The Digital Fallout

The Blind Man

2011-11-11T23:50:00.000-08:00

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/dada/Blindman_1917_No2.pdf

Cabaret Voltaire

2011-11-11T23:37:00.000-08:00

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/dada/Hugo-Ball_Cabare-Voltaire_1916_No.1/Hugo-Ball_Cabaret-Voltaire_1916_No.1.pdf

The Next Step

2011-08-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

Kings of Breath by Jasar on Mixcloud

Kings Over Breath

2011-08-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Motherless men cling to a life raft helpless
drifting further and further out to sea
a lighthouse twinkles in the motherless men's eyes
but grows distant on the horizon
becoming a stargazers last bright bursting dot of the night
an aleph fading out from the motherless man's sight

space

that is the point of all points

changed

that is the point

darkness folding over night

becoming one

fear and understanding unite

Infinite!

QR-Code

2011-05-25T20:08:00.001-07:00

Handbook for Jurors

2011-01-22T02:44:00.000-08:00

It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

I’m trying to express a concept according to which you can translate one thing into another.

Hoping that someday our cities would open up and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.

You see?

I’m trying to express a concept according to which you can translate one thing into another.

'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'"

You see?

Working quietly behind the scenes you could pass by one of us on the street and not even notice. It is a silent revolution from inside out and ground up. We go undercover, not concerned who takes the credit, but simply that the work gets done. Many of us have normal jobs and seemingly normal lives, but behind the storefront is where the deeper work gets done. It is a silent revolution.

And the war began and ended in that instant.
Later, they could not say if they had really seen anything.

Perhaps the merest flourish of light and motion in the sky. Perhaps the bombs were there, and the jets, ten miles, five miles, one mile up, for the merest instant, like grain thrown over the heavens by a great sowing hand, and the bombs drifting with dreadful swiftness, yet sudden slowness, down upon the morning city they had left behind.

Silent.
Once the bomb-release was yanked it was over.
Revolution.

Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies.

Silent revolution.

This was not to be believed. It was merely a gesture.

for

"your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time."

There is one other thing to know……when you have expressed yourself to the fullest, then and only then will it dawn upon you that everything has already been expressed, not in words alone but in deed, and that all you need really do is say Amen!

It is a silent revolution.

Leonard Cohen “The Darkness”

2011-01-08T01:47:00.000-08:00

I got the darkness baby…..

…. it was drinking from your cup,

I got the darkness

from your little ruby cup

I said ‘is this contagious?’

You said ‘just drink it up’

I’ve got no future baby

I know my days are few

I’ve got no future though

As I say I know my days are few

Is the present not that pleasant

Just a lot of things to do

I don’t like your sticky little bud

I don’t like alcohol

I don’t need your loving touch

That’s always been your call

Cause there’s nothing but the darkness

Makes any sense to me at all

I should have seen the darkness

It was right behind your eyes

All those pools so deep and heartless

I just had to take a dive

Ah yea but winning you was easy

Ah but the darkness was the price

Got no future (x3)

Yea I know the days are few

The present is not that pleasant

Just a lot of things to do

(AND THEN QUASIMODO THE BELLS THE BELLS !!!!)

1966 William Burrough's interview extractions

2010-10-19T00:52:00.000-07:00

B
U
R
R
O
U
G
H
S:
I don't know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I've recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I'll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I've written. I'll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or I'll be walking down the street and I'll suddenly see a scene from my book and I'll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I've found that when preparing a page, I'll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I've been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines. I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.

• Extracted from the 1966 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker in Paris Review; reprinted in Writers at Work, 3rd Series (New York, 1967).

INTERVIEWER: In Nova Express you indicate that silence is a desirable state.

BURROUGHS: The most desirable state. In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. I've recently spent a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that!
Words—at least the way we use them—can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience. It's time we thought about leaving the body behind.

INTERVIEWER: Marshall McLuhan said that you believed heroin was needed to turn the human body into an environment that includes the universe. But from what you've told me, you're not at all interested in turning the body into an environment.

BURROUGHS: NO, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit to me as a writer (aside from putting me into contact with the whole carny world) came to me after I went off it. What I want to do is to learn to see more of what's out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings.

Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and now he is in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction: outward.

INTERVIEWER: Have you been able to think for any length of time in images, with the inner voice silent?

BURROUGHS : I'm becoming more proficient at it, partly through my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between words and images. Try this: Carefully memorize the meaning of a passage, then read it; you'll find you can actually read it without the words' making any sound whatever in the mind's ear.

Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you're well on the way.

INTERVIEWER: Why is the wordless state so desirable?

BURROUGHS: I think it's the evolutionary trend. I think that words are an around-the-world, ox-cart way of doing things, awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This is one objection to the cut-ups. There's been a lot of that, a sort of superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can't cut up these words. Why can't I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers— doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are.

INTERVIEWER: HOW did you become interested in the cut-up technique?

BURROUGHS: A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, "Minutes to Go," was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of
course, when you think of it, "The Waste Land" was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in "The Camera Eye" sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.

INTERVIEWER: What do cut-ups offer the reader that conventional narrative doesn't?

BURROUGHS: Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.

INTERVIEWER: YOU deplore the accumulation of images and at the same time you seem to be looking for new ones.

BURROUGHS: Yes, it's part of the paradox of anyone who is working with word and image, and after all, that is what a writer is still doing. Painter too. Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands.

INTERVIEWER: Instead of going to the trouble of working with scissors and all those pieces of paper, couldn't you obtain the same effect by simply free-associating at the typewriter?

BURROUGHS: One's mind can't cover it that way. Now, for example, if I wanted to make a cut-up of this [picking up a copy of the Nation], there are many ways I could do it. I could read crosscolumn; I could say: "Today's men's nerves surround us. Each technological extension gone outside is electrical involves an act
of collective environment. The human nervous environment system itself can be reprogrammed with all its private and social values because it is content. He programs logically as readily as any radio net is swallowed by the new environment. The sensory order." You find it often makes quite as much sense as the original.

You learn to leave out words and to make connections. [Gesturing]

Suppose I should cut this down the middle here, and put this up here. Your mind simply could not manage it. It's like trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldn't do it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also operating against you.

INTERVIEWER: YOU believe that an audience can be eventually trained to respond to cut-ups?

BURROUGHS: Of course, because cut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That's a cut-up. I was sitting in a lunchroom in New York having my doughnuts and
coffee. I was thinking that one does feel a little boxed in in New York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out the window and there was a great big Yale truck. That's cut-up—a juxtaposition of what's happening outside and what you're thinking of. I make this a practice when I walk down the street. I'll say, When I got to here I saw that sign, I was thinking this, and when I return to the house I'll type these up. Some of this material I use and some I don't. I have literally thousands of pages of notes here, raw, and I keep a diary as well. In a sense it's traveling in
time.Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: For Godsake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, "Did you see him, that person who just walked by?" No, they didn't notice him. I had a very pleasant time on the train coming out here. I haven't traveled on trains in years. I found there were no drawing rooms. I got a bedroom so
I could set up my typewriter and look out the window. I was taking photos, too. I also noticed all the signs and what I was thinking at the time, you see. And I got some extraordinary juxtapositions. For example, a friend of mine has a loft apartment in New York. He said, "Every time we go out of the house and come back, if we leave the bathroom door open, there's a rat in the house." I look out the window, there's Able Pest Control.

INTERVIEWER: The one flaw in the cut-up argument seems to lie in the linguistic base on which we operate, the straight declarative sentence. It's going to take a great deal to change that.

BURROUGHS: Yes, it is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the whole either-or proposition. You remember Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian logic. Either-or thinking just is not accurate thinking. That's not the way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking this down. I should imagine it would be much easier to find acceptance of the cut-ups from, possibly, the Chinese, because you see already there are many ways that they can read any given ideograph. It's already cut up.

INTERVIEWER: What will happen to the straight plot in fiction?

BURROUGHS: Plot has always had the definite function of stage direction, of getting the characters from here to there, and that will continue, but the new techniques, such as cut-up, will involve much more of the total capacity of the observer. It enriches the whole aesthetic experience, extends it.

