winterreise 2011

they're calling this winter [here in nj] one of the snowiest on record---or at least in the top 10. i don't have to tell you---your back feels it, as does mine, from shoveling human habitrail paths through its slushy bulk....

cue 'gute nacht' from schubert's 'winterreise'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

so many complain even after their backs stop hurting...i secretly love when heavy weather comes blowing in to cause its mischief...i think people complain because they think, without realizing it, that every day should be tropically sunny and warm and they should be running around out in it, which, of course would set you up for misery---when every day seems to go out of its way to especially thwart your expectations! my secret love is that i get to justify staying in and being introverted....i also guiltily love watching the frustrations of the aforementioned people and the breaking of our rational technologies [like snowblowers] and the just-as-rational political systems which try to coordinate by great effort the removal of the snow which so effortlessly blew in.

embrace the ice queen....it's just mother nature being herself....

a new blonde

just when i've been wondering whether i should ever play guitar again and perhaps switch to another instrument....just when my real life human blonde dumps me, in steps the soul with its work in wonderous ways to reveal a younger, leaner, more understanding blonde ;-)

now, if i can learn how to play and make music with this one...a big 'if'...but if i can rise to this occasion, i have the feeling that much else will fall into place...what i'm referring to is that, after reading a couple of books of archetypal psychology, i've come to the conclusion that my daimon [to use their word for 'guiding spirit'] wards off relationships because it has to do something else first through me and i think that this is it---to mold the materials of my psyche into....SOMETHING....i have to manifest something first...until then, i'm in the holding pen...

and my psyche puts up a hell of a fight! just ask the ex's...piling up high like the fresh kills landfill...

a weekend of parks and recreation II

...we're all lying in the gutter...but some of us are looking at the stars-------oscar wilde

...or at the tops of trees, at least...now that it's already the following weekend, i'm finding it difficult to muster up interest in last weekend, despite how interesting i remember it to have been...perhaps the pictures will fill in the gaps in my words...perhaps really none of this matters at all...

[really i'm too depressed at the moment to write anything interesting: transmission in car is shot and can't see girlfriend this weekend, trapped at my parents' house...hearing that a cousin killed himself...mom has more [skin] cancer...a sparse, sombre thanksgiving]

i have creepy premonitions of being an old man trying to find these entries as a nostalgic way of reconnecting with my younger self but not being able to find them---though the reality is probably going to be that, sometime in the future, a great internet server purging will take place and those not willing to pay up in order to maintain their postings will have said postings erased to make way for paid cyber real estate...or that much of the server infrastructure we currently use are like dirt roads which will be demolished and 'paved over' with the latest information superhighway triple intergalactic bypass surgery...now, i'd surmise, is about tail end of the '40 acres and a mule' phase of the internet [free, encouraging, expansionist]...just wait until the 'twenty-first century manhattan cut-throat housing market' phase [maximum runaway profitization]!

choose your apocalypse! please leave your personal favorite in the comments section of this post----it'll be erased eventually,  anyway; so, have fun with it at least, humoring yourself and me in the process!

sorry....

while driving to deep cut gardens, i spied a sign that said 'fossil beds' on the side of a typical road! having just read about the new mammoth [literally and otherwise] finds in colorado, my head swam with intrigue...the sign below awaited me in the parking lot:

poricy brook fossil beds! my inner 8-yr-old grabbed the wheel and steered me down the path and over brook onto its muddy banks. the water cold, my hand numb...plunged into the mushy gray clay to excavate some ancient sea creatures which had last been alive tens of millions of years ago, when the sea actually covered what is now 10 miles inland:

how surprised i was to find that the fossils weren't even fossilized, the organisms still being in evidence, and the rock not being fully solidified [unless i'm way stronger than i realize].

after 20 mins digging i was cold enough to continue onwards towards my original destination, deep cut gardens:

glistening, bronzed, autumnal redwoods!

formal gardens with volcanic stone walls...

