Paul Joseph McLean Among the Scholars of War
CODA
O My Songs
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people’s faces
Will you find your lost dead among them?
Ezra Pound
1-3
The dead feed the dirt
Their souls flutter above us
The natural song pleases the ear, the cries of the mourners, the weeping
The widow is pleading. Who are these orphans? Who are these people?
White Buffalo is dead.
One man observes the sight unseen/his mask himself
perfect and complete
No one can see this. & I won’t tell you how you will die. Dying is not drama.
The catheter is not a cathedral. Senor Chapuy is hardly
When this voice was younger, I didn’t listen & neither would you.
One in each ear > White Buffalo, the story of a Mayan Prince & Others
Paul Joseph McLean among the scholars of war. No matter
How hard I tried
I was no good at poetry, &
I’m still not any good at poetry
No matter, how hard I try
It turns out not to matter at all
No one reads it. Nobody remembers poetry.
When I was 22 Mike gave me a ride from Red Rocks to Trinidad & Raton
Then, I think I took a bus to Santa Fe. I don’t remember. I was holed up in a hotel for a week
making paintings, drinking Jack Daniels with a gun two pairs of jeans a couple of tee shirts
A sheepskin leather coat Ray Bans, smokes, a few hundred dollars. What was I thinking?
The motorcycle wreck
The blow to the head
Messed me up. NEECHEE screwed me up. When they take the eye out of your head
& lay it on a tray, maybe that’s when you start to see two worlds. The Doctor later tells me
I can only see out of one eye at a time.
No perspective.
No 3D.
How can you be a detective and not see the three points
and a horizon line?
I think they all are dead now
I’m not sure if any of this happened, really
I made a huge pot of spaghetti for Marcel
when his esophagus exploded
Was that the day I found the black widows -
like, five of them
in Will’s kiddie car?
The pink one, used to be red
Faded in the sun
On the top of Monte Sol?
Rudy was not his real name.
You’re not a tourist, anymore, he said
You’re not American - you’re a citizen of the world
Borders don’t matter [or something to that effect
“I know not civilization, your civilization. For I am a child of the wilderness, & your civilization for me is poverty. When your civilization crumbles I shall rise once more to restore the earth, my mother.”
They were always writing on bar napkins. White squares.
The Blue Moon tonight. The bottles behind the bar are brightly lighted
“Paul, you’re an ace.”
How can he be dead?
I bought drinks for them and for me. 11 thousand dollars
In three bars in six months, for a book.
Writers are such assholes. It’s not enough
to take pictures. Nothing is ever enough.
No thing is enough.
Dad is passed on, now, and mom, too
Dulce et Drucker ESTamos. The Chistmas lights are white, but
I have a broken tooth and scratches on my hands.
I don’t know where they came from.
“I awakened one
morning…
To find that my mask
had been stolen in
The Night. I Ran unto
the streets Hollering
Thieves, Thieves, Oh!
CURSED Thieves who
stole my mask!!
Then the sun
Kissed my face….
And from then on I
walked the streets
saying… Thieves, Thieves
Oh Blessed Thieves
who stole my mask”
Rudy wrote that on a bar napkin. He flew around a truck
I saved Scroggy from a gang of Mexicans in the parking lot
The Wizard fed me White Crosses and I bet them
My heartbeat would stay the same for an hour
& then I drove home to Pecos
What was the point? I did a flip after eating mushrooms [in cowboy boots]
Sitting in the driver’s seat of some nice couple’s car
Pretending to drive, with my dog Rock n Roll staring at me mournfully from the passenger seat
What was I doing there? Is that how dumb life is?
That painter from the jungles of Columbia said, “No tricks,”
But his paintings were no good, knock-off of Rousseau
Getting it on with a red head white girl, but he was a friend,
The day after the mushrooms Freddy sold me, he said I went to the space between
We were at the bar, or a table at Babe’s
Lou was there, maybe, or not.
4
>
Rudy died of cancer. He came into the bar and we spoke about the doctor’s appointment,
When his fate was revealed to him. His former girlfriend was there with him.
Rudy turned to her and said, “I had a good run.”