INTERVIEWER: Nova Express is a cut-up of many writers?

BURROUGHS: Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven't heard about, someone named Jack Stern. There's Kerouac. I don't know, when you start making these fold-ins and cut-ups you lose track. Genet, of course, is someone I admire very much. But what he's doing is classical French prose. He's not a verbal innovator. Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story "They Just Fade Away" is a fold-in (instead of cutting, you fold) from Lord Jim. In fact, it's almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim. Richard Hughes is another favorite of mine. And Graham Greene. For exercise, when I make a trip, such as from Tangier to Gibraltar, I will record this in three columns in a notebook I always take with me. One column will contain simply an account of the trip, what happened: I arrived at the air terminal, what was said by the clerks, what I overheard on the plane, what hotel I checked into. The next column presents my memories: that is, what I was thinking of at the time, the memories that were activated by my encounters.

And the third column, which I call my reading column, gives quotations from any book that I take with me. I have practically a whole novel alone on my trips to Gibraltar. Besides Graham Greene, I've used other books. I used The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea on one trip. Let's see... and Eliot's The Cocktail Party; In Hazard by Richard Hughes. For example, I'm reading The Wonderful Country and the hero is just crossing the frontier
into Mexico. Well, just at this point I come to the Spanish frontier, so I note that down in the margin. Or I'm on a boat or a train and I'm reading The Quiet American; I look around and see if there's a quiet American aboard. Sure enough, there's a quiet sort of young American with a crew cut, drinking a bottle of beer. It's extraordinary, if you really keep your eyes open. I was reading Raymond Chandler, and one of his characters was an albino gunman. My God, if there wasn't an albino in the room.

He wasn't a gunman.

Who else? Wait a minute, I'll just check my coordinate books to see if there's anyone I've forgotten—Conrad, Richard Hughes, science fiction, quite a bit of science fiction. Eric Frank Russell has written some very, very interesting books. Here's one, The Star Virus; I doubt if you've heard of it. He develops a concept here of what he calls Deadliners, who have this strange sort of seedy look. I read this when I was in Gibraltar, and I began to
find Deadliners all over the place. The story of a fish pond in it, and quite a flower garden. My father was always very interested in gardening.

INTERVIEWER: In view of all this, what will happen to fiction in the next twenty-five years?

BURROUGHS : In the first place, I think there's going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form.

INTERVIEWER: DO you think this will destroy the magic?

BURROUGHS: Not at all. I would say it would enhance it.

INTERVIEWER: Have you done anything with computers?

BURROUGHS: I've not done anything, but I've seen some of the computer poetry. I can take one of those computer poems and then try to find correlatives of it—that is, pictures to go with it; it's quite possible.

INTERVIEWER: Does the fact that it comes from a machine diminish its value to you?

BURROUGHS: I think that any artistic product must stand or fall on what's there.

INTERVIEWER: Therefore, you're not upset by the fact that a chimpanzee can do an abstract painting?

BURROUGHS: If he does a good one, no. People say to me, "Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up." I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to program the machine; somebody has to do the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one.

Question: "Inspector Lee, how can one be sure that you are a nova officer and not an impostor?"

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, Nova Express
1

The RM then is an artifact designed to limit and stultify on a mass scale. In order to have this effect it must be widely implanted. This can readily be done with modern electronic equipment and techniques described in this treatis. The RM consists of commands which seem harmless and in fact unavoidable ... To be a body ...but which have the most horrific consequences.

Here are some sample RM screen effects ...

As the theatre darkens a bright light appears on the left side of the screen. The screen lights up.

To be nobody ... On screen shadow of ladder and soldier incinerated by the Hiroshima blast

To be everybody ... Street crowds, riots, panics

To be me ... A beautiful girl and a handsome young man point to selves

To be you ... They point to audience

Hideous hags and old men, lepers, drooling idiots point to themselves and to the audience as they intone ...

To be me

To be you

Command no 5 ... To be myself

Command no 6 ... To be others

On screen a narcotics officer is addressing an audience of school boys, spread out in front of him are syringes, kief pipes, samples of heroin, hashiesh, LSD.

Officer: “Five trips on a drug can be a pleasant and exciting experience...”

On screen young trippers ...”I’m really myself for the first time” Etc. Happy trips ...To be myself ...no 5 ...

Officer: “THE SIXTH WILL PROBABLY BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF”

Shot shows a man blowing his head off with a shotgun in his mouth...

Officer: “Like a 15 year old boy I knew until recently, you could well end up dying in your own spew ...” To be others no 6 ...

To be an animal ... A lone Wolf Scout ...

To be animals: He joins other wolf scouts playing, laughing, shouting

To be an animal ... Bestial and ugly human behaviour ...brawls, disgusting, eating and sex scenes

To be animals ... Cows, sheep and pigs driven to the slaughter house

To be a body

To be bodies

A beautiful body ... a copulating couple ... Cut back and forth and run on seven second loop for several minutes ... scramble at different speeds ... Audience must be made to realise that to be a body is to be bodies

...A body only exists to be other bodies.

To be a body ...Death scenes and recordings ... a scramble of last words

To be bodies ... Vista of cemeteries ...

To do it now ... Couple embracing hotter and hotter

To do it now ... A condemned cell ... Condemned man is same actor as lover ... He is led away by the guards screaming and struggling. Cut back and forth between sex scene and man led to execution. Couple in sex scene have an orgasm as the condemned man is hanged, electrocuted, gassed, garroted, shot in the head with a pistol

the electronic revolution william s. burroughs
29

To do it later ... The couple pull away ...One wants to go out and eat and go to a show or something...

They put on their hats To do it later ... Warder arrives at condemned cell to tell the prisoner he has a stay of execution

To do it now ... Grim faces in the Pentagon. Strategic is on the way ... Well THIS IS IT ... This sequence cut in with sex scenes and a condemned man led to execution, culminates in execution, orgasm, nuclear explosion ...The condemned lover is a horribly burned survivor

To do it later ... 1920 walk out sequence to “The Sunny Side of the Street” ...

A disappointed general turns from the phone to say the president has opened top level hot wire talks with Russia and China ... Condemned man gets another stay of execution

To be an animal ... One lemming busily eating lichen ...

To be animals ... Hordes of lemmings swarming all over each other in mounting hysteria ...A pile of drowned lemmings in front of somebody’s nice little cottage on a Finnish lake where he is methodically going through sex positions with his girl friend. They wake up in a stink of dead lemmings

To be an animal ... Little boy put on a pot

To be animals ...The man has just been hanged. The doctor steps forward with a stethoscope

To stay down ... Body is carried out with the rope around neck ... Naked corpses on the autopsy table ... corpse buried in quick lime.

To stay up ...Erect phallus

To stay down ... White man burns off a Negro’s genitals with blow torch ...

Theatre darkens into the blow torch on the left side of the screen

To stay present

To stay absent

To stay present ... A boy masturbates in front of sex pictures ... Cut to face of white man who is burning off black genitals with blow torch

To stay absent ... Sex phantasies of the boy ... The black slumps dead with genitals burned off and intestines popping out

To stay present ... Boy watches strip tease, intent, fascinated ...A man stands on trap about to be hanged

Pearl Jam - Just Breathe (unofficial video)

2010-10-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

Please listen to this.

Yes I understand that every life must end, aw huh,..
As we sit alone, I know someday we must go, aw huh,..
I’m a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I love,..
Some folks just have one, others they got none, aw huh,..

Stay with me,..
Let’s just breathe.

Practiced are my sins, never gonna let me win, aw huh,..
Under everything, just another human being, aw huh,..
Yeh, I don’t wanna hurt, there’s so much in this world to make me bleed.

Stay with me,..
You’re all I see.

Did I say that I need you?
Did I say that I want you?
Oh, if I didn’t now I’m a fool you see,..
No one knows this more than me.
As I come clean.

I wonder everyday as I look upon your face, aw huh,..
Everything you gave and nothing you would take, aw huh,..
Nothing you would take,.. everything you gave.

Did I say that I need you?
Oh, Did I say that I want you?
Oh, if I didn’t now I’m a fool you see,..
No one know this more than me.
As I come clean.