art nouveau/celtic twists in the cypress groves...

even a whimsical dragon with googly eyes created out of this weeping pruned tree!...all off an ordinary, winding road in monmouth county, nj...

a weekend of parks and recreation

...not the tv show but the 'real' thing...

perhaps hearkening back to my time living abroad last year, i'm finding myself being able to act like a tourist where i live. it's a blessed feeling to be able to unabashedly, non-ironically explore my own backyard and it seems that having monmouth county as my backyard [until february 2011] is an especial blessing.

within 20 mins. drive i have my choice of excellent parks, county and otherwise: hartshorne woods, huber woods, deep-cut gardens, tatum park...this weekend i've made it to all of them in glorious, cool, clear november weather, plus an unexpected bonus i spied while driving by...

i finally found the back [rocky point] entrance to hartshorne woods, a sprawling enough park to get lost in! luckily the weather cooperated, i had my camera and good hiking shoes---off i disappeared into a rambling, scenic 3-mi loop trail. before that, i came to an unexpected old military concrete bunker sporting this neat graffiti:

back to the trail---i hoofed it in front of a large, loud gang of about 25 kids...who never managed to catch up to me, even with my stops to soak in the scenery, like...this unexpected and mysterious concrete shaft vent in the middle of the woods:

where did it go to? what was it used for?

 the trail bent around the south side of a rocky hill, complete with views of the navesink river, to which it eventually led:

the scenery celebrated itself as if it were an old dutch etching or an expressive hudson river school painting! reeds swayed, wavelets lapped...and i felt myself [like i do] reverting to an edenic state, as if seeing the scene for the first time after coming upon it at the end of a thousand-mile migration with my tribe; but, alas, i have no tribe...and i did want to jump into the navesink like a black lab...but i did not.

'auto-tune the news' is news to me

i remember reading, a while back in college, a short, yet dense french postmodern book called 'noise' by jacques attali.  ah, how i used to search in vain for clues to living in these types of impenetrable gobbledygook books---but i do remember one phrase which, at the time, struck me as being as important as it was cryptic: that the musical instrument of the future [written in 1985] would be the video camera. being a musician who was studying video, i filed away the comment...

cut to a few days ago when my friend james sent me a series of links to peruse, one being to the auto-tune the news channel on you tube. instantly, after watching and listening, i was struck, not only by attali's prescience, but by the brilliance and total 'now-ness' of the art of the gregory brothers
---the creators of the channel. the 'now-ness' or cultural relevance to what it means to be human at this time, is so rare in most creations [which mostly look to other people, at other times, or, heaven forbid, look nowhere at all] and constitutes real art in my humble, aging book!

in other words, here are three young brothers and one wife who are offering a playful, engaging, artistic, thought-provoking and musical answer to our culture of constant media bombardment. they're not whining about it! they're making yet more media, yes....but media that's on our side.

below is the famous-for-the-moment 'bed intruder' song---as i type, this video has had over 42 million hits and has, i imagine, turned the gregory brothers art into a full-time career!! the creation is based on a news story of an intruder breaking and entering an apartment in the projects and getting in bed with a sleeping resident. here i think of the long-running folk and blues tradition of turning current events into songs...

first, here's the original news story source material for the song:




now, the song [response]:




no, the gregory brothers aren't the first to play video musically, however. even back in those heady, postmodern theory-soaked days of the early early 90's, i remember being exposed to the emergency broadcast network's [ebn] then-hot-off-the-press video loop music and performance. see an example below:





compare, contrast...talk amongst yourselves about digital patchwork quilts...

how i learned to leave the force and grab a firehose

now, some context: the above is a picture of my boss taken about 25-30 years ago. it sits propped up against the stereo in the shop to provide sometimes much needed comic relief. for a while, each time i looked at it [or even imagined it] i burst out laughing---imagining, as i was, a jerry-lewis-like outburst of sound to accompany the visual.