At 51, he said he would live to be a hundred, “Just to piss ‘em off.”
It didn’t work out that way. I thought he knew everything knowable.
Death usually proves people wrong.
Rudy said a man lives the first fifty years in experimentation,
the second fifty in assimilation,
and after that he’s a human being, wholly formed,
capable of sound decisions.
He talked about the pueblos, about how until recently
his people lived for hundreds of years,
like in the Bible.
They must not have had cancer.
He gave me his knife, a two-bladed Case pocketknife,
sharp as hell, and Rudy showed me how to hold it,
in the fist, shiny steel on either side, and deadly.
I got drunk in celebration, showing it off and bragging
to the routine bar punks,
and Rudy took it away from me, while I wasn’t looking.
He also stole hash from me once.
Rudy told me a story about how he was taught to give gifts,
in his village, walking a long way until his auntie was home,
at the right time, not taking anything in return, and
so on.
I always felt like I didn’t know much about the basics.
Turns out I knew more than I thought I did, but I was given
the rare opportunity to learn more than one way.
On this blue moon, I am beset by these ghosts,
like Scrooge, like George Bailey.
The Gramercy Hotel documentary on Sundance is the right movie,
and maybe Manhattan is the right city.
I fled New York City for Santa Fe in the 80s,
escaped Bernie GETTZ and the GRUFFITI,
the 10 year-old panhandlers, and the piss stench.
It took 25 years of flirtations and interludes to fall in love with the City.
The turning point was the post-9/11 trip, when I applied to Yale MFA.
I visited Central Park and drew a massive woven form in the sand
of the baseball diamond, a bouquet of love, of grief.
I also answered the President’s corrupt call,
and spent money.
I entertained an art dealer in my suite at the Hyatt Grand,
held my own private art fair, ate at Frank, Nectarine,
visited Dumbo, which wasn’t much in the middle of the Chelsea exodus.
Wait.
I think I’m confusing several trips. It’s a problem with editing.
Rudy made me write this down: “I just heard on the news today
there are five billion people on the planet, now. Can you believe that?
Five billion people! You know what that means? For one thing,
your people don’t reproduce fast enough. The oppressed people
of the earth are fighting their oppressors, by reproducing faster
than their oppressors can kill them off. But think of it! Five billion!
Think of the possibilities for each man, the choices for each human being!
It boggles the mind.”
Now, according to the Census, world POP is 6,793,625,822
03:46 UTC (EST+5) Jan 01, 2010
… A New Year, and last night, Jesse the Body Ventura
uncovered the plot of the Super Class to reduce that population
to a measly 500,000,000. Well, that’s quite a DROP.
>
Now, I can see why someone would think the Transthesis is mad,
just another conspiracy theory… The Body & I agree on the eugenics trajectory
& the source of the conspiracy, more or less. But Marcel and Colors were the first
to hand me the Bircher book and the one about the Kennedy assassination.
What’s a kid supposed to do with that data?
They called Marcy “Kid” when he was a Hopi cop, or so he said. Marcy,
all those stories, once the whiskey started to flow on those flooded days,
like the one when Freddy blew a dart at the Carriage Trade to see if the dart gun
really worked, and it stuck in the wall just above some citizen’s head,
pfftt/boing, like a cartoon, and Marcel trying not to shit himself, or
the one when somebody paid a debt with a two-gallon gas drum
filled with hash oil, and we dipped our smokes in it - just the tips -
to throw off the narcs, hid in the mix to put some dummy away…
What was I supposed to do with Kenny Hilton’s .22? While my Python sat
in the safe, for the holster that never materialized? The spring-loaded holster
I designed for a shoulder quick-draw, that inspired Asher to name me “Killer,”
though I never killed no body…
Kenny’s gun was haunted, so I gave it back to Marcy, who expressed
disappointment, since another heir dropped out, like I guess he did,
but what do I know? When Dad came to town, long after Marcel had run
the check on him, to make sure I was legit, and we all gathered round
the table for a meal [was it the Ore House, too, or that French place?]