Nothing you would take,.. everything you gave.
Hold me till I die,..
Meet you on the other side

Je Rame by Henri Michaux

2010-10-01T23:57:00.000-07:00

probably around a 3rd into reading it I realized it's a lot more effective in what it translates if you speak it out loud, and you start automatically speak in emotional-synchrony w/ what it's about, which of course is a Hex. I also realized that this poet is so obsessive to where it becomes incantation, and 1 more thing I picked up reading this, he's For Real! haha. He's not doing this Hex as an artistic statement, he's actually trying to *effect* the Hex, and in his way it seems possible as it get more rapid it gets more stimulating and when he's "rowing against your Life", i can imagine hearing him actually *rowing*. Hope you enjoy it.. & read it out loud :D

I have cursed your forehead your belly your life
I have cursed the streets your steps plod through
The things your hands pick up
I have cursed the inside of your dreams

I have set a puddle in your eye so that you can't see anymore
An insect in your ear so that you can't hear anymore
A sponge in your brain so that you can't understand any more

I have frozen you in the soul of your body
Iced you in the depths of your life
The air you breathe suffocates you
The air you breathe has the air of a cellar
Is an air that has already been exhaled
Been puffed out by hyenas

The dung of this air is something no one can breathe
Your skin is damp all over
Your skin sweats out waters of great fear
Your armpits reek far and wide of the crypt

Animals stop dead as you pass
Dogs howl at night, their heads raised toward your house
You can't run away
You can't muster the strength of an ant to the tip of your feet

Your fatigue makes a lead stump in your body
Your fatigue is a long caravan
Your fatigue stretches out to the country of Nan
Your fatigue is inexpressible

Your mouth bites you
Your nails scratch you
No longer yours, your wife
No longer yours, your brother

The sole of his foot bitten by an angry snake
Someone has slobbered on your descendants
Someone has slobbered on the laugh of your little girl
Someone has walked slobbering by the face of your domain

The world moves away from you

I am rowing

I am rowing

I am rowing against your life

I am rowing

I split into countless rowers
To row more strongly against you

You fall into blurriness
You are out of breath
You get tired before the slightest effort

I row

I row

I row

You go off drunk, tied to the tail of a mule
Drunkenness like a huge umbrella that darkens the sky
And assembles the flies

Dizzy drunkenness of the semicircular canals
Unnoticed beginnings of hemiplegia

Drunkenness no longer leaves you
Lays you out to the left
Lays you out to the right
Lays you out on the stony ground of the path

I row

I row

I am rowing against your days

You enter the house of the suffering

I row

I row

On a black blindfold your actions are recorded
On the great white eye of a one-eyed horse your future is rolling

I AM ROWING

Bob Dylan's Foot of Pride lyrics

2010-09-18T00:33:00.000-07:00

.......give the song a listen sometime, you may find yourself in it...............

Like the lion tears the flesh off of a man
So can a woman who passes herself off as a male
They sang, 'Danny Boy' at his funeral and the Lord's Prayer
The preacher talking 'bout Christ betrayed

It's like the earth just opened and swallowed him up
He reached too high, was thrown back to the ground
You know what they say about
Bein' nice to the right people on the way up
Sooner or later you gonna meet them comin' down

Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down

Ain't no goin' back

Hear ya got a brother named James, don't forget faces or names
Sunken cheeks and his blood is mixed
He looked straight into the sun and said revenge is mine
But he drinks, and drinks can be fixed

Sing me one more song, about ya love me to the moon and the stranger
And your fall by the sword love affair with Erroll Flynn
in these times of compassion when conformity's in fashion
Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in

Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down

Ain't no goin' back

There's a retired businessman named Red
Cast down from heaven and he's out of his head
He feeds off of everyone that he can touch
He said he only deals in cash or sells tickets to a plane crash
He's not somebody that you play around with much

Miss Delilah is his, a Philistine is what she is
She'll do wondrous works with your fate
Feed you coconut bread, spice buns in your bed
If you don't mind sleepin' with your head face down in a grave

Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down

Ain't no goin' back

Well they'll choose a man for you to meet tonight
You'll play the fool and learn how to walk through doors
How to enter into the gates of paradise?
No, how to carry a burden too heavy to be yours?

Yeah, from the stage they'll be tryin' to get water outta rocks
A whore will pass the hat, collect a hundred grand and say thanks
They like to take all this money from sin
Build big universities to study in
Sing, 'Amazing Grace' all the way to the Swiss banks

Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down

Ain't no goin' back

They got some beautiful people out there, man
They can be a terror to your mind and show you how to hold your tongue
They got mystery written all over their forehead
They kill babies in the crib and say only the good die young

They don't believe in mercy
Judgment on them is something that you'll never see
They can exalt you up or bring you down main route
Turn you into anything that they want you to be

Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down

Ain't no goin' back

Yes, I guess I loved him too
I can still see him in my mind climbin' that hill
Did he make it to the top, well he probably did and dropped
Struck down by the strength of the will

Ain't nothin' left here partner
Just the dust of a plague that has left this whole town afraid
From now on, this'll be where you're from
Let the dead bury the dead, your time will come
Let hot iron blow as he raised the shade

Ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down

Ain't no goin' back, oh yeah, oh yeah

Kathy Acker's last published work before her death.

2010-08-21T00:04:00.000-07:00

Requiem
by
Kathy Acker

As a memorial to Kathy we are publishing Act III of
Requiem, the last writing she gave us to publish.
Requiem is a three actopera commissioned by the
American Opera Project. It was performed in the Spring of 1998, with Ken Valitsky, composer.

Act III

Scene 1: Electra's monologue. Electra enters and sits cross-legged upon the stage. Just the actress, no need to dress up anymore. It's present time.

Electra: I'm gonna to tell you about myself. (A little like a kid) I'd been working with this woman who knows how to access past lives. When I found out that I had
cancer, a cancer that had metastasized, I ran to her for help. Why?
For this reason: When the surgeon who had taken my breasts off, a few days after this operation, informed me that some of my lymph nodes were registering cancer, I asked him if the lymph nodes or the body's oil filter could simply be registering cancer because I was on a high anti-oxidant diet. I had been for some weeks. (Picking at her feet.)

He answered me that diet has nothing to do with cancer, with the causes of cancer. He added, "Nor with environmental pollution. We have no idea," said my surgeon, "what causes cancer." So I decided that he knew nothing about cancer. I had no idea why I was deciding this. I knew I had to find out who did know about cancer. But I knew I had no way of knowing how to find out.

Everything I had thought real had just been taken away from me.

I ran to George, my psychic. I told her everything that had happened, that the surgeon was good-looking. Like President Clinton. I guess they're in the same racket, I said. George replied that I shouldn't be scared. She would send me to someone who kills cancers. Who had killed several for her.
I was alone again and everything that was happening so fast ran through my brains. I could only think about was killing cancers. If I can kill the cause of this cancer - this was my thought - the cancer that's in my body will go away.
I didn't know, however, if phenomena happen by chance or b y cause. Now, if things, phenomena happened by chance, then nothing that I did or could do mattered, that is, there was no way I could know what action led to what other action or event. In other words, if chance ruled the world, then my surgeon was right: cancer had no discernible cause and my life and death were meaningless.

I can't bear this.
It was at this moment something, I don't know what word to use, came out of me, someone larger in than me, and screamed without raising my voice, using a calm tone, "No more of this death. You've fucked everything up so now I'm taking over." It was a male voice. I felt that my conscious section was just a part of a huge being. If this world is meaningful, I continued, then so must be each of its parts, no matter how minute. If this world is meaningful, then I need to concern myself, not with cancer, but with its cause. Whatever caused it must change. I knew one thing. That writing is a way to change reality. I returned to George in order to find out how I could change
reality.

But I was very scared: the growing fear that I felt was so great that it seemed just about to take me over. I was about to stop being. Again George said that I shouldn't be frightened. Why was I? I didn't understand this question cause I thought that the fear of dying was enough to frighten anyone.

Had I ever been scared before I had gotten cancer? "Yes." I said this; then I thought. When I had been six years old, I guess it was six cause I don't remember anything that happened before that time, I had been taking a shower. My mother entered the bathroom. I didn't know she was in there because I couldn't see her through the shower curtain. Just like Psycho. She threw ice water on top of me. She had already placed a bar of soap on the floor of the bathtub. It was a game. If I can remember playing these games like this with my mother, why can't I remember anything that happened before I was six years old?