one can almost imagine that this picture proof of goofing off on the job was the reason that my boss has run a guitar repair shop for the last 20 years and is not still an officer of the law-----hence, my title to this post [with passing reference to dr. strangelove].

transparency

i sit here on a friday night, missing my long-distance girlfriend terribly---wishing nothing else but to invent the killer app machine to conquer time and space...gosh, while i'm at it, i'd get creative and splice, dice, mix and sample her anachronistically into parts of my life she didn't make it into the first time around...i enjoy the endless possibilities to myself...

of course new media technologies find new ways to put us 'in touch'....these said technologies, made mostly by men [female tech designers, engineers, developers speak up now to prove me wrong!], seem to be remarkably conducive to pornography [one can, here, cry the end of civilization as we know it with xbox's 'kinect' which responds to player gestures---what a great porn medium!]...if even a simple generalization about the male sexual psyche is true----that men need to 'see' what's going on to get turned on----then it can be said that males are 'hardwired' [sorry!] for pornography and, by association, advertising. joseph campbell called anything pornography that induces a desire for an object whether it be a car, fridge or flesh and blood; so, according to his elegant formula, all advertising is pornography, since advertising's only job description is to generate desire! in fact, all celebrity-fed media is pornography! to consume media is to be flattered that one's eyeballs [attention] are the coveted prize, though, in the end, your eyeballs are attached to your wallet by a long chain...

during the past week, while consuming my political pornography, i've reflected on david mccullough's mammoth biography, 'truman' about----surprise-----president harry truman and how i'd like to throw it at president obama, not in order to physically injure him [though it would, weighing in at a whopping 996 pages!] but in order to show him how to face a mid-term elected opposition congress: with pluck and toughness. even in 1946-8 the republicans were the party of 'no', their smear campaigns working public opinion polls against the president despite a booming post-war economy, which refused to devolve into the economic disaster the naysayers prayed for. [apocalyptic fetishism is yet another form of pornography---live and well----- which, in my mind, is akin to the fad of jerking off while attempting to strangle oneself---in order to have more intense orgasms] even then, conservatives wanted to cut people from the social security roles, deny relief aid to a freshly-devastated europe [leaving them wide open for soviet take-over in the process], and ignored truman's push for low-cost housing for veterans and....[gasp] a national health plan....sound familiar? read the book now, barack!

on the phone---another great porn medium, invented by a man---a friend and i wondered about the theory of efficient markets, rational actualizers and the decision-making process during political contests [like we do]...sounds fancy, but the take home was this: how can a voter ever hope to make an informed, rational decision for a candidate when there is absolutely NO transparency in the available information about the candidate, where in fact, lots of money is spent to produce the exact opposite effect, opacity?

what with our sex buttons frantically pressed constantly on top of the need to make decisions without any tools with which to do so...NO WONDER WE'RE CRAZY!!! insanity is the only sane response to the cruel experiment in which we're the subjects...

more transparency, please! with everything....so i can, with my male psyche, glare at the pubic [turned public] hairs of politics, marketing, the medical establishment, media, paranoid alarmists, etc...well, no...i already know they all have no clothes...

the future luxury of anonymity

did something abnormally normal last night: went to the mall, ate and saw a movie--'the social network'. a saunter through the monmouth mall almost inspired me to poetry of the post-postmodern: i gaped at the face-slapping irony of glitzy window-loads of sportswear being peddled to overweight, and in certain cases, obese teens and 'tweens'...immediately i realized that this was the fate of pretty much all of us against the leviathan of total consumer media saturation, as it must be...for why would a self-assured, healthy person need discretionary products in order to feel good about his/her self? the answer: they wouldn't and don't. so, go ahead...be an elite athlete, you fat fuck! or at least buy the sneakers...