From one Green Beret to another, they paid their respects, though I never got
none of that til I sobered up, and even after there was the problem of
mistakes, and Frances was the worst, as go lost opportunities in the heir
business…
The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the Tibetan one, one book
after another, filled with ghosts, shades of memories and memories,
all come true, now. Joan Suval put it best, when she salved my conscience,
explaining away my survivor’s remorse: “Don’t you see how proud they are
of you?” I waited til later, but I wept, which will probably dampen the ladies’
drawers, but WGAF! On a night like tonight, it don’t mean a thing.
Like the nights Marcy and I watched Full Metal Jacket and Platoon, and he laughed
in all the wrong places. Later that evening, with my back to his back, he drank
Herra Dura and cried. “There are at least five guys in here who will kill me,
if they can. You don’t move. You don’t take a piss. When I’m done, you drive me
home.” I couldn’t tell for sure who was who, and Marcy was too busy drinking and
crying to finger any of his enemies. He drove himself home, after we closed the
Pink Adobe down.
Marcy had a Grand Trine, and silver eyes, when he got pissed, which wasn’t all
that often, although you wouldn’t know it. He flashed me those eyes a few times,
I suppose, but he knew I loved him. He was a friend. After I sobered up, I would
drop by to see him now and then. Once he asked why I didn’t just knock him down
and take him with me to sobriety. I shook my head, and said, because the last time
four or five guys came into the shop to take him someplace he didn’t want to go,
they left on stretchers, or so the story goes. Eventually, death came, first.
I don’t know if this is a poem anymore. It was probably a last will and testament
to start with. No, I thought these guys were the coolest in the world. What did
I know? Now I don’t know that I was wrong.
5
Written on a bar napkin that Rudy gave me:
“All heroes become bores at last.” - Emerson
What’s a native look like? I was raised on Westerns, the Duke, Winchester,
The names of football teams, like most Americans. In college, Jim Morrison
painted an alt.portrait, and herbs varnished the [native mutable] still life -
New Mexico drew all in three-point perspective, pushing at horizons that once
lived beneath oceans, monstrous cataclysms of lava and ash, a rock
big as a fridge punched through the air all the way to Chicago from
Valle Grande cone, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore down by the Arizona
border, or across into petrified forest or painted desert, or up above
in aspen stands so fine or ponderosas, down the arroyo and the red brown
soft earth, fertile, the pueblos can grow anything, like Israel, just add water,
the vehicle for dreaming. Santa Fe was where I got taught Mercury retrograde,
doesn’t exist in West Virginia dark mountains dripping all the time, moist,
cricks and streams a-plenty, big rivers like the Kanawha, burning bright rivers
in DuPont. The Rio Grande of another clan, born high in the Pecos Wilderness,
dying in Texas and those old deserts, of mica in the sky, and a thousand martyrs
under every stone and windmill, now
when I reflect on it all, I admit I jumble the story and scramble the theme,
wondering when the trees began to grow alive again, and no car could drive me
far and fast enough to see every nook and cranny, on Blue blacktop Highways,
with the desperate ache between cigarettes or songs that attends the turning
odometer, gas and oil the theme, not ambulation, for speed permits a layering
of narratives, just as time’s winds and dust blowing between Mojave rockpile
boulders five floors high, David leaping among them, my Cyclops one-eye-at-one
time, no 3D vision, proving problematic, with each adrenal clinch of the sphincter,
not letting me leap like he does on his broken knees, a physical reaction to
not knowing, the effect of broken vision channel device, not a thing I can do
because it’s the wiring that’s wrong, I learned that on the ridge lines of Grandview,
clinging to the rocks, my friends laughing, so I in my anger outgrew their jokes
beyond the triangle dimension to the next one’s hypercube of inscrutable maps
with those rules and codes, the scale not linear, the road not straight, a sky
above, yes, but just lay down and look up with your feet perpendicular and tell
me on the orb spinning round and round 98,000 miles per second as Rudy pointed out,
on an axis not vertical exactly, hurtling through space with the rest of the galaxy,