Scene 2: Light opens up to reveal a lovely small study in tan. Most of the walls are huge clear windows through which can be seen full grown trees, tiny buds, branches, birds hopping here and there, maybe even a squirrel. The sun is clear and strong.

Electra, dressed in the actress' normal clothing, and George are sitting in two of the three comfortable armchairs. George looks like a beautiful Hollywood actress slightly past her prime; in a way she is, for she used to be married to a well-known American film producer.

They are already in conversation.

Electra: So I went to this dingdong doctor and she made me hold vials of different cancers in one hand while her hands tapped and sort of moved my feet. She said, "You don't register at all for breast cancer." "Maybe I'm cured." "But you have six other kinds of cancer." I think I'd know if I was growing every conceivable kind of cancer.

George: Forget about her.

Electra: While I was holding each group of vials, there were fourteen, she told me to hold the thumb of my other hand, for each test, against a different finger. Each time my thumb touched my third finger, she found all these really bad emotions. She named each emotion, then told me to think about it and hit the base of my skull with that tool they use to adjust backs. A "clicker" or something or other. As soon as my head really hurt. I told her I had thought about the emotion.

George: Don't see her again.

Electra: The most usual emotion was anger. I want to learn about this cause I don't think I'm angry with my mother. I've worked on forgiving her.

George: You must have been angry at her for what she did to you.

Electra: I don't know, but I don't know how I felt before I was six.

George: What's the first thing that you remember?

Electra: I do remember one thing that happened before I was six. I was about a year old. I had this pink baby blanket with roses. I adored it. They took it away from me. They said they were taking it away to clean it, but I never got it back.

George: Now, be a child. Sit in a chair or on the floor as if you were a child.

Electra: George. (Readily sitting down on the floor, her legs away from the rest of her body.) This is silly!

George: What toy do you want?

Electra pouts.

George: Would you like a stuffed animal?
Electra: I like stuffed animals.

George: (Handing her a pig who's hugging a baby pig, and a mauled bear.) Which one?
Electra: Both.

George: Go back to that blanket. To it being taken away. Where are you?

Electra: I don't know. (She closes her eyes.) A bare room. Grey walls. I see a crib. I can't see anything else.

George: Who's taking your blanket away?

Electra: They are.
George: Your grandmother? She's obviously the one who took care of you.

Electra: My mother, my grandmother. They're one and the same. They're the only people in this world.

George: What about your nurse? You said you had nurses.

Electra: I adored my nurses. It was my mother or my grandmother.

George: What do you feel?

Electra: I'm really angry.

George: Do you show your mother you're angry?

Electra: No. (Thinks.) My mother was a.... I wouldn't have dared.

George: Why? Children usually show their mothers how they feel.

Electra doesn't answer.

George: What were you so scared she was going to do to you?

Electra: (Her voice changing.) I tell you: I'm blocked. I'm blocking.

(Her body is rigid and she's in pain.) I'm trying to think of what I'm most scared of. Lobotomy. (Reasons.) They're going to make me into nothing. To make me a puddle so I can be just what they want. Then I'll no longer be. That was what their society was to me: The fifties and the sixties. Hypocrisy.

George: I don't understand.

Electra: I was constantly supposed to say to my mother, "I love you". I wouldn't because I didn't know if she loved me. My father would say, "Why don't you tell your mother you love her? She loves you so much." I was guilty. When I was six, I would tiptoe up to the doorway of their bedroom, it was always late at night. I could hear them talking about me. My mother said that there was something bad about me which genetics couldn't account for and my father would agree. He agreed with everything she said. They talked about how
maybe I should be instituted.

George: How did that make you feel?

Electra: I was unlike everyone in the world. I decided I was a freak. So my mind made up another world: that's when I began to live in the imagination.
George: But what had so frightened you?

Electra: I can't remember back then cause I'm scared to. (Making herself.) I've got to remember because I have to cure this disease.

George: Go back further.

Electra: I'm trying. I'm going to look at my fears. Lobotomy. Fire. I'm terrified of fire. Which doesn't make sense cause I'm basically fearless: knives, guns don't bother me; when I was a kid, I used to jump off the boardwalk over the beach. It was high.

George: Why are you scared of fire?
Electra shrugs.

George: If you were badly burned during childhood, you'd have a scar.
Electra: I don't have a scar. I'm scared of fire.

George: Let's go back to lobotomy. Your mother doesn't want you to be you.

Electra: She wants me to be really dumb and get C's on my report card. She hates how bright I am.

George: She doesn't want you to exist.

Electra: She's always tells me that. That she would have gotten an abortion if she hadn't been scared.

George: She tried to kill you.

Electra: I don't remember. (Blocking.) Let's ask the healers.

George: Dear healers, please be with us now and answer my and Electra's questions about her mother. Did Electra's mother try to kill her?

Electra is sitting in her child's position, rigid.

George: Yes. Did Electra's mother try to burn her when she was a child?

No. Did Electra's mother try to kill her before she was born?

Yes. When she was three months in the womb? When you were seven months in the womb, your mother tried to abort you using something to do with heat, a method common in those days.

Electra: I know this.

George: The abortion didn't work because you were meant to be born. You were helpless when all this happened. That's why you're scared.

Electra: What do I do?

George: May you go back to that child who existed before your mother tried to abort her, so that she can grow up in love. Give her the help that she needs to do what she has to do while alive. Amen. Electra sings in a clear, strong child's voice:

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels?"

I know the answer: no one.

Tell me: from where does love come?

An angel is sitting on my face. To whom can I run?

Take me in your arms, death,

I'm so scared; do anything to me that will make me safe while I kick my heels and shout out in total fear,

while we hurtle through your crags to where it's blacker: Orpheus' head eaten by rats, what's left of the world scatters, in the Lethe the poet's hairs, below where there's no ground, down into your hole, because you want me to eat your sperm. Death. I know. "Every angel is terrifying." Because of this, because I have met death, I must keep my death in me, gently, and yet go on living. Because of this, because I have met my death, I give myself birth. Remember that Persephone raped by Hades then by him brought into the Kingdom of Death there gave birth to Dionysius.

You were the terrorized child, Mother, Now be no more. Requiat in pacem. Tell me: from where does love come?

"Emerging at last from violent insight

"Sing out in jubilation and in praise."

to the angels who terrified away the night.

Let not one string of my forever-child's heart and cunt fail to sing.

Open up this body half in the realm of life, half in death and give breathe.

For to breathe is always to pray.

You language where language goes away.

You were the terrorized child, Mother, Be no more.

Requiat in pacem.
Requiem. For it was you I loved.

Angry Dried Sea Spit Spatterings

2010-07-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

In America, women are more dangerous than a loaded shotgun in the hands of a drunken 10 year old boy. In America, a narrator strains to see images and hear sounds, always echoing bodiless voices or voiceless bodies, origins unknown. In America, a recording of an expiring consciousness struggling to find meaning in a situation which offers no purchase in mind or sensation. The consciousness makes repeated, feeble efforts to assert the possibility of color, sound, movement, memory, another person’s presence, only to fall back hopelessly into the recognition of colorlessness, paralysis, silence, oblivion, solitude. In America, there is an image of a self imagining itself, but a self imagining itself imagining itself, often suspecting that it is being imagined itself. In America, remember the swimmer, always swimming whenever we saw him---swimming---wet----seeking the next pool? In America, suddenly everything was thin, two-dimensional, without body and fullness. In America, brightness fell from the sky and the black ruins in our hearts awakened again. In America, the idea itself, which transforms our minds conceptions into events imperceptible through the labyrinths and fibrous interlacing of matter, disguises the new idea of what belongs to nature. In America, a manifested matter in the domain of forms. In America, sensations so subtle, they are a pleasure for the spirit to frequent. In America, a magic state. In America, a concrete concept of the abstract. In America, true to nature, a soul at the mercy of phantasms from beyond the void of fear. In America, a frenetic dance of rigidities and angles. In America, our minds have begun to plummet. In America, a visual and audible whispering------a voluminous magnetic whirl. The strut of the double. In America, countering the narrative is the key to saving humanity.

