Sunday, April 25, 2010

Psychic Haul Video

Open the bags and show you what I got this weekend with my daughter in NY:
1. Little red notebook from Kiosk.
2. Physical contact with Hart Crane's bridge, which Davetree turned me on to so long ago. Long ago for me, not for him of course.
3. Physical reassurance that a friend is doing OK--just OK, but OK--when I ran into her by chance outside Carnegie Hall.
4. Great concert by the Whitman kids. Not-so-great Mary Poppins. Almost did a bait-and-switch on my daughter in the tkts window and told her they only had tix left for Fela!, but she's too smart to fall for that shit nowadays.
5. Cupcakes with Hot Friend E.
6. More $5 fake pashminas.
7. A poem about the Marina Abramovic exhibit. Let me inflict the former upon you now.

The Butterfly on the Bicycle Seat

Show them what you're made of, girl!
Show them all--what's underneath,
What's inside--they'll always pay for that.
Show them the pile of bloody bones,
The rotting doll--at seven you knew
The meat on your own bones,
That day on the beach, you saw
The end of the piece, every bit cleanly bleached.
And the encircled figure sketched
In dried-blood-color lines,
Its reach not the ideal of man's capacity
But evidence of the master scientist
Performing experiments in endurance.
You know, the one with the pin.
Seven years later, with your own blood,
You wrote: "I began to paint my dreams."

It's a little from things in the exhibit, but the part about the DaVinci is imaginary. I don't much like Salvador Dali, but I'm really fascinated with his bizarre vision of Millet's The Angelus, and it got me thinking of a different perspective on a famous image. It's probably still too awkward for now. Can we blame it on the notebook?

Photo: The artist from the artist, used without permission. If I'd picked up a Mary Poppins image I'd be in jail for sure. I'm racked with guilt as it is. If you look here tomorrow and there's no picture, it's cause guilt won.

Monday, April 12, 2010

The Rest of Us



Five of Pentacles

Showing Respect

Mourning has a hierarchy
No less than any social construct
And it's just; don't upset them
When they've had enough.
It's often to the same preacher
Who proclaims: This is the time
For you to remember and to share

That falls the delicate duty
Of pulling the prodigal aside,
And in the shelter of a brotherly arm,
Whispering: Don't make this about you, now.
I've seen a few whose doors
In life were thrown open,
In death, rest behind a velvet rope.

The circle of kin can be forgiven
A preference for hired mourners--
Who know the dress, the decorum,
The proper pitch for the wails--
To the peculiar, the peripheral,
The ones they never could understand
Why they always kept showing up.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Special Offer Extended--Tell Me to Fuck Off Thru April 14!

The new deadline for finishing my book manuscript is April 14. New moon. So many stupid work interruptions. I'm furious frustrated over not being able to write what I please. I want to write about a very good writer who died but it just doesn't seem right even if I could. I want to write about Massey Energy but that could take years. And I really want to write about Erykah Badu, but the perspicacious Wanda Sykes has pretty much said it all.



PS: Perspicacious is a good thing to call someone. Someone called me it in a letter to the editor once. It was then I discovered that it doesn't mean sweaty.