Very Superstitious (or Writing on the Wall)
April 1, 2005
Leture on text with Haida Hawaiian Stone Fish Dog Shark Bitch, ITIN ‘05
After reading, looking, hearing, reading Robert Bringhurst at the Chelsea Museum, I’m not certain if I feel more, or less crazy. I was on some sort of speedball concoction of Tussin and Red Bull (honestly, there ought to be a law) and then they brought out the 18 yr. old Scotch (insert dirty old man joke here). Ever have one those days where you are surrounded by the ineluctable modality and every thing seems to be a cracked mirror in which to read your own dog face the riot act? Last I checked it’s April Fool’s day. Joke’s on me… feels more like June 6th. What an Odd City. Alas Poor New Yorick, I knew him Horatio Alger, A fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy… Where be your jibes now? Your acts of merriment that were want to set the table on a roar?… To see you smile now, makes me want to puke! Go paint your mask, make it up an inch thick…I ask you only this fool: Make me laugh at death!
Well that’s my from memory bead on Hamlet with a skull in his hand like David Bowie doing Cracked Actor. And Bob comes up to me suffering from a similar cold and the Whiskey and says: “I can tell you this because I’m almost drunk: You’ve got to get over your father.”
Which is the funniest thing anyone’s said to me since my mother pointed out that this blog is obsessed with death. I appreciate what he was saying, but one one of my favorite (near inaudible) moments in Orange You Glad is when Senior Stein says of his son: “Oh God, Bob is facinating. We’re pretty boring, but Bob is facinating.”
What tears me a new one is that I’ll never get to hear that (unless you believe in ghosts or audio hallucinations). It’s like Allan Stone was reminding me the other day: my work was one giant Fuck You to my dad’s hard edge, Swiss, Modernism. But we never got past the Rumble in the Jungle to wear Ali and Foreman can smile and slurr over griled hamburger.
So don’t put on any aires when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue…. Plus it’s the only story I have (other than love stories). I had a joke with Philistine Jr. where my father had stories of finding unexploded block busters in the Basel Black Forest, we could tell our kids about how we watchted the BMWs go by and then the Mercedes Benz and then we played tennis (actually in context that’s pretty fucking ironic). Robert started with W.S. Merwin poem that I wrote down:
Mask for Janus: W.S. Merwin
Death is not information
Stone that I am
He came into my quiet
And I will be still for him
Ali Roi, ITIN ‘99
So I keep thinking of Kubrick’s blank, black stone, and the Kabbah and Mohammad Ali and Paris and (yes BOB): the old man and the river. The light is going blue outside the window. The king is dead; long live the king.
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April 1st, 2005 at 3:34 pm
a side of events on the corner of Garfield and 7th Ave shortly spotting bananas with Bailey and Alex:
I needed some cream for my coffee. Snowflake and I headed to the neighborhood Apple Tree. In front of the market, we were - by a hungry looking man with and upturned hat- we tried to give him an apple from a newly purchased bag of apples (in addition to the cream), but he misinterpreted our intentions…
“yo-how you spill lugacy?
a lu a le a la
a li?
don’t drop no chew up apple coh in mah
face
sittin on a cahnuh trine t suvive
don wan no appu coh, need some change
Unnastan?
chainzzzzzzzge!
that ch-a-i-n-z-e
tha it yuh.
I outon duh cohna cuz I downed on luck
need annithin yuh got maybe extra fo me?
yessuh gudddddd breadd- hey!
I like th doug-how old’s he? you-
gotta moovy camera too?
Godd blessa!
yo- spai some chainzzz…
Alex your site is a kiosk for a grundge communion of erstwhile saints…
donna and snowflak, both straight from the dog park
April 1st, 2005 at 5:04 pm
See now, when I was a kid I wrote a lot of poetry and it’s only now that I’m realizing I never stopped, I just got all Jiggy asian on it and started painting poetry.
that said: Donna’s comments verge delisciously on the offensive and remind me that American culture is essentially Minstral Show. We all pretend Minstralsey (or however you spell that) is not relavant, but it is the entirety of what is interesting and horribly beautiful about this stolen land and its bastard stolen population.
I was riffing about ted danson and Whoopi with Sly the other night… and spike lee and … the blue note, the blue note, the blue note.
Willoughby is nine parts Al Jolson.
April 1st, 2005 at 11:03 pm
alex, you’re goddam brilliant.
(incidentally: have you ever heard glenn gould’s “solitude trilogy”? bringhurst’s new book was inspired by these - three radio documentaries from the 1960s and 1970s about life in the north of canada. they’re fantastic polyphonic assemblies of voices fading in and out . . . they strike me as something you’d like. i have mp3’s if you want ‘em.)
April 2nd, 2005 at 2:49 am
Yes yes yes and I said yes to yes and she called me Ferdinand the bull and I called her Trudi Kane and said a rose is a rose is a rose is and andalusian rosebud.
32 short films about GG is the firs shot fired acdross the bow of Canandian (rip off hollywoos with state funded appparatus) cinema. That said… GG is still to smart for all media.
He is a lotus flower that grew from Marshall McCluhan’s naval… or not.
alex