as a child and pre-teen, i never felt like i had to wrestle with the cunningest of cunning madison ave minds...even the most well-meaning and well-prepared of critically-thinking adults are hopelessly outgunned in the cultural showdown for hearts and minds--hearts are subliminally won, while the mind shuts off and is pulled along. meanwhile, children are just dead fish in a barrel. not a chance! what's even worse is that the whole enterprise of a mall is like a giant tv of constant commercials, through which you can walk and only spend your way out, interbred with a low-lying, child-level checkout aisle candy rack: the kids grab, the parents pay and are converted into child-abusing curmudgeons if they don't. in fact, i feel that any dissent from or critique of the system instantly makes the critique-er/dissenter into the same. i feel it now, writing this modest blog entry. to even question malls is to hate puppies and children and sacred cows. [no, i don't hate any of the above.]

speaking of that: another sad moment for me...seeing boy scouts selling popcorn at the mall in order to fund their existence. i fondly remember being in the scouts, but don't remember having to do anything remotely as commercial and separated from 'community service', which was an integral part of the entire scouting experience! i felt bad and gave them money without accepting the popcorn. this action seemed to blow their minds even while they thanked me. good scouts...

so, the movie...as a film, it was very good, engrossing even to a non-gen-y-non-facebook-user...i see the facebook phenomenon as strikingly similar to my mall experience, actually: a non-place space to be where everybody is and to see what everybody else is doing. in a word: gossip. in the old world: the town square. my intuition about the trajectory of such an enterprise: right now represents an age of digital communalism/feudalism, wherein everybody except the old wants in---if i may map the historical development of [western] economies onto the development of the internet as a commercial medium...next, i feel that colonization can/will happen, pulling developing nations into the fold [just like getting them cars and cigarettes----new markets, my son, new markets!]...

once everybody's in the pot and being stirred, we'll have to pay---probably a premium---in order to get out....just like at the mall, just like the suburbs vis-a-vis the city! the future luxury of anonymity! this stage would represent the 'bourgeoisie-ification' of our internet society. a current example from our commercial culture is paying more for products without the cheap and sometimes harmful additives expedient to industrial mass-production, but not necessarily to humanity. in an age of total or near-total connectivity, anonymity will be a sought-after/bought-after privilege.

this past week, at the shop, a co-worker talked about the hypothetical tooth-implanted music chip we'll all have...it then came to me that we'll probably have to pay for silence, too....we already do: exclusive living away from the noisy mass, vacations...'getaways', in a word...pay to get away...away...away from....you and you and you and you....

econ-ned

economists SHOULD calculate the cost of everything having a cost...the cost? priceful....

t.e.a.t.

...total entertainment all the time....

some old artwork i did...still agree with its cynicism...please, by all means, have a suck...

beach bum

i don't look happy about the fact that each southern-california-type day we've had this 'indian summer' i've hit the beach after the shop...but i have been quite pleased, taking advantage of living 'down the shore'.

roots and rootlessness

...so...in the face of last post....what would my 'roots' be? in which cultural milieu would i find my melodies, dances and participation in an authentic way? i know that 'authentic' is a very slippery slope, indeed---especially for a suburban white guy like myself who inherited a culture of 'no-culture' [or ALL cultures, depending on how one looks at the issue]...on a side note, i just heard an npr interview with robert plant, who claimed the same 'culture-of-no-culture' for himself whilst ignoring and actually denigrating his 'real' native, ancient, well-established anglo-saxon culture...african-american music spoke to him from across the atlantic....and the rest, as they say, is history...

back to me: where i grew up was settled by the dutch and used for farming since the 1600's. before that, i've heard it described as 'prime indian hunting grounds'....so what would that melody sound like? ironically, i've also heard it said, and found it to be true, that the dutch don't really have music of their own, and thus are avid catalogers of the music of others. did the rootlessness of the dutch rub off on new jersey suburbia, literally planting a root of rootlessness? i listen to the amazing dutch radio station, concertzender, as i type this...

recently i received a forward from my mother of an email from my cousin who has been involved more than anyone in the family in plumbing our geneology. three pictures were attached. one is believed to be my great grandmother:

