we make cat-
sounds
over the rock-sounds
and afterwards we kiss

we make horse-sounds
too for the horses we carry

waiting at the bus depot

Here’s a link to a video I partially shot recently about the guy who constructed the tree sculpture on the Quiet Green.
The video has been voted to go on satellite tv soon - it’s a station owned by Al Gore called Current TV. People can upload videos to this website (www.current.tv) and then they are voted on “yay” or “nay”, and the top ones get aired. Sposed to be democratic er some shite. (We all know how well “democracy” works…)

http://www.current.tv/watch/16619020

So I shot the footage of Patrick and his crew working on the scaffolding (i.e. not the interview stuff). The video was produced by some kids at Cornell.
… and don’t worry, they’re going to credit me when its re-edited for tv (he “spaced” on the original version)… Let’s just say I was a little pissed when I saw the video end without my name mentioned, and I heartily voiced my opinion.

This is what I wrote down when I woke up:

The Dead Fish Diner.

Suffocating chickens in olive oil before cooking them. Listening to them scream.

The Ugly Potato (Restaurant)
need to draw the designs of the outsides, a big dead fish and a big ugly potato

I’m going to write everything that happens down. (Like a remote recording session.) Then we will have no secrets, because everything will be secrets.
I began to cry, almost, a tragic human love, no, please don’t write everything down. We don’t need secrets
no, I won’t write it all down. Don’t worry

I think McNashers is the word of the day

they told me to vote red. But not anymore….

a house with cool light, just daylight coming in through the windows. cool blue light, the kind that isn’t light at all, but life itself effusory, not attacking but allowing as if there were no other option. as if there were no darkness. as if that light was darkness, and light itself was blinding, painful.

sitting with my mom, with three dogs, big, medium sized golden and brown dogs, lying, sleeping, waking, noticing, watching. the door. opens, girl comes in, crazy hair, ranting.
who the hell are you? oh its someone i know, its my sister? at least someone who lives in the house (having a sister). speaking gibberish, leaning on a lamp, at least grabbing it and holding on to it. recognize, stand, hold.

(commenting is indeed not working, so to respond to Jed, which everyone ought to read below)

Man, the first thing that must be said is ‘Fantastic.’ Thanks for being such a good writer and one so fun to read.

Beyond that, I don’t know, I don’t think I could come to terms with seeing in pixels or with having better music coming from computers. I myself believe in people who play guitar, and while I have fun watching people move dials up and down on some incognizable black box on stage, I would respect them more if they were playing a traditional instrument. I don’t like what’s happening to the human landscape, and I don’t want to walk on Cheeto dust-lined asphalt. (Do you ever notice how little bare earth there is in NYC? Fucking scary. I wonder what that peninsula looked like 300 years ago.) My reaction is to walk away from what you describe, never embrace it, and hopefully, to have enough compassion to understand people who do embrace it.

But I’ll stop there. This post is yours, it’s fantastic, and I don’t want to clutter it with overlong comments.

Is it possible the comments function on blogger is broken? because it is. My comment on the last post was: the poem could just as easily be written about the reproduction and proliferation of ink and paint.

Here’s my post:

I, a being born in a place, my parents lead lives before I did, and decided when to create. Create a skin of a certain color. Hair with a certain texture. They bore me into a religion, which they thankfully would deny, leaving me free to invent one. But they still cut my foreskin without asking me whether I wanted it or not. I didn’t. Throw it away.

I, a being first stared into Lacan’s mirror, I remember the event. I breathed the glass. I needed the mirror not to see my whole self, but only to wiggle my fingers, the feel of an electronic impulse coursing down my spine, down my arm, my fist clenching. I did not yet know that I would not be a revolutionary. So I ate the mirror, became it. As I grew older, it became a camera in my belly. Then a camcorder. Then a projector. Now I consume movies, and project them inward.

I grew between my legs, becoming too heavy to carry through the everyday swirl of humanity on the sidewalks. Only fully encapsulated vehicles can kill me if I step into the street not looking, mere men cannot. So I cling to the sidewalk, only occasionally wandering into the black expanse of asphalt, for the thrill of defying the law most immediately at hand. Sometimes civil disobedience doesn’t need a cause.

I grew in the tightly choreographed American Tango. I believe in natural Cheetos. Because they exist. They lack the curve and neon color of original Cheetos, but they preserve the Dangerous Cheese. I believe in movies with names like “Let’s go to Prison” (coming November 17th) and “Snakes on a MuthaFuckin’ Plane” (sadly behind us now). I believe that computers can make better music than fingers, if the right buttons are pressed.

I, a burning man on the edge of time. A rotation of existence, casting myself over the brink of a flat earth, prepared to merge with the blackness. My empty intestines churn with starfire. I am the single stem cell of the world. My green grass settles over the pregnant earth, stirring itself into trees and undergrowth. I settle over America and grow into Cheetos naturally, settle flatly onto streets and become clean black asphalt.

My head rests on a cloud which rests on my neck. I am ankle deep in soil, and I feel my toes questing downward for nutrients. My mouth thirsts for alchohol, my tongue thirsts for loud ink. My eyes see in pixels.