Only way out is in

2010-07-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Time. The dying experience. Look. Gone from my sight. Time. In its own way, in its own time. Please turn out the lights so I don’t have to look at what I cannot see. The plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures. Time. Could he win? It possessed certain secrets of linear harmony. Affecting the brain directly, like a physical agent. Harmony. Time. Especially when they get to be 1200 years old. Our Master Blender has a very ancient ritual he applies to each one of the great works. Similar to The Aroma Ritual. One look tells you the time it took, the time it is, and the time you’re doing. These days the right time isn’t enough. If you’re not sick today, why worry? It’s tomorrow that holds the terror. And that’s what we consider our business: to be ready for tomorrow. What a good time for all the good things. The mouth opens the tongue rolls out in the mud and no question of thirst either no question of dying of thirst either all this time vast stretch of time. Something is wrong here. Another image so soon again. Time was short, his problems vast. I tried to paint it black, but turned it purple. This is the beginning of separation, first from the world. This is becoming a time of withdrawing from everything outside one’s self and going inside. Inside, there is only room for one.

Day into day. Night out of night. Time after time. Year before year. Sign for sign. You hope that love remains. Expressing in past tense all the things we have to say and the ones we used to know are all here with us now. Drifting with the clouds on a breezy memory day. I have to say - the shadows of themselves do need to be placed upon the shelves.

Out of the scene- A mosquito bites him and dies immediately

Out of the seen- Poison blood

I have to say, And so winter arrives as does the sadness in your eyes. And yet we remain. I know when that feeling hits, the drift is going to take me. A man puts his sax into a black case on the side of the street. A haunting displacement /in the head/ I’m going back home - - going to walk through the rubble there. Look at it again, one more time, see how it is gutted out. Walk through the rubble where I was born. A boy strolls off the background bridge takes a path through some trees. A cityscape appears in the distance before him. He stares through a smashed window hole into a building full of trash----- weeds crawl the outer edges of this bombed up 10 story hunk of concrete. A man appears from a dark corner inside. I live back there. He has a yellow yo yo, and plays with it in the alley. Leaves walking the dog. The Savage Innocence of sound changing as it moves, or the Doppler effect. Suitcase/Passport/Open Water/Goodbye/Liberty fading/ distant monuments. That goddamn tick tock. Time.

Supplica a mia madre

2010-06-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

"It’s so hard to say in a son’s words

what I’m so little like in my heart.

Only you in all the world know what my

heart always held, before any other love.

So, I must tell you something terrible to know:

From within your kindness my anguish grew.

You’re irreplaceable. And because you are,

the life you gave me is condemned to loneliness.

And I don’t want to be alone. I have an infinite

hunger for love, love of bodies without souls.

For the soul is inside you, it is you, but

you’re my mother and your love’s my slavery:

My childhood I lived a slave to this lofty

incurable sense of an immense obligation.

It was the only way to feel life,

the unique form, sole color; now, it’s over.

We survive, in the confusion

of a life reborn outside reason.

I pray you, oh, I pray: Do not hope to die.

I’m here, alone, with you, in a future April… "

-Pier Paolo Pasolini

always on time but a year late

2010-05-17T00:56:00.000-07:00

Be selective with whom you expose yourself to. Ya never know who you’re talking to sometimes.

The way you see it, it's a fucked up universe, it's just there never moving from place to place always outside and inside of itself simultaneously I agree to be abandoned voice of voice of all what voice to be abandoned to say nothing when nothing in a moment of stutterings A body painting a token breath of life inside a cesspool is what I'm talking about. It's shit, that's what it is and when I turn hot everything I touch gets liquid. The slitting of the throat with a straight razor is spectacular----one sure movement, deep quick skin divides gaping tear the wound is fatal yet consciousness lingers here something illegible savoring your death in between the lines of dreams thus north south east and the west of the abandoned arrow effect of hope each no knowing that I should cry or sing about the sack of arms the trunk of somebody in the mud with living strands of maggoty snails all that you don't hear nuthin' just like I never felt so calm in my life saying as I hear that one day all that every word always as I hear it in me alone in the dark the mud I hear it and say to make an end with him a warning to me a murmur quick then end as I refuse to put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.........................

-- This is the illustrated reach, the definitive reach, the reach in motion stopped in time then sped up again, the reach beyond ourselves behind us in these pages, the reach captured inside outside upside down, the reach glazed in granite, the reach for you in nature, the reach in canvas, the reach in paper, the reach in life, the reach in death, the reach in nothing, the reach dismissed.

here we go again

2010-05-12T13:56:00.000-07:00

Your just getting it into place placing it next to the Kleenex in a little opposite to white raven black slot by that armrest-something like that beige armrest though slightly put on alright you want to try and do this without too much bullshit trying to make it prattle nice that would probably um defeat the scheme of what this is of what this is not so try to do it you just-try-n-do it change it afterwards-maybe-ok-video-drome in-you put your video/drome in in a chilly hummmmmmmamamamamam and you know what that means…………

I have to puff away the lime raw smoke haze on the outerside—there it went out the crack twisting about the concrete gray walled freezed white fluorescent wash of a parking garage from the inside out I said I didn’t I I meant you…….that’s what you should do anyways here we drink so maybe you won’t fall fall out of the slits out of the uh crevices that happens to be umm where you are ohhhhh here we go now for now

Maybe you won’t get switched off maybe you’ll stay switched on through the whole stumble tumble slip lurch founder slide fall pitch over upon go head over sprawling plunge T-R-I-P have not heard that before ehhhh I hope so ooop there’s that I again cover my mouth in deviant surprise you hope so you hope so you hope so you hope so what we’ll see uhhh guh uhff guhhhh huff huguhff hooooey……..-----you wanna try not ta get into a smash batter you know you want to turn this down jusa-little-bit=sooooooo it all might can mingle you approach the gate approaching you realize this is going to be more difficult then you were thinking but none-the-less the gate opens a wrap that’s buckled up….hmmmm that’s a wrap of wonder you wonder-you wonder one way gripping the leathery worn steering wheel still shifting to turn the

CANTO
Corner stone one way you moved your feet from the place where you were standing, in order to look from near at another story which was gleaming white to me it was the hour in which the ascent allowed no delay we’re going one way means right Shit you realize it’s rainin like a mutha fucka you see that it’s really really wet people are still drivin like fucking maniacs so you cautiously approach the corner or the turn you wanna describe things more but everythings going by so rapidly you’re finding it hard to repeat what yer seein when we were down in the dark pit beneath the feet of the giant, far lower, and I was still gazing at the high wall, I heard say to me? XXXII
A syntopican II spinoza when there will be so little time there will come evidence to take and rediscover human being existence that it would be itself a noun a verb an adjective an adverb pronounced conjuncted interjected preposition those grammar rules man to world like the yellow dingy maple leaves strewn about or are they elm leaves pillaging the road way in such a way that the road is lost that you cross the double yellow line is even gone the leaves are there wet-n-soggy with rain coming down in nice even patterns ya know you notice that as you cross La Jolla ave lt doesn’t matter you could go left you could go right but your goin to go straight through the light you look into the you gazing into the rear view mirror in which a van maybe with lights on bright right in your rear view mirror looking into your gaze so ya reach up and tilt your little rear view mirror bright light dimmer do on and watch it not disappear but become very faint so you make the corner onto

Crescent Heights you make a left as you laugh to yourself you hope you don’t get a flat tire you see a white maybe 1986 Buick Reagle parked to your right traffic is slow but not bad it’s 7:30 pm and you have to make Encino by eight but you know you can’t so you just settle in and enjoy the music you try to stay turned on enjoy the trip you have to stop you have to stop behind this red car with license plate #4FRJ074 CA----------------------you see that it came from a Santa Monica dealership----wow------green lights.

