wise too but I figured not to step in what did I know and instead just let this old jazz guy go on (it did seem back then there were plenty enough of them about - in the waning days of old 60's jazz that I'd somehow bump into them now and again pretty often and it was just like an inner 'urge' or something to come forth and be personified in one of these guys) "and I am thinking of JAZZ maybe again or that be-bop hazing sound of evolution something like what went right past say Louis Armstrong from Fats Waller without anyone really noticing (what am I saying - oh shit they noticed!) until POOF right there was Louie with Lucy Baba Louie ruining the entire sell-out raggedy-muffin scene selling it all out for money and fame CHEAP fame mind you and some backstreet-curb-assed excuse for nigger or hipster of jive or cool whatever right here in black AND in white and the most destructive thing we ever did was the worse move we ever made was to co-opt the voice of the white-man's toady that nigger Armstrong vain ego-bleeding sycophant circus-tent juggler and them ain't MY words neither - they are exact words the words of Mongo Park his'self or someone very much like him - and then we let the whole ship o'shit pass on until now the scene shifts right under us to the ultra-cool hip of cigarette smoke cocaine-induced heroin-rambling spook-faced dead-man sit-up tunes in any smoky New York or Chicago blues parlor jazz club speakeasy big-hit hip tunes and supposed black nigger-tunes and white-man's stupid poetics tripping with the downtown jazz-girls soothing voices talking back ever so lightly to the sex-tinged super-cool waiters working for change or tip or pussy or lip or smack or whatever you want and it was right then as the whole entire major fag scene too erupted on New York's darkest backwaters that everyone finally smiled like even me and down at the Village and the old Cooper Union porch and the Five Spot Corner with suddenly fifteen new kinds of hippie kids a day selling everything and anything they could and it was all laid out on the sidewalk each day just piles of shit : boots records clothes tools artifacts paintings junk coats and you see don't you that the point was to turn one or two dollars a day at least in any way you could so to survive and all that 'angel-headed hipster' stuff made no sense anyway because the only people buying were either themselves back and forth to each other or unwholesome freak-faces from Long Island and New Jersey strolling through this trinket-touristy life like it all already OWED them something and no one made a move and no one knew a thing except that all of a sudden the hinterlands had come home to roost and the best we could do was stay in place and survive while it all wilted : the beats died the Jazz died the real color died and the only thing left was the co-opted motion of small time Jew merchants and beady eyed Italian neighborhood wranglers trying to make a buck off the blood and the spirit of dead kids already dying and struggling - they labeled it this or they labeled it that and tried to make it work : hippy-carnival-fantasy-land : but it couldn't and it didn't and at the same time these very kids were wasting themselves others of them were dying and frying in nowhere's land of fantasy - vision-power-HELL Vietnam" and so it seemed he wouldn't stop and didn't and it was really weird as usually I did hate old people and all their pontificating and bullshit about life's lessons and all that crap they never did and had failed to realize and blah blah they just go on but this guy was different he had an edge he had some freaked out wildman point-of-view about everything and it really did seem he had done everything and been all around - which got rid right away of the fakery and the doubt and made me want to listen at least just for the hell of listening and if I only knew then what I know now I'd have started listening a lot closer right off the bat there and then and how (and it really was the start of something big).