..stern, czech, classical...these seem to be my authentic roots. her brother, named josef franzl, [if she in the photo is indeed my great grandmother] was a well-known, accomplished french horn player with various groups in nyc during the early 1900's; well-known enough for my cousin to have gotten in touch with a horn collector who recently bought a lot of franzl stuff on ebay! this is blowing my mind...i searched the new york times archives for mentions of josef and there are a few concert announcements. supposedly he composed, too. that would be a holy grail for me: find and procure franzl manuscripts!

melody/memory

an interesting thing is happening as i'm able to hold a pick and play guitar again, after 10 years of battle with the you-don't-want-it condition, focal dystonia. during the entire past ten years, along with losing control of the fine motor skills in my right hand, another curious neurological wipe occurred: that i was practically incapable of perceiving melody!! melodic continuity was just as scrambled as the kinetic instructions to my right hand! now, however, both activities are sprouting some exciting new growth...i believe the two go 'hand in hand'...

my 'amelodia' was almost the more frightening of the two conditions. picture a sampler with a memory of 4-5 seconds only able to reproduce a clipped mockingbird form of music. however much i tried i couldn't anticipate or perceive music, melody and/or meaning beyond the 4-5 sec. limit! it simply would be processed. i was stuck in a very short loop, indeed. my mind could only collage, rip a few words and paste them on a small surface and was denied the richness of original paragraphs and chapters. an ocd adhd rut.

it feels to me now that my body was experiencing [and still is, though to a much lesser extent] what our culture,  especially music, has experienced over the past 30 years. a self-fulfilling rut. imitations of imitations ad infinitum---the effects of total media saturation...the telephone game converting english into unintelligible chinese whispers....ooooh, and how horrible that feeling feels! another notion comes to me: that melody transmission is rooted in identifiable strains of culture [now reduced to 'genres' or 'styles']----not knowing the songs is not knowing the dances is....not knowing and not being able to participate in the culture in a meaningful way...melody is meaning...and losing melody is losing meaning, a huge chunk of language!

i welcome back melody and meaning in my life....and hope they stick around....its been lonely, fragmented and frankly nonsensical without them....

coming up for air and sea

so....since last entry i've relocated to my new temporary boathouse residence in highlands, nj ['where the jersey shore begins' and it does] and started a guitar repair apprenticeship program. any move is difficult even when it's as physically easy as mine was: i moved myself in one car in about 20 mins. [i've moved about 15-20 times over the past 17 years, depending on what one defines as a 'move'] ah, no matter how hard i try, i can't escape my father's business [moving]!

yes, i'm alive and well even if i haven't been able to call you---universal winking irony would have it that i should move to the only [literally] small spot in monmouth county not serviced by my cellphone company!

oh, it feels so good to get into a shop with tools...so many things philosophical and spikey that i can say, but i'll try to sum it up: for years i've felt like an imposter and in certain respects i have been...my roots are blue collar, no matter what heady proclivities i've developed. i'm very far from anti-intellectual, but i've always felt the discrepency between me and the educated/ivy league/intellectual people with whom i've associated over the years. the discrepency comes down to class. yes, that elephant in the american parlor!

mercury retrograde

my girlfriend pointed out to me the astrological fact that the planet responsible for communication and ideas, mercury, has appeared to trail 'backwards' in its orbit across the sky---a condition also known as 'retrograde' by ancient astronomers/astrologers. if the planet ruling communications and other 'mercurial' fiefdoms is appearing to move in the opposite direction, what effect could, almost logically [in a medieval way] be anticipated? that all one's communications can be botched, undone, untied? yes. no wonder my head has felt turned 180 degrees...

i don't know if a small planet very far away is responsible, but i do know that this past week had been a communications DISASTER with my said girlfriend as well as with my attempts to find an apartment at the jersey shore. other co-varying factors most surely are: the fact that i'm using craigslist almost exclusively in my housing search; that i'm searching in new jersey...after two solid months of banging my head against the wall [to make myself feel BETTER], hours of driving, being told off and blown off, this morning i've finally had a moment of closure in my housing search!