You can’t turn left well I guess you can it’s after 7pm but before 7pm you can’t turn left on streets like 3rd like Beverly and you are not suppose to turn left on Vermont-------ever but some do--------you have if it’s clear you agree with that not turning left before 7pm with the volume it makes sense as long as your not the one wanting to turn left (giggle, te hee) at least that’s how you see it on occasion-when your thinking

Too much let’s see what else can you describe? These street lights on the sides are kinda cool if you look at them from a distance they kind of come to a point at that green light to the yellow geometric sign moves past moves fast or you move past painted bold center DIP---------

ON THE RADIO

“I agree with you wholeheartedly about the importance of not protecting the sensitive ecosystems in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and I support all efforts to drill in this area. In the last Congress, I cosponsored more executions which when introduced would have designated 1.5 million to die. Protect the area from development and preserve it for future generations………hell no…….develop drill and more profits……so what if it would have protected the nearly 165 species whose habitat is the coastal plain, as well as complete the spectrum and destruction of arctic and subarctic ecosystems that it sustains.”

Sayeth the burning BUSH

The drug of sleep is only temporary comfort…….TERROR in the wrong place wakin at 5am cuz I can’t be realistic my back was turned to her as she screamed like anything my body craves a dream to make my life worthwhile a shadow blots out your words shivering loneliness meanwhile I pay for my expressed need you got into this , you get out of it between gaps of psychodrama.let my dream s be yours.I could get undressed and move closer to the fire…

You find that humorous ooops there ya go again ya gotta quit you know you did find it humorous when you saw it that time with BT but now but now you know you know your talking about BT when you recognized that that’s what it was you can say hey that’s kind of funny DIP or you’re a dip whose dip who is insecure anyways?

Your approaching Oakwood now go through it you could go left you could go right but yer goin ta go straight -----------------------------recycle bins blue then the black trash cans lining the road are the recycled bins recycled? Nice $ Tidy like with water rushing around the bottoms swirling to the gutter cross on the sign you just saw a cross on the sign and what you mean by the cross or the sigh n of not interpretation which is mediocrities compliment to genius which is bad but like the speed limit sign the 35mph sign-the sign that that just has nothing but a cross to let you know of an approaching intersection in front of you a billboard reads:

“INVISIBLE HANDS:

The neoliberal free market process has two hands, the left and the right, between which it has squeezed the world to near death. These invisible hands wear many gloves: education and incarceration, regulation and deregulation, democracy and fascism, welfare state and free market……….

As protest and resistance mounts, and the capitalist power structures implement their repressive measures, justified and propagandized through the corporate media on grounds of a need to prevent some angry kids from breaking a window, let us remember that what they rightly fear most, is that those kids may grow up and smash the whole façade of the decrepit bourgeois edifice that is destroying the worlds.

By presenting and institutionalizing its own self-perpetuation as a primary objective, the capitalist mind-control machine seeks to equate the preservation of the system with the preservation of life itself. The neoliberal wishes to loosen environmental regulations not because he is hell-bent on destroying the environment as an end in itself, but because he knows that “good liberals” will fight him on the issue, and that is exactly the sort of avenue into which he wishes to channel all opposition to his plan of world domination----------------
What we are fighting against is not globalization or global capitalism, or neoliberalism, but capitalism, and what we are fighting for is not justice or democracy, but life.”

So do you read the signs, signs like that? Just remember that it was once said that “the last refuge for a scoundrel is patriotism.”

You see the red lights up there those are brake lights bright red-----that means you should stop or at least exercise caution & slow down ahhhheehhooouahhhahhhheee be aware there are red lights---read the signs-that could be a good thing too red light districts are a good thing, but then again there you go with a thought your thoughts---Fred Segal signed to your left can’t even oooops----umm------you go with that I again and you can’t even you can’t make it out because of the rain……

His conversation is so vapid he puts me to sleep………my dislike of out of the ordinary is in the congressional cloak room
He opened his mouth just wide enough to let out a noun
Freedom cannot flourish in spots………
Circumvent a verb

Incite revolution arouse revolution revolution framed revolution though he seemed loyal in public he worked behind the scenes to incite stir up arouse revolution

THERE’S NO PLEASING HIM

the fare

2010-05-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

A NIGHT BEHIND THE WHEEL

A lengthy point-of-view shot from MIKE’s vantage-point behind the wheel.

We see the city as Mike sees it. The front windscreen is a little dirty, the lit-up meter juts up at the lower right screen. The intercom crackles with static and messages.

The lights turn green; we take off with a start. A short first gear-quick shift-a long second gear. The cab eases to the right of the street, checking out prospective fares.

Our eyes scan the long line of pedestrians. The regulars-bums, junkies, tourists, hookers, homosexuals, hippies-they mean nothing now. They only blend into the sidewalks and lighted storefronts.

Our eyes now concentrate on those that step away from the curb-is that man hailing a cab or scratching his head?

In the next block there are perhaps three, four fares-quick gas-up through this yellow light-brake sharply-check the action. The first: tourists, nickel tippers-let the next guy pick them up. Let the second go also, the third-there’s a live fare: middle-aged local woman, short fare to the East Side, good tip.

We pull over to the curb, waiting for her to get in. It is a long wait-a black streetwalker crosses in front of the cab. We focus on (as Mike would) a young couple embracing in the distance.

As we travel, we hear Mike’s random thoughts about selecting fares and tips.

MIKE:(Voice over) As simple as it is- (the meter is activated: $0.60 registers. Tick, tick, tick. A quick glance shows the woman is now seated. She says softly, ‘192 East 89’. We take off with another jolt. Cross back up 9th Avenue, then cut through the park. We’re zooming up 9th Avenue; how many green lights can we string together? Somebody sets out to hail the cab, but quickly steps back again. The meter is up to $0.90. It’ll be $1.40 fare. -I forgot to remember to forget my Blue period, when “the spectral teeth and the heat of their glare” were “snapping pictures out of place” this unconditioned connectivity, this seeming truth experience as pure as wordless as nothing as love painting with liquid motions of the spectral brush with all filters destroyed, unfiltered communication as simple as it is “For those who don’t know what it is, total freedom is dangerous.” Now through the park and we’re almost there. Check the numbers-134-140. End of the block. The fare comes to $1.40.

Check back mirror-she’s getting out two bills. Two quarters and a dime change. Tip’ll be either 0.25 or 0.35. The tip comes back: 35c; a good tip. Good lady. We take off again with a jolt.

This is Mike’s world: dark side streets, garnish glaring main streets, quick glances, quicker evaluations- a dozen instantaneous decisions a minute. Are these people, are these objects?

Mike’s taxi speeds down a darkened street.

Mike lets off a fare and pulls into line at the Plaza.)

MIKE:(Voice over) “The Poison of the Honey Bee Is the Artist’s Jealousy. The Prince’s Robes & Beggar’s Rags Are Toadstools on the Miser’s Bags. A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the Lies you can invent.”

MAN: (Out of shot) I’ve got to remember stuff like that.

(Mike checks the mirror: Scanning across the back seat, he recognizes the passenger….oooops just another tourist checking his watch and speaking) The back against this inside wall of this epic box containing boxes containing boxes and so on and so on (Mike puts out his cigarette.)

MIKE: (Interrupting) A very horrible affair-isn’t it, sir?

MAN: (Only mildly irritated and rattling off words) In and out mind carpet caramel colored round marble patchy pasty paisley plaid puff puff green pillows yellow light lamp known sexy legs.

MIKE: That’s enough of that you drunken sot, with your popless little popgun! It’s raining lead and steel around here, and it might put a dent in our precious person.

MAN: (Pleased; glances to check Mike’s license) Frames full-a picture with it’s blue lint fibers clear Pens smear automon plastic don’t sit blankets used rag bone carrier vcr fantastic pioneer bee honey candle wire plug that linden in time stereo ok useless hole being used antennae and vents draping beatles books papers and a water of glass to drink before ten or eight.

MIKE: (Turning the wheel) “Repetition is the mother of comprehension” (Mike pulls up in front of the Barclay Hotel. The man jumps out of the cab and leans in the window to pay Mike)

MAN: What was that?
MIKE: “Repetition is the mother of comprehension.”

MAN: Huh?
MIKE: “Repetition is the mother of comprehension.” Got it?