VAGARIES AND INDISCRETIONS II

2009-04-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

270. VAGARIES AND INDISCRETIONS II - Mr. Borodin and Hands Together (1967, art loft, the flower wagon):

He was a clown but a lackluster clown he was a terror but a poor terror he dealt with sticks and shovels but could not dig a hole and I never wanted to know his name so I never did - one day as I was walking to the far west end of 14th Street to a friend's loft just like that there he was pulling out of some grease-hole parking spot in a ratty Volvo and he smiled over at me and said "Hey Bonko ! Once I was a Swede and I invented Greed and don't you ever forget me or get over that either ! and how you been anyway?" and he was sincere that much I knew so I stopped to chat (I said "how about that!") and I was rolling a tire serenely at that moment down the street towards the loft if I could and I said "this is mine - we're using it for target practice when I get there - the big center hole in the middle is just right for our aim!" and he laughed back and said "what better way to look good!" and I spoke not a word except "speaking of looking good who's the babe who should be mine?" and he looked to his left and said "who her ? that's my new Sally from Oshkosh and she's posing for picture stamps at Roland's Arcade for Fine Art" and I mentioned as an aside that I'd been there before and he stuttered some words about "thought that was you good God" and sped off and I haven't seen him since though I've read his name in a few little this-and-that articles about 'Life in New York' and always do hope to meet him again and life is like that - one grand go-round grand guignol until you meet your own personal devil with his green-gray machete - and then it's coming your way all that way and nothing you can do about that.
-
And although it was all very strange indeed I let it be and I lived it too - and I mean I'd heard of 'let a hundred flowers bloom' and all that but this was enough to curl the icing on even the most sedate of cakes : and you must see too that going back and forth across midtown like that was always an adventure to me seeing as to how my own personal point of view had become skewed towards the wide-open spaces and non-rigeurs of loft-living and painter parties (14th Street by the way is the longest crosstown street in Manhattan - refer to any map) and painterly types just coming and going at will in their own form and format - dressed like bums or caring nothing about it either way - some were tediously informal while others who'd apparently come from money or of some finer breeding stock of family still bore with them the traces of a certain gentility more appropriate to Connecticut or Westchester or the upper eastside - a sort of noblesse which carried itself along into even the most scurrilous of habits (seemingly out of place) like sexual adventures or repeat yet transient relationships amidst paint-stained piles of rags and turpentined brushes and dripping and poorly-sealed paint containers - these people somehow affected a morality of cleanliness around themselves and even pretended not to notice more so as to be and act the 'truer' bohemian they'd heard of YET no matter what the initial impetus of their personal lifestyles and habits would always come through even if it was simply in the way they'd butter a roll or coat a bagel or drink their coffee - it was always there for all to see : 'you've become a perfect case of crazy' : I was told that once in one of these places by a guy who had a massive bump on his neck and a noticeable limp - none of which stopped him from being cool and hip (like any of those people who utilize their deformities or odd traits to further themselves along on the scale of uniqueness) and both of which came across as totally weird and boho-styled when draped in leather and fabric - he was VERY cool to say BUT Barnum's days were over I always said to myself and as he spoke I was riveted by his presence and just to hear him speak was both forthright and cool let alone hearing his opinion of me : I'd been non-descript enough so that I wasn't sure why he'd said that but then I realized he had in his hands one of my black-bound notebooks (which I'd left as always on the counter nearby) and he'd been reading from it for some time and apparently was taken by what he'd read - conscripted and engaging - enough to blurt out that comment and then he continued "this is some of the fucking weirdest narrative I've ever read and it seems to just go everywhere at a dart-whim's notice like your mind is leading everything along to wherever IT wishes to go - so very great and so very talented too - compliments to you young lad and let me see more!" - I figured 'another fag on the make' too and decided to assume an air of indifference figuring that if Andy Warhol could do it so could I and this guy was effectively silenced by it but he gave me his name card and an address w/phone number to keep and he placed the notebook back where it was found and got up to go but first he took my hand and said "I do know that we'll meet again in much more favorable circumstances for you my friend - Ciao for now!" and he waddled away "Charmed!" I spoke back fortunately unheard for it was actually filled with venom and I couldn't wait to see him fall down the stairway and crumble in a heap at the bottom served him right but it never happened and he got away successfully and without a scratch DAMN! thought I these sorts of people are dangling about everywhere and hasn't ANYONE ever heard of women ! but of course I knew the answer - for there were plenty of them around too but just then I thought back to Richard Meyer at the library and figured if 'vengeance' really does belong to the Lord then what's mine if anything and where do I get it from - but no answers came and the stairway was again creaking with some people who came up to look around and stay put for a while (this was all OK with me it wasn't my loft and I was used to just spending time in places and scenes like this - I figured to wait for the wine or the food or the soon-to-be-proffered pot I was sure but I always stayed aloof and kept away so as to stay straight while they all flopped around and got stupid or dazed) and sure enough right off the bat one of the girls - the one with the black leather skirt - starts grabbing allover this guy she was with and before long she's basically near naked and in his adroit clutches with not a care in the world (nice couch good scene decent view) and the others along with me just ignored it and let go whatever as so many other things were going on : talk viewing art discussing smoking stabbing the air wasting time : and it was like that often in these lofts and painter studios where oftentimes more non-work got done in workspaces that never seemed fully utilized for their intended purposes until much later or in the dark the solitary lunatic artist would somehow manage to get work done in some sort of solitary inspirational moving about with much of the mess from what had just been going on was still all about him or her - it was after all their own spaces and they needn't have cared nor cleaned - SOMEONE would always end up doing it for them.
-
And then when I got where I was going I put on the record player some Borodin and sat back to listen : wonderful sound those Steppes made for me : and I wondered what would happen too if I just at that moment decided to put my hands together in prayer and pretend to be once again that simple Catholic lad at play somewhere but I didn't - it was after all long past all of that and my personal jokes notwithstanding no one understood any of that anyway (I'd recently attended - in walking by - a church spectacle on St. Mark's Place where everyone brought in plates of food and after a small procession had them blessed by the priest - it was some traditional Polish parish and it was actually called the 'Blessing of the Food' for Easter or something I forget and somehow right after that I sort of swore never to even bless myself again IT WAS THAT WEIRD and without connection to anything even remotely salvageable as human but whatever)...I wondered what could be blessed here (maybe the riotous rabble along the street would do) but such such were the idle thoughts of a rabid Tuesday late afternoon that I simply stayed in place and listened and watched (I LOVE SPECTACLES) and soon enough someone addressed me anew : "Larry Swenson here hi how do you do?" and I smiled back and he said "this is Myra Wranitz and that's her sister Abbie" and I motioned towards them and said "hi nice to meet you" after which I spoke my name and told them I was friends of the artist here and they said they already knew that and had heard of me before and they knew about the Studio School and knew a few people there too and we shared names and mentioned acquaintances and then he asked if I was looking to stay there for a while or did I intend to move along and study further elsewhere and I told them I was really quite happy with things just as they were and that I'd continue and hope maybe down the line for some sort of a break if it ever came and they understood all that and then this Myra person spoke up "we were just sort of wondering what someone like you sees in all of this" and I said I didn't know what she meant but I saw whatever I could and hoped someday to put it all to use and I told her I'd maybe rather just be a writer I'd seen so many things and liked putting them down with other ideas on paper and that with 'art' and paint and such you couldn't just do that and if I ever got a chance I'd really like to find a way to meld the two together into some new sort of broadside art or message painting or something and they liked that idea but then I said it really wasn't my main concern because I wasn't much interested in getting 'lessons' across as they all usually just turn out to be crap-shit politic things and that was pretty useless and certainly not art the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists had already tried it and it was merely a thought that I'd had in passing and they said they could understand that but did I think there was any value in making 'message' art and I said "not for me I don't think and anyway I don't really have a message I just want to keep doing what I do and it's a pretty singular undertaking and you guys all outclass me by far in money talent and education too - I'm just a fringe character" and they smiled and looked at each other saying "but that's where we come in we'd like to move you up a bit and actually we can see you fitting in to something we're about to undertake called '30 Kids Who Matter' and it's to be sort of a traveling hippie troupe of artists and performers we're hoping to take around the country and show at various venues we'll be sponsoring" and at that point I shut them right off and said "forget it NOT interested - you're already trying to make something fit into a form you've pre-ordained and besides that you're looking to make a killing right?" and they said "yes" and I said "that's not what I'm about anyway and I really don't know how you got my name or what you think I'd do for you but forget it I wouldn't fit in and I'm not interested" - (sometimes now as I look back I think that maybe I was the one being a bit shallow and maybe I should have taken in on it and traveled or at least seen what it was going to be about - actually the only thing to have come of it really was a musical called 'Hair' - but that was another story and another place anyway - plus actually it was me who had just given them my name - though they did say they already knew it) and although they may have feigned a disappointment I didn't really think they cared either way and eventually they just left after a little more simple talk and of course it wasn't much long after that the whole silly scene was consumed by hippie-ania and whatever they had in mind was - for all I know - undertaken and finished : needless to say none of it mattered to me at that point : instead I was remembering the scene from the morning all of which was still fresh in my mind - it was a large flower-wagon being pulled by a horse and the driver was hawking the flowers as he slowly plodded his way along the street and the entire scene was almost breathtaking in that behind him as a sort-of theatrical scrim to his movement was a grand tableau of some of Manhattan's most beautiful buildings along Fifth Avenue and the slow clop-clop of the horse's hooves was like a sound-track to the slow movement and the driver's voice and even though I saw no one stopping the cart so as to purchase flowers it was nonetheless an amazing scene - vivid striking and fresh - and it recalled the many times I'd walked slowly through the 'flower district' as it was then called and witnessed the early-morning tradings and wholesale set-ups of any of an amazing and gargantuan display of plants and blossoms - a veritable full palette of color and hue which always somehow reminded me of an artist's color board all jostling with paint and that memory then brought forth another one of the even older funeral corteges which used to go by these very same streets at the turn of the 1800's into the 1900's as one by one the wealthy of old New York died off - the same slow clop-clop of funeral wagons and their attendees walking or riding their way slowly and with much less color through these old streets and I wondered about the presence and the feel of those passages and those wagons and where they all had gone : I wondered a lot you see about a lot of things : but in no time at all there were other people in the loft coming and going and the two on the couch were done (apparently) with each other and now they just rested while others around them wandered at will - this whole 'loft-living' thing may be hard to understand from a distance but these early-use lofts were quite large and quite open and still very 'industrial' in format and here and there they were broken into walled sections or approximate rooms perhaps for privacy or comfort and each of them - whether artist-studio or not - had massive space set aside for work and I'd been to lofts used as movie sets and lofts used as libraries and meeting centers and lofts used as dance halls too and much of it was always the same - the old columns the stairwells and elevators the plumbing and electric most often exposed along the walls and the blowers and fans used for heating and only sometimes cooling suspended from ceilings and brackets along walls and I'd seen blanketed and carpeted walls and lush floors or wooden floors and good windows and bad windows and I kind of loved them all - let's say I never found a loft I didn't like - even the dingiest and most dreary of them and I just found them to be completely interesting and always subtle and attractive and I thought of them as a perfect adjunct to city living in the same way as the most expensive townhome could ever have been and I liked all the garish and jarring industrial use appurtenances and platforms and lightings and coolnesses and concrete and dock-entries and concrete pillars and the old wooden stairways I COULD GO ON for I was fascinated by these lofts.

TO THE DOCTOR OF BREATHTAKING ELEGANCE II

2009-03-29T17:33:00.000-07:00

269. TO THE DOCTOR OF BREATHTAKING ELEGANCE (II- 'won't that be the day'):

And oh baby thy namesake is golden - swimming thirteen laps already in that sad sad ocean of doom - and have you heard all the cats just talking and talking - be-bop diddly-wop - while they played horns and they crooned 'oh the black man's in the alley again and I can hear my mama just saying 'when' as she sneaks out the backporch door' but the small piece of paper the workman left me said nothing when I read it but this: 'leave open the final opportunity - for chance will never come your way again' and I took it to the gypsy who couldn't read a thing but said instead she'd 'never seen a such as this before' and lit a candle and I left holding the bag she'd given me : the low black car along 23rd had just stopped near the Chelsea Hotel and a wild Winter storm was coming - the frothy Hudson was waved and twisted over and over again upon itself : and here it was ALREADY 1968 so so dawning : two guys had gotten out and then a third who swaddled some woman in a big thick coat and together swiftly they all went into the lobby and sweltered a moment in that way-too-hot heat only a lobby can give and they disappeared to where I knew not and the girl whom I knew only as Marney had just settled down in her chair so I sat next to her to start this conversation and she smiled delightedly and said 'let's go upstairs' by which she meant New Year's Eve was approaching or had just passed (I can't remember) and once we got there she gave me a small package wrapped in paper and told me to open it - so I did - and what it was was a photo in a small book - a photo of Pablo Picasso kissing her hand - and she said she wished for me to have this but just for ONE year and I had to give it back IF I TOOK IT this very same night a year from now - she'd gotten it in Malaga when Picasso was there - she spend three or four days with him and his wife in the stucco-white atelier they were staying in - fame might have had its perks but I couldn't yet figure where she fit in : and I agreed to all that and we had a glass of wine and soon after I left with the photo and the book (a miniature Inferno) and I stayed intent for a real long time on seeing her again the very next year - to give it all back or just to see her - but as it turned out I saw her lots of times until about August - when she disappeared and that was the end of that and the photo ended up FORGOTTEN and forlorn somewhere to this day unknown BUT when and if I ever turn it up again WON'T THAT BE THE DAY!
-
They made you partake of something you didn't understand or share feelings for they made you a parfait of the elements of swank - in their thinking - while you were used to gnawing on tar they underscored your alignment with rightness by saddling you with depth and meaning unlike the reality you brushed through they made you listen to the noises of steam in a carriage-house of dread while you were used to fast light at the edges of travel - places where things compress and draw back into themselves and solidify and gain mass before disappearing BUT 'once the orphan always the waif' as the Sisters of Mercy said so you went along not willingly but along nonetheless and they threw marbles back at your face and the sting-marks of rebuke left small welts not yet healed and your place at their table was taken over by a bear who did tricks for a master and the dances of wizards seemed broken by the factory-light of some pale yellow fire and the death-defying gorge from which some sacred river roared seemed deeper and rockier than ever before but the highlands - you knew - always have lakes which then drain to the lowlands and that was the one noise you heard - the thrust of the minions of three-thousand sickening faces looking up the swamp of iniquity where the piled-up people built their villages and towns - fens of diversion malodorous buckets of scum swamps and perverted valleys with hangmen seeking trees for a noose to be placed on perfect fat limbs : there was no succor nor solace in what was left after any of this but you withstood it all nonetheless.