dare i share my most interesting housing search snafu?

the listing was modest and no-frills enough: share my beautiful home. large, wi-fi, your own kitchen, yard, friendly black lab, etc. i think the black lab had me sold on it before anything else. the owner was difficult to understand over the phone due to her accent [or was it mercury?] but we talked and worked out a time to see the apartment. i pull up: very nice neighborhood! grand, new house! very promising! i meet the landlady, the kids, the dog...everything great so far. the space is expansive---the whole basement floor, in fact. the landlady tells me she isn't a private person---leaving me to wonder about the significance of having said so...though the comment verged on classic-segues-into-pornography, i didn't dwell too much on it.

next day, i left a voice mail message, informing her of my decision to take the place. then i waited a number of days for a reply. then she leaves me a voice mail message, asking me what my decision is...and that she can only accept the rent in cash, being that she isn't supposed to have tenants in her house. didn't she get my message? cash?! red flags! next, i e-mailed her saying that i wouldn't want to put myself into such a precarious housing situation, in a place where i'm not supposed to be. she writes back: no one can tell me who can or can't live in my home. i want someone to live in as a family member, who i can rely on when i'm not here...[and charge them CASH for the privilege?]

translation: she wants help with her two children since she works so much....er, don't people get paid to do that, not pay to do it? after a sherlock holmes-ian line of questioning, i discover her true motivation! in the same way, my girlfriend and i needed hours of telephonic emotional archaeology to unearth what we really have been trying to say to each other during the past few days...[we're better now, thank you!]

damn you, mercury, moonwalking across the sky!

can run, but can't hide from the hive mind!

maybe it's just me...or my changed perceptions since having joined the 'blogosphere' in my minor way...

or...

that the decline of our higher education has hit the journalistic marketplace, to which would-be hopefuls aspire and therefore imitate...

but...

these days, at this time, i'm finding it truly difficult to read [practically] any journalism!!! mostly, i skip to the comments section of most articles. through the noise and blather and asian knockoff product spam, i can usually recognize some intelligent debate and interesting personal perspectives, which i would expect the journalism to provide. metaphorically, i'm thinking of articles as we've known them as photographic stills. the wiki [comments] appendage to the article creates a more 4d-time-based medium, say, like video...

i'll boldly venture here: metaphorical photographic stills, no matter how well done---even though they may be beautiful or accurate----can't really tell us in a comprehensive way about how we live at this moment, at this time...on the face of it, it's presumptuous that a single mind can have anything even remotely accurate or interesting to say about the multitude that is---and always has been---the american experience. even a cursory flip through de tocqueville's 'democracy in america' reveals the chaos which still defines us today. love it, hate it, or love-hate it: america's main export to the world [besides treasury notes and the military] is a barely-contained game of bloody-lipped dodge-ball!

but, i thought you just said that a single author can't say anything accurate or interesting, never mind prescient, about the american experience?!! what about that singular french aristocrat you mentioned?

well....that was soooo 1835-40....

and what about you? you are a single author, aren't you?

that remains to be read....

here i'm touching upon a sentiment about which i have mixed feelings----about the only ethos i feel in common with conservatives and even tea partiers...that i'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 people out of the boston [or anywhere] telephone book, than by the ivy-league elite that has ruled us since the beginning...

and what's the connection between the previous paragraph and the ones before that?

that i think the leaders and the journalists are way out of touch with the lives of their subjects! notice that the word 'subjects' is appropriate to both...

yes, very clever! how long had you been planning that wordplay?

not very...and that the subjects are losing interest and even becoming hostile towards their subjugators!

ha! same word root: latin sub=under+jugum=yoke. is it me or has this blog entry split into a dialogue between plain and italic fonts?

no, it's me too...

and how does that make you feel?

i'm of two minds about the whole thing...