MAN: Yes-straight for it. It’s something to swim for- that light or something (he steps back and watches Mike pull away)

DATE NIGHT

Manhattan street. Early evening.

Mike, dressed up to the eyeballs, walks brightly down the sidewalk. His face freshly shaved, his hair combed, his tie straightened.

He pauses in a store window to check his appearance.

Under his arm he carries the gift-wrapped Dylan record album.

Outside the Palestinian headquarters KATHY, smartly dressed, waves goodbye to another worker and walks out the door to greet Mike.

A short while later Mike and Kathy are walking down Broadway towards Times Square. Kathy does not let their bodies touch as they walk although Mike contemplates edging closer to her.

Kathy has opened the package and is admiring the record-or, rather, Mike’s sentiment behind giving it.

Mike looks around with pride: this is a moment to savour in his life-one of the few.

KATHY
Having fun?

MIKE
Yes. Thanks for bringing me here.

KATHY (Pointing to album)
What do you think of running track?

MIKE (Sly smile)
An odd ritual. You run as fast as you can to get somewhere. But never enjoy the sights or the company.

Mike thinks about this, the SPRINKLERS suddenly go on. Mike shrieks and runs out of the spray. Kathy’s face backtracks a bit. Maybe she was wrong to go out with this fellow she doesn’t know.
She makes a polite laugh.

Later. Mike and Kathy are in Times Square, turning the corner from Broadway to 42nd street. Mike carries the album under his arm.

They approach the garish marquee of a large midtown porno theatre advertising The Swedish Marriage Manual. The box office is flanked on both sides by glass cages filled with explicit publicity stills. Offending portions have been blocked out with black tape.

Mike steps over to the window and buys two $5 tickets. Kathy befuddled, watches him. She doesn’t know what to say. Mike returns with the tickets.

Kathy still has not fully comprehended what is happening.)

KATHY
Mike?

MIKE
Water! It is our life force.

Mike dances through the spray. He makes ALIEN GUTTURAL PURRING sounds. Kathy enjoys his playfulness.

KATHY
You are destroying life forms.

(Mike seems confused. He is so much a part of his own world, he fails to comprehend the other’s world. Compared to the movies he sees, this is respectable. But then there’s also something that Mike could not even acknowledge, much less admit: that he really wants to get this pure white girl into that dark porno theatre.)

MIKE
I know, but these are green, fang-faced, blood sucking Mutoids.

KATHY
Mike, I know Mutoids. They live two planets over from Xela.

MIKE
Okay. (stopping playing) You knowing these guys take the fun out of vaporizing…you can stop shaking your head.

KATHY
No I can’t. I feel really weird.

MIKE
You’re an alien, Kathy. You define really weird.

KATHY
It’s not that kind of weird.

Mike makes an awkward gesture to escort KATHY into the theatre. Kathy looks at the tickets, at the theatre, at Mike. She mentally shakes her head and walks toward the turnstile. She thinks to herself: ‘What the hell. What can happen?’ She’s always been curious about these pictures anyway, and-like all women, no matter how intelligent- she’s been raised not to offend her date. A perverse logic which applies even more in offsetting circumstances like these.

FREEDOM

2010-05-09T03:34:00.000-07:00

Freedom, like other concepts, is fruitful for human beings in particular situations. The mere repetition of the ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ slogan is as idle, bootless and disillusioning as any other unfulfilled or unfulfillable promise. Any unbalance or maladjustment, whether individual or social, should be examined on its merits. A general prescription of ‘freedom’ as an answer for all individuals and all social situations is unsatisfactory and under certain conditions it may be as dangerous as any other guaranteed universal cure-all.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of the freedom idea is its separatist character. Freedom implies separateness, -including preparations for division or departure, the actual process of separation, and the subsequent independence which results from separation.

If the first question confronting a human being is “to be or not to be”; the second question is “to belong or not to belong.” Belonging means attachment. Freedom means detachment. Those who are attached go along together. Those who detach go their own separate ways. The implications of separateness are present in the life of each individual and of each group and sub-group composing the human race.

From birth (which involves separation from the mother) the individual human is confronted by a dilemma,--to remain as close as possible to the mother or to break away, separate himself from the mother and strike out on his own account. If he remains close to the mother he enjoys the security of comfort, companionship and love. If he breaks away, he enjoys the thrill of initiating, adventuring, experimenting.

"Wavelength" Michael Snow--------------------1967

2010-05-09T03:02:00.000-07:00

My impression of and @ the showing of Michael Snow’s film “Wavelength”, march 2001 @ The Hammer Theatre, UCLA :

Just over there on a horizon on a wall on a white silk screen images burn hot we file in through a wet slick shiny outdoor marbled passage way into a darkened garage like room grays whites but clean & cold the types vary on the shuffle in mostly twenty somethings all interesting in their own way their here in this room all of us gathered together for 45 or so minutes strangers to see something rare…oh the literatures to the right as you walk in on your left—eyes blazed red on a friend 7 rows of white plastic folding chairs curved outward towards the medium sized white screen divided down the mid dle we all find our seats with projector slightly behind and undecipherable walla walla filling space the announcing introduction of what will be viewed the white chairs we all sit on are bound together with wide clear large bag ties……you know the kind cops use for handcuffs during one of their riots just like those binding our chairs together-when one moves the whole row must move together or the binding could snap we would run a risk of becoming unorganized or out of synch
Lights darken----hummmm, SWITCH………clat cl cla clat clat clat clatte clatter clatter clatter rrrrrrr click clickkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrrrrrrr
the projector purs light onto the white screen before our sight images dance images burn hot into us cold is heated focus on a moment it gives the picture gives you no choice a room a loft, fluorescent lights buzzing closer closer jerk closer smooth windows looking out onto tops of traffic on the move beyond a phone before a window a brick orange building-a hardware store

light changes outside closer closer closer yet the music plays a familiar favorite 4 people in $ out of 45 the room is half of what it was before closer closer closer now it’s day it’s night color change brilliant slow flash of red then a bit later all green- the black all over framing the outside picture is bright vivid and alive as the neck stiffens your jaw clenches her waist twists to whisper something to him[SQUIRM} closer closer outside is hardly visible inside bluuurs to out with the outside on top at the same time I lose sight of my peripherals to our sides it dissolves to black the outerside is gone just a few silhouetted heads and this picture of focus out of focus in the moment you have no choice
We’re in a black ribbed tunnel with light at the end like looking up through the bottom of a smoke stack through to the hard blue sky from within this place this black tunnel moving out into the end where the light is and at the end of this light is the back of your EYES moving closer closer yet still chugging forward (as being born) the phone is hesitantly picked up and used some motion with the edges still gloomy on the white of the wall between the glass dead center focal points to a photograph maybe three

Room is much much smaller now than before now by this time their heads are disappearing into the smeared car ride and back to the picture on display on the wall the waves become reflections, murky, long, menacing, black, fluid, cloudy, alien upclose slide sample under the microscope in the works of life almost time to end forty five minutes of meditation

Some have left but still the room is yet smaller as you all move closer into

pan across waves which seem to have faces appearing see those teeth them eyes that nose this mustache a fish for design a swirling twirling laughing extended faces in waves images burn hot images dance fast images slide out of view to darken as the clitter clatter click of the projector winds down slow to stillness we stumble back out into the rain alone~~~~~

PARROT THAT TALKS

2010-04-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

Diminished never is the drizzle that broke no calm and despairs of attaining his own mind. A new beginning, starting with flesh from the rain. The plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures. The great source of Surrealist inspiration is love: the exaltation of elective love. Surrealism is a spiritual politics of joy. Ahhhhhhhh Artaud, Sontag, Duchamp and Kerouac. Life destroys art and, at the same time universalizes it. I feel wrapped in the arts of the embalmer. My flesh suffocates, yet I cling to it. What would I ever do without my noble driver? Going forward I carried wax along the line, and laid it thick on the ears. Homeless with a first class pass and speaking with such pauses, you could go get a beer and snack before he’d begin the next sentence. These intruding shadows reach out, hold and fold me into the scenery as he works. I can hear the worms moving underground as destiny catches up with me in time to take over. Most of us feel what language cannot convey. Now I’ve caught up with my delusion and seem to be passing it by. Roll over into the light, a warmth of the other. Just before the flash reaches my eyes, they dig in. Wood workers cross a carpenters prison as I struggle and you collaborate. These letters destroy my armor. It awakens in me that it may not be so bad to live, and that makes it intolerable. It all made death vivid to him again. Worse than that, it made me conscious again.