READING THE MATCHBOOK COVERS

2009-03-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

268. READING THE MATCHBOOK COVERS:

"Men are all alike and so are all their Gods – I found that out a long time ago – all that vengeance and anger violence and retribution and the killing of the masses that goes with it all and I never know why but the only thing I’ve ever gotten from this stupid world is sadness – the sadness that comes with it : that absolutist bullshit crap about men killing men for a cause and men taking it upon themselves to rule over others with the solid stipulations of rightness AND righteousness too and the straight-line direct message from the Gods stuff by which we apparently murder and maim each other and it’s all a direct link to stupidity and madness nothing else : I’ve been sickened over time and over again by things I’ve seen and heard : the stupid Spaniards who put a bull in a bullring – first unloading him blindfolded from the rear of a truck – after dousing his horns with gasoline and then setting him free after the horns have been lit into flames – stupid sucking bastards these famed Christians are – and then cheering as they watch the bull rave and rant to its death in some forlorn corner of the arena – WHAT PRIDE’S IN THAT for a God OR His creation you’d have to tell me that – or the American Appalachian hunters who select the dog with the least succesful treeings for the afternoon and hang him from a tree in glee and I’m sickened by the sadness around me : animals like corpses along decimated highways left to die and rot after being massacred by cars and the time a thousand small frogs in some post-rainstorm frenzy were crossing Route 6 at dusk right by the ‘Camptown Races’ Stephen Foster sign by Wyalusing Rocks and the cars going by just ran them over by the hundreds – smashed frogs and guts all over the roadway – what kind of God would forget this stuff in the equation and not kill off Mankind – if even as merely a gesture of His own righteousness about His own work : how can this be accepted how can any source of justice be found coming from a mess such as this - meandering millions of evil idiots crawling and crowding over the very globe they’re ruining and NOT A WORD BACK in either direction for this God or that God nowhere and Mankind in its eyes harbors resentment and hatred and cannot then fathom its own reasons why RUINATION is its wont REVOLUTION its aberration as the thunder roils and rolls overhead the great pealing of perfection breaking back over itself and every God story has its own ending : while we ‘wait’ for Salvation (again) or fire up the maddening guns for to make RIGHT the world in the WAYS of GOD – hang-dog message-mentor that it is – there is no meaning but rot and there is no passage but the one to DEATH and to BACK from whatever oblique blackness we once came from EMITTED like atoms spit forth atomically and clinking to the darkest sides of some magicians swift DNA – ‘we are monkeys not men and we prove it and then…’ SO I’ll mention once more – ALL men are the same and so are their Gods" and as he was talking to me I was sitting up in a chair reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius which reading he’d interrupted to tell me what he’d just told me - based I guessed on the premise that he saw that I was reading about Gods : and I might as well have been since they were all alike – Pagan Animistic or Religious doesn’t matter – and I wanted to harken back to where I’d been and tell him I’d been there and visited and seen and lived the times KNOWING FULL WELL that all it would do would be to certify back to him and confirm that he was right in his meager and raging opinion but WHAT HAD I TO WAGER no sum worth anything : and the thunder overhead pealed again and the thin stick of lightning jagged lit its jagged way down ‘God’s saber this ? God’s diminishing sword?’ I questioned myself : "for Pete’s sake" I said to him "why don’t you stop your harrowing outrage and get down to business here anyway – like what the matter really is is you’ve got nothing to do and too much time to do it in so your brain is breaking things down way too much : people don’t give a shit about that stuff – if they’re told to ‘live like this’ they do it and if they’re told to ‘go to church’ they do it or repent or pray and seek the God of their likeness – notice I said likeness not choice – why is it every man’s God in the end comes out looking just as they do anyway ? which is to say as sadly humanoid as possible?" and my point was (even though no one was listening) fairly much the same as his had been : Mankind are dolts the message is sadness and ALL THINGS LIKE THIS DO PASS AWAY - - (but hell I said to myself I could have read all that on a matchbook cover for what it all was worth)….

SOMETHING LIKE THIS SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED

2009-03-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

267. SOMETHING LIKE THIS SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED (a story of misunderstanding; 1998):

There are moments when conversation stops all time and the only recourse one has is to listen and review - like the cowbells coming across the field - tolling deftly from the neck of every cow leftover lame vital and what-not - and a part of us each knows that reality is real while another part recognizes the fact of its fiction and its subjectivity within all the made-up attributes of a sad and sorry life : the guy with the hunched shoulder rolling down the street with a bag filled with debris - light or weightless things he's picked up from along the way to try and redeem for small change as if already the misinterpretation of redemption can work in his favor or be put to use for his benefit : we pile on meanings one after the other and as wrong as they get to be so the deeper they're piled - skylights and mass parades - thousands of fools out on the street with a regular and unceasing levity yelling and screaming and laughing for something else - lines and acres of girls in small shirts at the curb with all their boys and boyfriends - a gaggle of serfs - hanging drunk at their necks and the color guard of police and fire and mayors and priests walks by with their canes and brittle thoughts and wheelchairs and harbingers of things to come : death riots and fires for sure : and EVERY man at EVERY moment is making his or her own pure unfettered eternal and unceasing definition about all things - "And Jacob once the tomb was empty what else was there to do except believe in something miraculous and the bones anyway the bones never showed up and that was the simplest thing - all the authorities had to do if they wanted to stop this crazed band of nascent Christians was to produce some bones - in fact ANY BONES would have done - and disprove in their way the occurrence of which everyone spoke but nothing like that ever happened nothing of the sort occurred and they let it all keep running on and eventually PERFECTLY it fell into place into something and neither lions nor martyrdom nor slayings and killings and ostracism and outlawing could put a stop to it as it grew fingers and added doctrines and made its rules and credos and new beliefs over old beliefs and before it was too far on the everything about it had become everything else and political power and secular rule became its order of the day but JACOB again NONE of that would have happened if they didn't will it to and that's the run of the world today - that's what we're left with the remnants of all which occurred and every offshoot from that which still exists today is what we're still fighting over and there will be no loving end to anything of this sort but any fool who fights for God is fighting for a DEFINITION alone - that and nothing more can you understand that Jacob?" and Jacob said "why do you believe everything you read and what if it never happened like that ? what if this was all made up in say 719 and they added AD to it for credibility and the entire back-story of all mankind can be adduced to be fictitious and without any basis in reality - have you ever considered that - and perhaps you're nothing more than - as all of us - a captive complete and total to whatever they've told you occurred" : it was an endless story and the push and pull of all things is what kept us alive - now I won't go on to say this conversation was something I wanted to listen to ad infinitum BUT it was interesting enough and these people were characters in the way that fiction makes characters who embody concepts which the story needed and that's probably just as artificial as anything else since - using myself as an example - whatever I was told when I was young I've since later found out was wrong incorrect lies and crap the stuff like 'statesmen never lie cops are your friends the priest will help you do this for your own good' and a million more things I've wrestled with mentally but never talked over and (as I recall) the last friendly conversation I had with my father was as I drove him home from another of his problems and all the way home he talked about the moon and everything about the moon and who'd been there already and who really made it there first and what the Russians (he called them Russians not Soviets) were planning to do and it all made little sense to me because I didn't view the moon in his terms - as if it was some form of political real estate that someone had to inhabit just to show who was boss - and the entire framework of that thinking and that thought was bogged down in nothingness and we never got anywhere with that one : but anyway I'd have rather talked with him IF I HAD TO about the beauty of its light and the odd regularity of its passage and waxings and wanings and what it all meant for those before us and the eons of time it was seen from the sea by sailors with nothing else to do or see.