which way is up, the stars glittering in the inky black, not the same ones as
ones in New York, which don’t even exist anymore, behind the veil of filthy progress,
cars and trucks, and factories obscuring, white cubes and street lamps burning
day and night into a single scale of gray, and walking across the high desert
trails in the evening dark, no less alive and not sleepy at all, the senses
measure the next step to the last to the shadow from a moon closer than you
could ever have imagined, scent of cedar,
now at Babe’s bar, three Indians smash an entrance
through the swinging doors, their cowboy boots clicking on the brick or tile,
drunk already by midday, shouting and cussing and swagger, they call out for
whiskey or beer and shatter the medication, I switch from coffee to Coors longnecks,
they’ve just picked up the one dude at the prison, and picked fights and got hammered,
to celebrate his release, from my notes> I mention anthropology and comedy, these
are not like the silver and turquoise humps of red Indians on the Plaza, these
not TV models, actors, the picture is out of focus, the blur is increasing as
the glands pump - my favorite drug - the little blonde artist [dewdrop? I seem to recall
was once badly married to a painter Indian and having none of this crowd’s
shenanigans “WHAT ARE YOU SCARED OF A FUCKIN INDIAN BITCH? when she won’t join their
mesa, "WHITE PEOPLE ARE SCARED OF INDIANS etc The biggest one turns to me "She doesn wann
sit wyou - no prollm, then all 3 HEY FUCK YOU COLLEGE BOY MAYBE THERE IS A PROBLEM
order more, change posture, hands on flat bar, tingling, feet rooted, stretching tight
longnecks, now
some of the guys are standing at the entrance and side door now
when did they
get here and just like that the odds flip and the Indians are not loud now
but tinny
and darkness is in the room like an ambush the girl is gone and this spaniard I know
very fast hands I know he always armed with small caliber pistol is over by the bar
someone closes the front door [locked? I seem to remember and the Indians’ options are outlined
[who told them? maybe very nervous Lou]
- don’t think so
and they leave quietly, not making noise, except for show, which no one buys
like before but I also remember now through sober perspective that nothing glamorous
accompanies such moments, it’s stupid and senseless and [not optimal social exchange,
not funny] a punch line, and hard to tell now
whether that was what happened at all
- so that is the proud Indian?
What about the future moments? in sweat lodges and hojoka, around the arbors of
Rosebud, Green Grass, Pine Ridge, or in homes up Taos way, along the ceremony
Road, or the bingo parlors where Eldorado came true and flipped,
for society
is dimensional too, Gold is now pointed in this other direction/
and is any heroic action necessary or possible anymore
they ask rhetoric'ly?
At Green Grass, I seen that 14 year-old boy run with the pegs and ropes
in his heaving red brown chest - he was wearing basketball trunks
under his Sun Dance skirt
[from the tree, again and again,
rope snapping taut, falling to earth like a meteor or a corpse
everyone weeping, the drums beating [his heart, for all to see
until Big John or Ivan or Gary picked him up and ran with him
tearing the pegs
from his thin now bloodstained chest, and yes there are heroes.
All wrapped
- in Pendletons and Beaver State blankets, who showed me how to go home
to Sorley
and the Cuillins, though I loved Ben More more, the tartan and the stone or bronze
rolls of honor,
[with flags and ridiculous-garbed old vets so proud on the Rez
wearing plaid shirts and jeans, baseball or cowboy hats with pins on vests
olive drab fatigues forty years-old and too skinny or fat for them, eyes hidden
behind cheap aviator sunglasses bought at the truck stop, a microphone and a
gravelly cigarette song for warriors homecomings.
Not so romantic with mosquitos
and outhouse flies, broken-down pickups, counting pennies for gallons of fuel,
bologna and WIC cheese, booze affected heirs {Marcel, shacks stitched together with tar
and used cinder blocks, giveaways of soap, socks and bandannas, stews of water
and buffalo and dessert of jello and saltines.
Doesn’t change the clouds or the rainbow circling the moon
four times on Kauai, in a jeep in the storm, wipers on fast setting
with a shaman who was a lawyer who was a soldier and a junkie, living a dream
a good life of Pacific fish and meetings, prayer-
What do you want?
- A hundred times hundred bad dream nights of blades and fangs
You can have anything.