besides that? oh, i get it...you're trying to illustrate your original point of writing this entire blog entry: about the inadequacies of journalism, politics and the necessity of honest, even chaotic, dialogue in the intellectual marketplace?


ooo, good point! in trying to grasp the multitude i've splintered off into renegade sub-personalities....mmmm.....

well, isn't that the logical corollary of what you're saying? that if embracing multiplicity, one must become multiplicitous?

 mmm....that i'm suggesting a schizophrenic state is the one [or many] truest-to-reality?

sorry, i'm not taking the bait...

good. my point is proven.

decisions, decisions

technology/marketing has spoiled us for choice...figuratively, by, of course, offering us stunning, numbing numbers of slight variations on a theme...just try buying shampoo at your ubiquitous, local cvs. unfortunately, politics suffers from the exact opposite problem! i wish it would catch up to market economics already....yes, power relies on concentration, not dispersion...

as our attention is dispersed, so is our power....

spoiling our choice, literally, too, suits the purposes of business perfectly! by blasting us with the said options, companies can make us worse and worse at making decisions...and making the wrong decision we have to buy another proposed solution to our created problem, i.e. a product...a product always stands by, ready to rid us of our problems...

why do we seem to have so many problems? well, to borrow from my favorite adulterer of fat, ugly women: it's the economy, stupid! problems keep us trying to buy our way out of them. repeat like a gang of four lyric.


elsewhere, across the corpus collosum, i can picture an evolved future where ever-youthful, gorgeous, pale and pasty, hyper-rational beings can parse stacks of bifurcating charts of options with cpu-ease...i can picture it....but would i want to photoshop myself and/or loved-ones into this pixel-perfect picture? 

why does the mechanism of choice and discrimination/discernment not seem like a muscle; that the more one 'flexes' it in a healthy manner, the stronger it gets? perhaps, the hinging, operative word is 'healthy'?! that market forces are ripping our muscles of decision-making, rendering them weaker...what would a decision gym be like? [minus the lab rats]

moral relativism wriggles in the back door to this discussion and ominously laughs, 'how do you know what's right when evil and good depend on your perspective?' let's just choose the cheepest bottle of shampoo and get the hell out of the store....

no...but seriously...

why don't writers write 'cover' novels in the same way that musicians play cover tunes? they could keep the same form in tact while perhaps radically revamping the style and 'point of view'...maybe expanding on different characters, giving different narrators a shot...foreshadowing...epiloging...think of a literary analogue of tony bennet covering ozzy's 'crazy train' or....hendrix's 'star spangled banner' from woodstock...

why the hell not?

[besides the fact of the auteur-solo-genius fortress that surrounds the act of writing which could only kill the act of making music---which is necessarily a more communal, interpersonal endeavor...]

are we still in the grip of bible-mania? that a text is somehow 'sacred'? unalterable? from the hand of god? [or king james...] not to be desecrated by the vulgar restylings [that i am suggesting]? that it's forever? immovable clay tablets for the ages? commandments for living? [i think i just heard a stone tablet falling...]

or that, since books require so much effort to read and to write, that the ping-ponging interplay of references and influences which come so readily to music, as you hear it in time, would be too painfully slow to sustain anyone's interest?

parking lot incident

she frightened me!
a friendly woman
who knew what
i was thinking,
without knowing
what she knew.

in the parking lot,
she said her friend
loved fish too...
almost backed over her
flattened her
like flounder...

but how did she know
and not know what
what she knew;
that i was then
pondering
sardines in a can
i ought to have bought?

distraught, i thought,
"oh, the stuffed
orange clowfish on my dash..."
so, for something to say,
i said, "so, there's
someone else?"

she replied,
"yes, and i'm telling her!"

an inner depth grabbed
by an easily available handle:
out of the fire
and
into the frying pan.

artisan fantasy

workshop dreams
grant me tools
to work on things
and not with fools.

something actual,
proof in the hands--
non-outsourceable
to foreign lands...

in corpore sano
keeps me sane.
the whole body
as embodied brain.