THE THIRTEENTH OPTION - Living Through the Depression

2009-03-06T18:38:00.000-08:00

266. THE THIRTEENTH OPTION - Living Through the Depression:

And thus the gentlemen of the jury took their seats and the others arrived – those who would watch and comment and criticize – and then the judge himself came in and sat down on the big royal elevation but just as he did so the chair itself creaked and broke and the lower leg twisted itself out and deposited the judge upon the floor by which time a messenger had arrived bearing papers from a notary which attested to the fact that the manufacture of that chair was already suspect but by then the judge had reasserted himself forward and slain the two guards who’d allowed this to happen and as beleaguered as everyone was - for fear is a great leveler and evidently no one really wishes to die - the room was abuzz with crickets and wallflowers and the old woman who had walked up from the basement was relating the story of the estate sale from Saturday at which an ancient man had come in asking far too many questions of the house and time and home and possessions and he walked away purchasing nothing and that had made everyone suspect of his motives and "WHEW! was he strange!" she’d said and "all we were trying to do was help out the Marsden family which was in some hard times after Helen died and by selling the old house and all she’d once had they were getting some financial savvy into their lives and even the grown kids were happy – even though Helen was dead – because they’d been able each to take their own favorite things and photos and mementos for themselves so that anyone else traipsing through the house wouldn’t matter to them" and just then the judge arose and said "I still profess that you all were trespassing and had no real business in that place for in reality it was not yours and never had been but for this moment we’ll let that pass" and he sat back down with a big pass of air and it was actually that pass of air which had gotten my interest but again he started professing something sonorously like a judge in the true modern sense of the word "I am not an impartial observer here you see and never have been for there was a time when I was deeply in love with Helen and she with me so I must take objection to this course of events and they say that Justice is blind but let me tell you it’s a false blindness which is caused by nothing more than – if you’ve never noticed – the blindfold upon her eyes which is processed and put in place by enemies of the court and they seem to feel that if you convince enough people of your impartiality and blamelessness then that will simply make it so but it never does and the entire thing is a pack of lies and actually I’VE HAD IT I’m done I quit I’m leaving this bench!" and with that he left the chambers and was never heard from again not even in the annals of legendary justice or any of Albee’s plays or anything of that nature and since that time – and probably because of it – it has became really boring to just hang around - and so everyone then left one at a time singly or in clumps but I REALLY HADN’T NOTICED.

BIG TIME JAZZ-BOOKING STORY

2009-03-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

265. BIG TIME JAZZ-BOOKING STORY - 'you can stay with uncertainty a really long time' (nyc, Nov. 1968):

Terpsichords and violins together made the sound of an unusual jazz ensemble tapping sounds on tipcloths and bottlecaps - it was almost as if right then at that time there was 'time' being made - cool guys on platforms wearing tophats and blowing tight horns while their feet kept time and the bodies swayed and in the background a wild drummer interspersed their time and rhythm with his own time amidst a wild staccato beat broken only by moments piled upon moments and no words could suffice ever to break in through the haze of sound and the cacophonous ride of scale with music : out front and lounging along the few tables and chairs nearby were half-wasted people with twisted faces looking up just to watch what was happening and maybe getting it maybe not but in either case present for the execution so to speak and even though this was but a final rehearsal they listened and the real playdate was that night - a few late sets rolling way into the wee hours but everyone was already set : one time I was on the street while the trucks lumbered by - delivery guys and freight-loads coming and going - and it was a lame mid-afternoon day in a cold grey late winter climate and everyone seemed tired of the cold tired of coats and tired of just being but it was that time of year too when a person knows things are about to change and the body can sense the new light and absorb somehow the new temperature and movement of the very air so that any unsettled feelings of cold or weariness can be withstood merely by expectation and hope alone - things to come will be better than the present - I looked at the poster on the entrance-wall and realized I'd mis-read the word and that Terpsichord was the name of the ensemble playing and not really an instrument at all but also (as Terpsicore) the name of the Greek muse of choral song and dance which didn't really fit but so what maybe I'd just missed it all and some people out front were busying themselves with the back end of a big station wagon which was filled with bolts of carpet or something which they were throwing onto the pavement nearby as some Spanish guy kept taking them into the next building and this went on for a while as I watched and I wondered how and why all these people had come to be - just going about their tasks each day in such a wide-open world all these closed routines - and it was as if I saw the very future stretched before me in that I was knowing that at some point I too would have to come to terms with life in that respect - what to do with all these days and how to go about that vapid routine of living and as the things of time came by me over and over in repeated manners I sometimes thought to myself that 'anything' would have to be better than that - better than taking the place and the station amongst the haphazard rank-and-file I saw around me repeating their daily chores but I saw too that I had nothing I had no more promise to go on then did the window-washer across the way or the Spanish guy hauling carpet and even though I was for now in the advantageous position of just 'being' without connection it wasn't going to last forever but a part of me didn't want to engage just didn't wish to come up to the cruising speed needed to mesh with what was around me and I realized then that THAT was the calling of art or music or at least the finesse of sensitivity which made creative types always outsiders but realizing and coming to grips with that brought me nothing but comfort and in my way I sensed that maybe a comfort level of such a personal dimension was - in reality - the entire purpose of life anyway but NOT in the self-indulgent way of merely doing (or not) what one wanted but instead in reaching the inner achievement or attainment of personal creativity so as to make and weave the thread of one's life into a sensible form or at least some resemblance of that to those who watched (and to whom I guess it mattered) - outside the studio doorway on the third level of the building was a sign which read 'Matador Productions - Management and Booking / fine art and jazz ensembles' and believe me it sounded bigger than it was for in actuality it was merely a booking agent for 'talent' which in this sense meant jazz quartets of whatever merit which were booked around town at any of the various nightclubs and cabaret/restaurants that wanted to 'trade' on the Jazz name but were more than happy with second or third tier acts that no one really cared about and this is what I had been listening to - another set by another small groups of guys heading out for their night's gig - it was all run as usual by some chubby guy in a cheap suit and plenty of sweat and humidity named Goldsmith or Goldberg or somebody like that - usually failed perfume salesmen or sixth-grade history teachers who'd chucked one career for another but got by in both cases by doing nothing and trading off the work of others and they'd sit around and throw promises like darts and wait to see if anything stuck so that there were always people around dumb enough to believe all this crap who figured they really were on the verge of stardom and discovery by playing maybe just two more weeks at Hanley's Chop House or Trolo's Bistro and Cabaret or the Big Fixx Club or whatever - it was all the same and nothing ever mattered - they got their 30 bucks a night and they stayed late probably three or four nights in a row dicking with the chicks or getting laid easy and then they waited for the next one to do it all again and Goldsmith or whomever it was always got the big take and always talked big and got the next schedule card to fill out all over again and - yeah yeah it just went on - and these were always cheap green offices with poorly painted green or ivory colored walls and extension cords and phone lines brought in on temporary hookups - all cheap and all tacky just like Goldsmith or Goldfine or any of the rest and what I'd do was for five bucks a day was move things around or pull wires from here to there or hammer together another pedestal box for some jazz-cat to stand on and limelight his solo and once in a while I'd get to plunk away on a piano as some form of accompaniment to whatever I was hearing - no one cared and no one stopped me though I was never sent out with a job-crew or anything and I never cared but there was one time I was let out to fill a drummer's roll in a song or two while the 'drummer' was out doing whatever and twenty minutes later he was back and I was done - that was at some east-side club out by the UN in the 50's somewhere and yeah it was fun but I had no card nor license or nothing of that nature so it was on the sly anyway and yes fame and stardom like all the rest it eluded me too but I was able to stay steady and just dig the chance.