Pre-Strange Aire notes

2010-03-08T17:35:00.000-08:00

Lenticular logic? Stepping into your memories is stepping into death. Here I am, putting these exercises out there for scrutiny. It’s all a work in progress and eventually due to become another form of digital fallout, as promised. A red sky tonight, expansive, like the eye. Maybe once it is all out there, we might find some of it to be of use in the untoward. There will be ideas thrown out randomly, to see how they smell out in the open. There will be just as many mistakes and false starts. The process is continuous. It is the work that counts. The end being always a new beginning. There will be names and outlines of stories, conversations recalled along with my current state of mind. Ultimately these exercises will lead to the completion of the untoward, and the first few steps of the next. With ancient evenings tucked tightly beneath your arm you carry on.

It begins now. Outline on the blog for the untoward, your experiences at Rangeaire or the falling out of rangeaire. Flip through each year from 89 to now listing the 3 most definitive moments/situations from each one. Write about that next? Sure. Turtle story from when you were three. Sarah’s short stories mixed with my short stories. JaSar. Straight linear narrative solid as a story can come, but as it slides forward, little signs move into view of a narrator slowly coming apart. Changing, growing--------affected by current environment (unemployed economy) raging as his jaunts to the past trigger psychotic breaks in the page, in him, in this. Northwest Renewable Energy Institute? At the end we are in the current stratosphere at hand, elongated indifference. Full circle, back to a solid as they come story. Linear. Random. Intersected. The narrator has evolved with us and worked through his psychotic confusion. Hear a brassy ring. It was like she had never come. Sha la la la lum sha la la la lum………It was like they never needed a thing. As I was walking a ribbon of highway, I saw above me gods anger give way, I saw around me a burning tower giving a pretty view of hell. Learn the harder they come and I’m a worried man. Biff Rose/ Ballad of Clichés off The Children of Light album. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” ---- John 1:5 Patti Smith Horses and Radio Ethiopia. Went to see Shutter Island. Checked out Northwest Veg.

This lands a bad land a raging mad land this land is heading straight to hell. Include the Tele-porn for brakes story in the piece. That would have been 1996 or 97. Ex-con stories and then end with the stolen turtles story from when you were three. First encounter was while a senior in high school I ended up stuck driving this 27 year old hoodlum named Ricky Gent out to a small party on the other side of the lake. He was legendary, so I knew who I had with me, and it was dangerous, he was unpredictable. He had robbed local beer stores, and was involved and on the wrong end of a knife fight, he would just start kicking the shit out of anyone for no reason. One minute he’s chatting it up and seemingly cool, the next thing you know someone is getting kerchopped with a half full 40 oz of Mickeys and stomped into the cold concrete. Left to pick up their teeth with broken fingers. So, yeah go into that one.

Then the second would be the guy that stopped in to the vagabond inn where I was a night auditor. He was just released from prison the day before after doing 15 years for second degree murder. He stops in finding me with icy blue wild eyes fixed on me I ask if he wants a room. This 5 foot 7 silver haired brute was drooling he was so high and pissed. He claimed he was off to kill his wife for trying to keep him from seeing his kid. Well, ole jb talked some sense into the man all night till he sobered up and could see more clearly the silliness of his notion. He would come back to thank me later.

Third is Nazario Cantu from when I lived in that lake house next to the convicts and felons. We all became friends real easy like. I let them borrow my lawn mower if they would make sure nobody messed with my place or my stuff. I would buy them beer and cigs sometimes and indulge them an ear to their adventurous stories. Nazario enjoyed telling me how he had been shanked eight times while in the clink, and the minute details of his revenge.

Fourth would be when I lived in the casa del crap hole behind my job at RAC. We had friends we scored cheap Mexican mota from that lived just down the street, and they wanted to name their child Mopri, cuz it spelled Primo backwards, which of course we know and you can see that it doesn’t. We didn’t say anything. Why? It’s some funny shit though. Ummmm, oh yeah, and more recently we were visiting a friend and a friend of theirs was over, he is a member of the gang known as the Crips. He just got out of the joint himself and is about my age, so he must be pretty high up on the food chain. He told us how the streets are edgy with uncertainty. He said that motherfuckers are even crazier now than ever. We believe him. He became upset about his father and began to cry, I think he missed a funeral or something. We consoled him. A truly tender moment indeed. VITAE. Course of life, eh?

Non-breeder and breeder separation. In the far future, millions of years from now, the earth becomes flat due to a shift in gravitational pull and a giant black hole turning our galaxy lenticular. The ones in the beginning who were wrong were made correct millions of years later. Long after humans (due to their breeding and non-breeding ways and discriminations) evolved into an ecto goo plasma sliding or dripping over the edges of our flat earth into the blank void of the universe. Like spooge sliding over the edge of a toilet bowl into the great flush of life/death.

So this is an invitation as much as it is a warning. Look for nothing here and maybe something will appear. Anyways, all exercises to gain direction for the completion of the untoward. I welcome all feedback. Give it your best shot. I will let the comments stand as they are and will not censor or delete the ones that are not favorable to me. I want all of the comments as they are all appreciated. I will begin with Strange Aire, the Rangaire story and attempt to make each entry after this stand as a short story on its own as much as it is a piece of the whole untoward. If it makes the cut that is. Your eyes will be full of lights at the surprise in my face. I is you and you is me. Be sure there will be paintings of the fields as they are sown to accompany each entry. For sale too. Soaking up the nostalgia of an ancient evening. Lenticular logic? When your memories catch up with you, well …………. yer dead.

Bennett, This is a test and The Chill Room

2010-02-11T15:59:00.000-08:00

This is my good friend and in many ways, mentor, Bennett Theissen's reading of the first posting on this blog. It's right down there below this one. There ya go. This is a test............. You can hear it by clicking: The reading.

Now BT is a master of audio art and has a show called The Chill Room, which if your reading this, you should definitely check it out. Here is the link: The Chill Room

This is a test, this is only a test...................

2010-02-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

I am a I am a I am a I am a blank page seeking the blood ink which will cause my surface to quiver with life. Subtext reaching depths beyond my own understanding. Rooted in this in which I’ll grow with every letter, word, phrase, passage, book, library and consciousness for as long as it exists. I am a I am a I am a I am a man a hu man human man seeking the bare truth, and not through these filthy words. I am not for which I am. I am resolution in film compared to resolution in storytelling. I am resolution necessary for clarification of images (pixels) manipulated for the whole. I am resolution necessary for clarification of characters / images / words / letters……..manipulated for the creation of the entire story, for the good of the all. We’re in a book, this book and anyone could be reading us right now! Study the links, relations and differences. Seek images and sounds that are free. Sounds that have nothing to do with one another, but eventually make a connection. What we need to know is what separates them, marking off time and space, this silent word that holds them apart. Once we are aware of this silent world, we’ll use these sounds together and their connection will be inevitably correct. In every image we must know who speaks. We must find the bare truth in the facts. No true image or sound can exist unless we study them first. Isolated/Isle? Am I, I am a.

Art as a weapon, as inoculations to fight off the digital disease and decay of present day ---------- as the digital veil blankets us like an airborne virus ------------- we are all becoming pixelated ---------- broken down into pixels and sound files/ virtual relationships -------------- Digital Madness! Art used as a vaccine against this digital virus / imagination for the sake of our souls ------------------- last strands of humanity clinging ----------------------- humanity snuffed out --------------------- Digital Progress? For what? For whom?

Maybe all we were all along was a digital signal, a transmission, a flash of light in the darkness ------------------- maybe, we’re just going home to our reception. Burroughs sees it as the enemy plan to reduce all human life to “simple binary coding,” to condense and assimilate the entire planet: “The cyclotron processes image ---------- It’s the microfilm principle------smaller and smaller, more and more images in less space pounded down under the cyclotron to crystal image meal.” Language is both the poison and the cure.