Here’s a good procrastination link. I especially wanted Tyler to see it. Go to

www.tower8.net

and click on the “video” and watch it. Done by a guy from Brown with a grant from MTV.

It reminded me of “gravity’s rainbow,” and if pressed, i could say why

He, whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds…
Dunciad, II, 76

I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost infinite wall of China was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned. That these two vast operations – the five to six hundred leagues of stone opposing the barbarians, the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past – should originate in one person and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me. To investigate the reasons for that emotion is the purpose of this note.

Historically speaking, there is no mystery in the two measures. A contemporary of the wars of Hannibal, Shih Huang Ti, king of Tsin, brought the Six Kingdoms under his rule and abolished the feudal system; he erected the wall, because walls were defenses; he burned the books, because his opposition invoked them to praise the emperors of olden times. Burning books and erecting fortifications is a common task of princes; the only thing singular in Shih Huang Ti was the scale on which he operated. Such is suggested by certain Sinologists, but I feel that the facts I have related are something more than an exaggeration or hyperbole of trivial dispositions. Walling in an orchard or a garden is ordinary, but not walling in an empire. Nor is it banal to pretend that the most traditional of races renounce the memory of its past, mythical or real. The Chinese had three thousand years of chronology (and during those years, the Yellow Emperor and Chuang Tsu and Confucius and Lao Tzu) when Shih Huang Ti ordered that history begin with him.

Shih Huang Ti had banished his mother for being a libertine; in his stern justice the orthodox saw nothing but an impiety; Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, wanted to obliterate the canonical books because they accused him; Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, tried to abolish the entire past in order to abolish one single memory; his mother’s infamy. (Not in an unlike manner did a king of Judea have all male children killed in order to kill one.) This conjecture is worthy of attention, but tells us nothing about the wall, the second part of the myth. Shih Huang Ti, according to the historians, forbade that death be mentioned and sought the elixir of immortality and secluded himself in a figurative palace containing as many rooms as there are days in the year; these facts suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death. All things long to persist in their being, Baruch Spinoza has written; perhaps the Emperor and his sorcerers believed that immortality is intrinsic and that decay cannot enter a closed orb. Perhaps the Emperor tried to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First, so as to be really first, and called himself Huang Ti, so as to be in some way Huang Ti, the legendary emperor who invented writing and the compass. The latter, according to the Book of Rites, gave things their true name; in a parallel fashion, Shih Huang Ti boasted, in inscriptions which endure, that all things in his reign would have the name which was proper to them. He dreamt of founding an immortal dynasty; he ordered that his heirs be called Second Emperor, Third Emperor, Fourth Emperor, and so on to infinity… I have spoken of a magical purpose; it would also be fitting to suppose that erecting the wall and burning the books were not simultaneous acts. This (depending on the order we select) would give us the image of a king who began by destroying and then resigned himself to preserving, or that of a disillusioned king who destroyed what he had previously defended. Both conjectures are dramatic, but they lack, as far as I know, any basis in history. Herbert Allen Giles tells that those who hid books were branded with a red-hot iron and sentenced to labor until the day of their death on the construction of the outrageous wall. This information favors or tolerates another interpretation. Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, perhaps Shih Huang Ti sentenced those who worshiped the past to a task as immense, as gross and as useless as the past itself. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: “Men love the past and neither I nor my executioners can do anything against that love, but someday there will be a man who feels as I do and he will efface my memory and be my shadow and my mirror and not know it.” Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in his empire because he knew that it was perishable and destroyed the books because he understood that they were sacred books, in other words, books that teach what the entire universe or the mind of every man teaches. Perhaps the burning of the libraries and the erection of the wall are operations which in some secret way cancel each other.

The tenacious wall which at this moment, and at all moments, casts its system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; it is plausible that this ideas moves us in itself, aside from the conjectures it allows. (Its virtue may lie in the opposition of constructing and destroying on an enormous scale.) Generalizing from the preceding case, we could infer that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content.” This would concord with the thesis of Benedetto Croce; already Pater in 1877 had affirmed that all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

—Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by James E. Irby

You are the ghetto because you need the ghetto in order to be somewhere else, to be secure in your suburban community. You are ghetto because you have supported the prohibition of drugs, creating a black market. You are the ghetto because you pulled your kid out of public schools to send him to a nice, private school with good lawns. You are the ghetto because you can’t understand the lyrics in Hip Hop music. You live in the ghetto because there is a gate at the drive into your community. You live in the ghetto because you live in a nice clean house that looks exactly like all the other houses in your sub-development. You are the ghetto because you voted for a politician because he is tough on crime. You told your child to “just say no” so that he’d know how to resist his own culture. You are the ghetto because you Support our Troops. And Freedom Isn’t Free. And so those goddamn gangbangers slingin’ crack in the ghetto, they violated their freedom, betrayed our trust, so they Isn’t Free. They isn’t free, they in the ghetto, they in prison, they in a cage. is you free?

sunrise