IF IT WILL EVER BE LIGHT AGAIN

2009-02-24T17:24:00.000-08:00

264. ...IF IT WILL EVER BE LIGHT AGAIN (nyc, november, 1967):

But let’s listen no matter for the water is washing the walls and the sea is coming up from its limitless depths and flooding the walkways and the saltwater seeds what it can as fish die flopping around and the little pace of seaside snails and crab-legs too are seen slithering slowly to their own small demise - the windows stay wet and everything is damp and there really is no weather any longer - for the sky has become the air and all atmosphere as only rainclouds perform at street-level now and fog is the name for the daylight : we wish it were not so BUT yet it seems as if this civilization is over and ‘we have tanked the attempt we have surely ruined the effort but whether or not we get another chance is the question on everyone’s lips’ and at night when the world goes dark it is such now that no one is ever sure any more if it will ever be light again (and for that a certain uncertainty is certain).
-
Nonetheless those who linger will stay behind - watching the seawall falter watching the great ships at anchor and seeing the riotous waves as they surmount the bulwarks and the walls the bulkheads and the landings and everything will seep and totter and twist and fall : there will come (most certainly) a time when the momentary lapse of whatever resembles calm will overtake us all and the waverings and movements of the world around us shall seem as nothing else but this - a wild ponderous degradation a failing of the essences a destruction of elemental notion and a complete fragmentation of the unitary world as we have ever known it.
-
And then I went far downtown - to where the Lebanese guys along the West Street piers drank their lime colas and heavy brews from chairs they'd set up on the roofs and they'd sit there and watch the evening fade to darkness and they'd curse the west and curse the darkness AND the light together and then the one who knew would get up and go inside and he'd come back out with two rifles and they'd point straight out to the west and looking across the Hudson in the dwindling light they'd simply fire their guns until there was no sound left and the darkness came and they'd invite me in and we'd sit some more - this time with their sickly sweet tea - and I'd listen for hours to their weird crazy tales about other lands and other places and what I knew of the differences between counted for little - Beirut to Ankara and Turkey to Lebanon - none of it meant anything to me just a breath of fresh air in the late 1967 air.

JUST AS WE BROKE - SO THEN WE STUMBLED

2009-02-20T19:19:00.000-08:00

263. JUST AS WE BROKE- SO THEN WE STUMBLED (nyc, art-studio, 1968):

The surrendered angle the alcove of some mad perdition the shade of an arching tree – any of those things could have held me forth or kept me dangling just above the edge of danger : masked men shooting randomly into crowds myself included with very inauspicious endings but I just went on paying no mind to what was around me and marveling instead at the sharpness of the attitudes I’d see : the fat guy from the music studio engineering a full board of slides and power turning a set of songs into something they never were – adding tympani and verve to what the poor guy had barely whispered the firemen out front of their station – slowly painting red the old wooden doors – probably their 50th coat of paint (it was thick like its own separate plywood) since its own time began and I wondered ‘why does nothing change do all things just go on?’ and even though of course I knew the answer I asked too - words anew for something sterner to do – 'question existence ! pander to nothing for the common man ! take no prisoners!’ and of course and most importantly ‘whitewash no fools!’ - which last one I never really knew what it was supposed to have meant BUT nonetheless I always thought an idle man to be a dead man and so BECAUSE OF THAT I lived on and just kept working I hoped at something : walking swiftly down Great Jones Street or Cornelia or Sullivan or 7th or Spring - all of those weird little enticements half neighborhood and half trying to be international-in-flavor big-city streets and stores but in essence none of it was anything except for whatever gloss was put over it all by storytellers and guidebooks and tourist crap and truth be told each street such as these was filled up with the anxious the loud or the angry or fired up old Italians on their last red-sauce legs or crinkly wizened Orientals shuffling along bent on something and bent of back with Slovaks and Spanish and Negro porters leaning into doorways or peering out windows to see what was down below – the airshafts filled with debris and mattresses broken bottles and cans the old window sills the stone of which had either been already broken or chipped away or in the process of becoming someone’s ridiculous artboard for profane graffiti or ignorant markings and the tumbling beatnik potheads or ghosted storytelling hippies crossed each other like twisted ships in the night : half-hearted artists and gay young men with brushes and flowers to paint while staring at naked beauties posing as models for artists-to-be (‘there’s nothing easier than this’ she said ‘anyway they’re all queer men so nobody makes a move’) guys drinking black coffee from oversized Okinawa mugs – dark colored hints of something in magenta clothing with oh-so-flamboyant scarves – and the fortune-tellers were out in force squeezing little hearts into over-sized chests while the lesbians geeks sat at the bar at Bar 55 staring out in their overalls and jodphurs and boots and everyone was smoking something while they littered the field-of-play at the Sheridan Street Station with old New York Times or Village Voice junk and gum was stuck to the flagpole and some stinking old rag hung limply forlorn – turpentine-battered oldsters asleep on any bench or guys with their dicks hanging out just barely exposed but touching themselves nonetheless while they watched : cars taxis and buses the subway beneath the Maidenform bra mothers and the 18 years old girls pretending to be pure while salacious horny cops twirled their sticks as they slowly walked on watching everything and nothing too or seeing it all but seeing nothing : and as I watch the fey young kid waltzes by as lightly as an angel with a wiggle to boot he floats along as gaily homosexual as a butterfly or hummingbird could be and I wonder about it all ‘self-consciousness’ at least or ‘what’s he feel as he does that stuff?’ or ‘are they born in the wrong skin or in different skin anyway just trying to get out?’ – and surely nothing of it mattered to me but I wondered like a saint in some pure wind-driven snow and I was thrown to nowhere in this mixed-up mash of people : as I often wondered are we ‘a part of this life’ or just witness to it ? do we take in our awareness while playing a part in it too ? are their still mysteries about - about things which will be found ? and up high above my head I stare at the sunlight passing across the old building top – old wooden-plank siding and two small windows in a leftover house from 200 years back – leaning and creaky small and yet serene amidst all the city verve that’s grown up around it and only in this part of ‘town’ as they call it can these old places yet be found - the twisted lanes and wooded copse of an old Greenwich Village and the surrounding areas of what once were marsh and brook with twisty lanes turned reluctantly into streets and the potter’s field and ammunition grounds to parks and groves and every corner has another old vista - wooden buildings once shacks that housed the masses and these quaint old buildings were still stuffed – like stuttered words in an active mouth – between things and behind others as the new and old mingled and the lazy days and evenings brought forth the memory and attitude of everything that long ago was – I watch the sunlight make a triangle in the sky and a geometric proportion of goodness on high and the imagined tri-arc of light to sun to window and sky somehow sweetly settles my brain – some personal and cosmic overflux of peace and well-being and the storyline of what once was but shall be no more : yet somehow it makes me feel fine.

ATLANTIC CITY - SHIVA LASH MONTALVO (2006)

2009-02-14T15:17:00.001-08:00

262. ATLANTIC CITY - SHIVA LASH MONTALVO (2006):

The yellow-handed congressman with the broken leg had just left Trenton for Lower Egg the Atlantic City coastline the cesspool of correspondence and circumstance and luck and coincidence : the fat Mafia boys in their tie-dyed suits were walking two-by-two down the sacred old boardwalk of what used to be : peals of laughter cries of glee and that crazy diving horse jumping precariously - and in each pocket they had a gun and under their suits a very-penny-ante bulletproof vest which sequestered their chests and their sternums pressed - but nonetheless the moment of the day was high-noon and the fair old sky was passing soon - bright golden sunlight arrayed and the spraying ocean high was rising - overall and each a pleasant horizon : and here comes the Boardwalk Goddess herself - one Shiva Lash Montalvo - walking along as without a care and singing a song to herself she sees the black car approaching off to the side and know just knows it's her afternoon ride but first she must preen one more time for the manager fellow in the nearby lobby who as usual will take her up to his office and make sure she 'still has her voice' - likely shot that - and she shrugs off and hates what she does but it's a living to make and make it she does - she enters the Palace at Ocean Avenue where she performs every other day and 7 and at 2 for the warm-up evening crowds and the late-night boisterous few (they know no time and care not to) and she remembers her grandmother used to say (a dancer too in the old days) 'performing each day at 5 and 9 is still better than 5 and dime' - nice sagacious thought she always felt but grandma's dead now some 18 years - and that withered old lady was worrying about her granddaughter and any possible failure or career disaster - whatever that ever meant - but no matter as time went on and Shiva prospered and grew into something actually quite sweet and 'cry me a river cry me a river - I cried a river over you' became just one of the old quaint standards she sang each day and both glitter and nearly nothing : standing straight standing fashionably tall and sexy while in her spare time and on the side studying things - the likes of Henry Chapman Mercer and John Sloan instead during mornings at the nearby community college where she wished to major in art but found herself instead studying phrenology and reading old phrenology drawings those kinds with the compartmentalized sketches of the brain and what part controls this and what part controls that and she read all about Walt Whitman and all that New York and Camden stuff she could find and she tried to learn whatever she could while working and earning too and it wasn't always easy : the roving eyes of men the grand gesture of the stage-lit singer the investment banker's greedy hands - - and now she stares out at the sea thinking of her future self and what it should be - withered and tired and old as slime or happy and joyful and enjoying the time - and she realizes she'll never know no matter until it happens no matter and in the distance she watches the ships roll by with the horizon tethered to nothing at all and the open harbor great steel beach crawling on the level sea and knows her chips are down and it's getting hard to be and she wonders 'what shall I sing when the audience is gone ? what shall I sing what song?' and this talent-house local queen of the labyrinth came out of cattle-call number 11 in the Summer of 'o1 and she never has left - benighted city broken-down garbage heap of false-promises-rubble-trash and junk beat-up hostess broken-down chattel-tramp of siding salesmen and used-car bilkers and matinee-mashers criminal drunks and crooks - and she realizes the mob guys are still out there strolling so she stays put - Elk's lodge and ladies auxiliary bus-rides long trips to sin-city nowhere at all - trashy old women and their dead-to-die husbands together shopping-mall field trip from anywhere loading cranky elders into their one-death to live tramp steamers and stuffing them all in one place to die - the 'Ride and Die' contingent it's called but the new signs say 'Fun' while the people sing and the boats careen and one day along the harbor she hears 'Mommy Mommy I want to sing like that someday too' and the family from Pennsylvania waits in line and they hold the little girl's hand and then someone handing out leaflets approaches them and says 'are you better off without Jesus ? are you better off at all?' and they question the question looking back at the asker cold-stone scared into a mirror of doubt and invisibility and say back sheepishly 'well yes we are - actually we're here aren't we?' and their pale non-answer has to suffice and they all start walking away three abreast while skywriters overhead leave marks in the sky and a small plane trails a banner across the beach reading 'Rocky's Palace - Great Eats Beach Party' but no one says a word for as it seems to her all the world is quiet but she's singing 'the world's a better place...for you for you.'

TWO-BIT PHILOSOPHY ON VANDAM STREET

2009-02-07T07:19:00.000-08:00

261. TWO-BIT PHILOSOPHY ON VANDAM STREET (nyc, 1968):

It was peculiar to its time and place - windswept waters near the road covered by leftover cars with fins and carousel-trucks still wet with kids and mothers - the simple sort of things one finds at carnivals and flea-markets at the broken edges of both marshes and minds - all those flaky neighborhood kids coming out with broom handles and bats to play stickball at the back of the alley where the old factory trucks still slumping slowly lost the air in their tires and the right to ride : anyway those three vagrants who lived there had always lived there and nothing for them had changed - cardboard to pressed board and a shopping cart to boot - just like the exotic animal that was shipped from New Zealand but never made it to the zoo from Paris to New York it came - all those outlandish ideas of eccentric men tumbled over the years ('we are free we are slaves God is dead God is enraged it's all up to you it's all pre-ordained' - listen up and take your pick) - over the years nearly all of Manhattan's weird streets accumulated myth and legend one over the other with personalities and activities arrayed from the likes of Barnum and Lincoln and everyone in between and since - playwrights authors robbers and thieves cheats and swindlers whores and preachers scribblers artists dramatists painters builders charlatans liars explorers men of science pimps hookers whores doctors and kings too in every walk of life there's trouble and joy whether an amble trot or run they come the came and they stayed and because of them then the city was as it was (is) and grew to be what it is (was) - a bifurcated mix right now of crap and garbage and trite death with all its junk - and we read the past with its glories and stories FOR THAT IS SIMPLE ALL WE GET and that was the time and place : from it one at a time the individual basis of hat we are each doing 'I make my reality you make yours and I make mine again' as multi-layered and cantilevered as a ziggurat from some biblical fantasy rolling at a trot over the bounding landscape and WE inhabit it ? do we ? at a risk to ourselves : the speaking man says 'I don't know any of that for you see I was born here and really don't know anything else unlike many other people I talk with who seem to know it all or think they do and who are always from somewhere else with far-flung journeys which bring them here whether it's business or theater or education or whatever and then they never seem to leave and I often wonder the multi-layered effect of this city is composed of how much of original people born here and raised here and how much by deft outsiders who adopt in and make stay - and where do these natives go I wonder when they leave their parents' nests and how do they find other places - it is easy or difficult for them is it expensive or not and do they take the parents' places over as death and illness wear them out to death and how much beneath all that old bedrock of once-New York is flavored by the constant and ongoing old blood of people who've been here over family generations and who have influenced the sense of place that comes with all that for you an outsider can only bring with them whatever they've taken from the outside which eventually changes the flavor of New York as New Yorkers seem to have only their own hard way of doing things certain and peculiar to themselves but it's simply all we get - one step from cannibals and killers as we are' and I listened hard with nothing but disinterest - the kind New Yorkers get - for really how much of this is one person supposed to take ? it's all over before you even listen anyway - all those Hannah Arendts of the base-philosophy of the little-man - the gentleman Jim of the tidy-sum slum going about his business and carrying out orders with nary a doubt nor a second-look in : down by the wharf I was watching the rats scurry - they jumped from tire to tire and each tire piled up in a heap had some water pooled in the bottom and each rat in turn found its own secure way of tasting the film to see what the logic within tasted like.

THE MUSIC LESSON ('Old Urban Jazz Cat')

2009-01-30T18:17:00.000-08:00

260. THE MUSIC LESSON ('Old Urban Jazz Cat', nyc, 1968):

I never entertained any theories but the ones I could prove - and the certainly-peeling paint on the stairway and landings of that old loft-warehouse building with living quarters on its west side - with a cool view of the old cranky Hudson - proved to me that this was a dump albeit perhaps the most musical dump one would find anywhere ('this side of Paradise' notwithstanding) along 17th Street for as long as one tried - I did and I walked many times through its wearily-cavernous edges while watching the trucks come and go and the black guys shooting nickels or smoking bent cigarettes as they leaned on the ledges of the loading docks and shitty postal zones and stables and taxi-barns all along there from the very corner by the Peter McManus Bar to the watery front of the grimy river covered with jacketed guys going about their tasks - filth merchants or stevedores : you choose - I'd just sit back and listen to those guys running up and down on their horns - every scale-run and musical interlude imaginable - Sharie O'Duff and Starkey Coleman and Wintzy Laber and all those crazy guys who would play long sets at nights in any of the weakly resonant clubs along the avenues uptown - smoke-filled sets pushed and puzzled with cocaine speed and marijuana that took everything to the limits and then they'd slowly be seen making their way back to this infested loft - singly or in groups - stag or with babes on their arms - and the next twenty hours were just some sort of bliss for them : maybe a fog maybe a haze maybe a recollection of from where they'd come and been : the tastes of jazz and all its crazy staccatos still resonating in their heads while three floors up the sky out their window was featureless and the morning trucks down below sizzled with their disgorged cargoes of hardware hat-racks fur coats or shoes and manufactured loft goods came and went around them by the truckloads - it was that very sing-song-y aspect of their living which gave that urban-gritty taste to their music - some free-form attack on reality placed with drums and bass-lines an uninitiated ear could never pick out - and it wore itself like a coat of beauty or something mixed with paint and thrown on walls the walls of reality the room out of which all other things came the infested dream of breakaway and solo - a very singular time seen in the faded images of the old buildings and battered entryways along the street - flat and black and abandoned into a ramshackle motif of decay and angular presentation for no one and these guys used to say 'that' was what gave their music its touched madness its reason for being and they'd work on it three days a week and then take it to the clubs and play all night if they had to in order just once to get it out there for the ten drunks present to witness to hear to understand or at least allow and yes yes there were times I was sure I couldn't understand one damned thing abut their jazz and all that fast be-bop touch and run stuff with little melody except the melody of some scattered sound-remembered and and fills were the lifeblood and essence of what they lived : hedging nothing going straight for the finish driving direct into and past the point of agreed it might still be like that today if I sit back and think about it but for that moment and then these guys were certain and sure of what they were doing - it was like drinking coffee or drinking whiskey or having sex or any of that for these men their instruments and their runs were as good as their lives : countertop furnaces with little flames and shattered windows mended with tape bare bulbs in the landing-doorway and a leaking faucet on all night the constant cold-bathroom drip-drip of water coming down and leaving a furious rust-stain in what looked like some scientist's sink a hallway bathroom good for less and the blackened glass of an old wall once leading onto some factory-floor - something now converted to a living quarters and music-studio together an all as illegal as can be - but in much the same way as student-quarters in some ratty old urban-dormitory walk-up with all its bare wires and bare bulbs and coffee-pots and hot-plates and twisted mattresses and old towels everything just came together just as the sound of all their raging instruments did : and I still never caught the ignominious rhythmic incantation that so many people had for jazz - sometimes to me it was just free noise - still I could see it (rather than just hear it) as something sterling that stood for itself alone - like some precious metal or something held in esteem for the rigorous effort it took to dislodge it from the ore in which it was buried - some magic metal with plenty of mettle - and yet underneath it all I knew their was something else something hidden and mysterious some great racial and tribal essence from the back of way-back itself and these 'cats' as they said they each had in their own ways and in their bloodstreams that ancient jagged old pulse of all that before them had happened - the defenestrated cultural and tribal dance of black darkness wild jungle and mysterious and wonderingly prolific experience of living - 'LIVING' in the human sense of being alive without constraints without meanings and refinement without the slowed-down pulse by which the disappointing present-day cut through all spirits and souls all music and story and these guys had it all together and it came through in the crazed sounds of their detail-oriented music - a type of sound run amok with the 'details' of the music those details that the 'outsider' could never see just maybe merely glimpse or feel or sense somehow - like a memory of a mother's wet hand holding the dishrag over the sink or the way a father's harsh slap would feel to a ten-year just stepping out with some brute form of self-identity - that was the wordless voice the running juice of all the wild loft music I used to hear and it spoke to me honestly I'll admit only with the greatest of difficulty - it took plenty of time and practice and exposure and explanation for me to somehow begin to grasp sense of it - and I found that sense in these strange 17th Street lofts and walk-ups I'd frequent and be openly welcomed into by crazed yet steady men - men of horns and rhythm and tempo and beat and time and solo and it was all like another tongue and a language I slowly learned.

THE VAST SUBCONSCIOUS UNDERGROUND OF OUR VISITED WORLD

2009-01-24T07:08:00.000-08:00

259. THE VAST SUBCONSCIOUS UNDERGROUND OF OUR VISITED WORLD (the crazy man of old Union Square, nyc, 1971):

'Follow my life - take the piece from the source and hold something to your ear and listen well : The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work and if it take the second it must refuse a heavenly mansion instead raging in the dark and morality is made by humans - not found in the world - and man must have an intellectual temperament with a delight in muscular language and the power to shock and the idea although a bit banal is that a person is responsible for his own life and external forces and events are merely the raw materials out of which we make a life and we therefore have no right to blame anyone else for the result because it was ours to make or muff and this is a philosophy or a psychology which is basically optimistic cheerful and a forward-looking one of self-assertion of liberation from oppressive frameworks such as those created by religions or other dogmas [AND] it has been said -

Sadness comes in three sizes :

Wind in the pines / Tears on my sleeve / Spaghetti :

while the Buddha's body cannot measured.

- this is truly remarkable -
-
"Esta buchiamento elanestreo tria enomble tolerado myanaro dustimistus aeroda telerado myanaro riligant et yatdo bosta bosta tiriamis trex no ! no ah dey wayamo lagdo tipes ayvama norto ex clamata emdicta tert !"
----
Strange foreign man:

He is measuring the sky he is lighting fires with his eyes and the outland rages in his flames and distorting horizons far awkward already by refraction and in stealth he walks away HE IS WALKING without limbs and he covets whatever he wishes and 'in strictures so defined he widely carries forth' along and over as people listen and so I wonder from what is he gathering strength and why from them as at that moment something flutters past me and I see it is merely old newsprint some sailing old page of nothing the same as the rest of the debris flying around the windy park and I see the words partial 'get your mind off the plow' and with everything else that too has lost meaning and I think I will just stop reading after this crazy guy is done reciting his words : 'off the ware on to the mantle the frantic matter seems to dismantle - and isn't that all like our very LIVES itself?' and as the hour though late is still enough for watching the fading light take away the far fading moon so fat still and settling as it sinks in whatever horizon is left FOR WE ARE ALL SO DIFFERENT NOW and far from any place we've lived before ('meadows in the field cardinals in the air that 1952 Chevy parked over there belongs to the soldier with the one-eyed girl - she was brought here from Cleveland and hasn't a care!') and oh delicate flower WITHER NOT NOW but stay until Spring and let me know you are here once more 'I love the laughing vale I love the echoing hill I love the oaken seat beneath the oaken tree where all the villagers meet and laugh our sports to see' and sitting here by myself I am awed too by age and its distance - soldiers on the field schooners on the water dock master trodding the old waterfront the shed and the shanties rank with odor and filled with all the overflow of the watery ages the spars and the ropes and the hooks and containers and the seaman's' salty tastes for food and drink - that knife slammed flat or thrown hard down into the tabletop wherein it stands and all the people straining to see out far to that watery horizon what sails approach and whose flag of endeavor it will be what journey closes in for AS LARGE AS IT IS IT'S A SMALL WORLD TOO and it's marked by craft and the line as on the maps and charts the conquerors can come or the peacemakers arrive NO ONE EVER KNOWS they just stare out : and on the maps and calendars of all men and maidens it is written - 'Father my Father you have brought forth a northern God to protect us yet it is He who maims us too and He will do no good here for there are not enough vessels to contain Him and 'ere long we must go anyway to other places and His hand cannot protect us from evils and the travails of travel and wander - men with messengers of gold and iron and weapons of fire and tongues of flame and magical weaving and dark smokes of falsehood and and they too shall bow down before that as quickly as you are gone from sight - Golden Calf Lucre Moloch Ogre each as insatiable as you - incendiary sacrifices lambs love maidens men - and your words shall be forgotten and twisted and even less heard and it shall be as if you had never lived nor been nor appeared here except as stories and lore NEVER LIVED and NEVER BROUGHT HIM HERE!!' and so they built three churches on the hills around as the landed people traveled wherever they went there would be a place for them to enter and think of the God or at least consider His ways as they passed on their Earthly missions and these ghostly places still stand broken bereft and forlorn and emptied of all pitiable screams and smokes and grown now dense and covered with weeds magical towers and flagrant tears in the fabric of daily life : the vast subconscious underground of our visited world : the gravelly stations and the holes they once covered for on THIS Earth the light is as darkness and the shadows are dense and the winged butterfly alighting stays not long or withers in the heat of fire and windward yonder blows sea breezes where STILL men stare out and pine to go as each and every seeks to leave but cannot move (mortal fabric heavy coil tarnished effect of man's first toil) and those who stay remain unhappy in their lot but steady they try and THUS THIS is our land today : for even as we may conquer the stars (as some will say) even as we have conquered the Moon we stumble over space.

MY BAEDEKER OF POE

2009-01-17T06:54:00.000-08:00

258. MY BAEDEKER OF POE (OBSERVING EVERYTHING UNDERSTANDING NOTHING nyc, 1967):

These streets never meant anything to me except the trouble and toil which time brought - every season would change what it changed and no matter the concrete or the greenery I felt the same as if I was in some deep Vermont woods amidst those suddenly descending hillsides coated and filled with hundreds and hundreds of deep dark and mysterious fir trees but I was instead chasing some other matter along one or another of the same cold barren streets I'd always seen - the old dumpy firehouse twisting on its form or the old Village Dispensary with its sad old red brick just waiting out another era and crying back for something : and yes I saw the same ghosts on every corner and on the Dispensary steps I'd see my own travelogue my Baedeker of Poe as he slumped there and moaned while waiting to be taken in tended to brought back from another horrible precipice to which he'd stumbled and around the corner and over some the soiled streets along Minetta with all their dark and violent underbrush of street urchins hoodlums markers and killers too - they'd never really left those age-old trappings where the floors sagged and the windows no longer fit and the tired stairwells reeked yet of ancient tired families swaggering in their destitution troubles and anguish - those cries still lingered and those kids along the street were yet there - hanging back as they scanned what passed - picking an opportunity or sensing a danger and looming nearby too was the old old house of Tom Paine and the other house around the corner where he died and the tower of the Vesuvius Church all filled with wailing Italians at still another weird funeral - holy water and hearts each pumping together - and the cemeteries which now breached the ramparts of brutish neighborhoods with no strangers allowed the horse troughs the mudded paths the tired laborers the men in work-pants pulling iron through the streets along piles of coal and horse-dung and the itinerant cobblers and stable-hands seeking work for horses for themselves for anyone and anything which could make a penny - and all this was a world alive and still there for me right there is my air and at my fingertips as I moved about : people all about even in the coldest mornings a 7-degree cold staggering through their walks and they walked and mumbled discreetly while holding things umbrellas bags bundles and each store seemed like a religion itself with each doorway a church but I could never connect the meaning of any one thing to anything else - which as it turned out I realized too was the way of all philosophy and all those people living broken and fragmented lives apart from the unity of THAT which was and which they and we all should have recognized early on but never did and living thusly a life misunderstood is probably the most 'Original Sin' (as they would put it) there could be and the one with which we're all smitten - but being too much of a burden to shoulder all that's always left behind and left out too of all those crazed pious pictures and all that Renaissance and medieval art I was always stooping (and stopping) to see - lines and densities of brown and madder the distorted peaks and valleys of faith and tradition before anyone really knew what any of that was and these were essentially the same people over and over again - they might as well all have been painted in vignette - so I passed auditoriums and and halls and central rooms and high stairways with small windows atop them where I'd see vases left in light and with flowers in them they'd reflect back some other realm and reality I was just learning - or a light left on where there was warmth (it seemed everything around me was warm at all times - even as I was freezing) and the slow slow cairn of evening would arrive and sweep through me as all that warmth closed - libraries and sitting rooms and the like - and the shuttered fronts of things marked again the isolation and singularity of the situation : the God-awful refuse of street and gutter rose up from pure nothing to settle in and voices hollow narrow and loud rose singly and together to say something in this nightmare mind of energy and place I'd carried myself through - I sometimes had only slept fitfully and raggedly for days and had wrestled with some horrible anguish and looked in every alcove to see what was left behind - reading mission windows reading posted signs for meals and sessions and help - any congregations of people warmth clothes and food - ANYTHING a prisoner could need it seemed was free for the picking but I staggered on alone past the massive assembled trucks at District 69 on Astor Place - everyone loading or unloading something - the sunken and profane ego of men working trucks and boxing rings and card-shark hustlers and scams and street-priest cheap missionaries all things and people filled with zeal the zeal of the dispossessed or the dead and all throughout the grubby wintry 1967 city were all the other years which had preceded it the lost and the dead the broken-down latchkey faces of the worn-out mothers and sons and fathers and often it seemed that all the frolic and fun had died long long ago and only the remnants and echoes of that uncertain something were left - some slum-face ghetto of tiredness and sorrow in which leftover people still scrambled to live - and it's all been done and closed over like yesterday's supper and yet maybe there was somewhere to be found some dignity some little bit of it anyway in the destitute poor and in the sordid heart of each person I'd see passing by and every washed-out person I'd ever thought of was walking with me now ST. LUKE'S MORTON STREET THE BOWERY right up to Herald Square in an old industrial darkness of smoke and might and all of midnight's power brought together in one mighty place - overlapped conversations twisted tongues layers of other languages amidst scrawling screaming oaths and broken sentences distended from all meaning and worth 'I swear if they arrested me now I'd be declared insane in an instant' and someone else says 'I would not fuck her I would rather lick my balls than fuck her' and the two patrolmen walking along are oblivious to all this and to whatever they see - Tompkins Square Park itself on the criminal prowl and they are talking as they walk twirling their sticks on leather straps past sandwich shops and shutters and windows and doorways and I pass the little bird-store and see in the big front windows that birds are flying around and some jump from perch to perch while others just sit and the canaries and parakeets and all the little brightly-colored things just collect themselves and stay put - the strangely silent snatch of bird-motion amidst colors and branches and the reflection of the traffic in the other nearby window too seems strangely muted and as if UNDERWATER I am watching life ALL LIFE for the very first time - OBSERVING EVERYTHING UNDERSTANDING NOTHING!

BACKGROUND NOISE (nyc, 1968)

2009-01-09T20:44:00.000-08:00

257. BACKGROUND NOISE (nyc, 1968):

Just as would someone painting the black night black be seen as insane so too was I at times adduced to be off-the-mark as it were commingled in the brain brought over from some other situation but none of that ever mattered to me and anything I did entailed no choice at all but instead just the doing - and reading 'Tradition and Individual Talent' for instance I read it not once not twice but ten times and each time more carefully than the times before and then some guy seeing me reading it starts telling me about how in his art-class in some San Francisco school that piece had been a mandatory read a part of the curriculum which could not be avoided and everyone hated it and T. S. Eliot because of it was considered anathema and but a brittle representative of old stodgy ways and old stuffed-shirt traditionalism that 'wasn't worth anything these days' because it was pompous elitist and completely conservative and rather than argue with the guy I high-tailed it once again to my basement sleeping room and read it with an even more dense satisfaction - read it to myself alone and over and aloud so as not to miss a point and although now as I look back I can see the guy's intention (it was after-all a broad and very busily active time of turmoil and dissent and experimentation and the rest - at a period when every yapper with a mouth seemed to have something to say) I still by contrast to him revere the points made and feel that I understand them reasonably well enough to make the points right back if I had to - but the rest of the people chattering weren't the sorts who'd take the extra minute needed to consider the 'finer' points of reading or writing - tough luck I always said - and that's why so many of the emoters and raging screamers just went on their way - all those people at the front of the room in the open-read and read-aloud story-time crap that was going around : ideology and venom mostly and not much else : but that was always their intention anyway so maybe they got it across and it succeeded but I was quickly overly tired of the girl-faces all twisted and grimacing about their misspent foul youth their 'fucking fathers' and their measly 'take this pussy you Uncle Sam!' tribute poetry towards the anti-war malice and spit which was everywhere - nothing worse I always thought than torrid loud irate poetry in which the writer/reader bemoans their own youth in vile terms of the finest sort they can find - but that sort of stuff still goes around so no matter about that and it was the enervating aspects of the Vietnam situation that had everyone all riled up but I always took no cover in and anyway that wasn't real art - word-art anyway - and the interesting facets of Eliot's perspective were all but overlooked by these idiots - tradition awareness of the body of all the past the acknowledgement of contribution being added to alter the body of what it was and based on an authentic voice and not just a 'wild' voice - an authentic voice based upon and within the living vehicle of all that which already was : just a great sense of promise and premise in a writing based upon a respect for the past in its uses of the past and the continuing need to learn and read and feed from that past to make the live-fabric of the new which would alter that past even as it included it and was included in turn by it - if done well and in a detached enough fashion to leave out of it the raw emotive power of shout - so much of what I was hearing - but I couldn't be bothered to tell that guy anything nor to try and change that guy's mind and I just let it go on and I watched his often alcohol-fueled 'intrusions in the enchanter's domain' - which is what I called all his work if it had to be called anything - no figment of imagination there all just reality alone and making it be : like glass on a fish-shop's window - allowing one to view the assembled fish in their dead-on-ice finery and select to choose but BY and because of the glass not really sense or smell the truth of what you were to purchase versus the assault and reality of Chinatown fish-mongers with the smells sights and sounds and often LIVE fish too still poking about right there in front of you - the difference was that real -'you pick the fish NOW we chop the head and clean for you you take home NOW!' - that was in a manner exactly the way it was.