I couldn’t say if Ama was right,
about many spokes to the wheel. I can say I don’t need no other, or none are the same,
with or without a solemn oath, and still we die and bear children,
[[ AND THIS CAME TO ME LAST NIGHT -YOU KNOW I’VE BEEN WORRIED, DARLING
ABOUT THE WORLD
ABOUT THE
while the [[needn’t worry
- PIMPS
of Davos scheme to rule the world - [[I learned about the I CHING, too
in Santa Fe]
this world will crush them and turn them to dust.
>> MILO says, by fire’s light, under the swirling stars
>>
They are fools and wicked, and I’ve seen something of what becomes of them,
and no matter how an honest man would hate them, I wouldn’t wish it on nobody,
but they’ll get it just the same. They’ll get it just the same, and the lies
won’t do them no good. Their robes and profane rituals will only add to the reckoning,
but there’s no pleasure on it, since it’s nothing personal and no man manages it,
but only succumbs, and once it is lost or found according to the rules, as a shade
the routes are determined and the thing it turns, it turns and no more can be told,
and in short time it is not only forgotten but erased forever.
>>
And you would buy art with all that money - go ahead, do it. Yachts and feasts,
waste and suffering.
>>
Fools again, fools, my brothers and sisters. [She sang, she like a Dakini
danced and made love in the fire’s light, on a million nights and a billion days,
her cup and horn and knife of bone.
[[I pick up the red hot lava stone with these
two bare hands and put it there and to prove it pushed it into the pit while
they watched, finally silent. That last I’ll tell you was hubris, scalding the skin,
though the fire dried the blisters, leaving only hot pain, which fades.
>>
Now
a good story, and mine alone, with witnesses, but all in code, until the talking
planet goes straight again two weeks hence. No hero, no coward, a corpse pose
and it’s finished. If there’s a message in it, I don’t know its script, I only
am certain of how small a part one plays, but essential, each one, all related.
6
“Don’t be a hero for a 25 cent hamburger when all you have is twenty cents.”
I’m dating myself.
Have you ever wondered
Whether the tales your teachers told you were true?
Did you never notice that the history fades?
The story has three dots on either side?
Does your memory reach for an answer
no man owns nor can he ever possess it
despite what he wishes with all his might
to believe? Did you never question
the order, the sequence or the pattern
of unfolding moments? Did you become frightened?
When the scope and scale outdistanced
your capacity to control and contain all of it
in the inhalation and exhalation of your lungs,
with your eyes shut? Did you not ascertain
the emptiness of the concrete beneath your feet,
the air between your fingers?
So - what does that shadow shaking the tree tops tell you?
Was the special friend of your secret childhood
a mouse under a bush, your mother pressing you to disclose
the one you spoke to… when you stood all alone,
as in a trance? Did you commence to move in your body,
and did the adults laugh nervously as you spin,
hands hanging in the invisible, mouth open
while you mumbled words whose meaning no other
can know with certainty, for they have lost
what each child knows without knowing, with no book
for a guide? Did one of them strike you or grab you
by your arm or hair and pull, the first time you
smelled fear on a grownup, and had your first taste
of power?
In that garage in South Bend, after a night of drunken
pool ending badly with my death brother Mike Varlotta,
him yelling “Get out of my head,” the mushies kicked in,
the house locked tight, and I couldn’t get in, and a blue
filament face like Easter Island talking to me in the dark,
or a night thinking I’m Jesus in Palestine, with tears
flowing, I didn’t cry for 19 years or more - got it all out
over that girl in the tub, washing around her bright white
sun dress from Mexico, so foreign, having only brothers
for siblings - the Highland way, separated and strong
to make good warriors, to make mothers suffer, to make
fathers proud, to make good stories, better than any
movie…
Rudy sat down at my table and said, “I have spoken
to the gods. They tell me I must be your mentor. I
humbly accept this task.” He puts his hands together
Namaste
“Even though you *are* an upstart youngster. But
I would not sign the contract unless a clause was included
that said, ‘I only have to listen to you if I feel like it.’
The gods said this was OK. So that’s the way it is.”
Also, I was hit by lightning. Actually, I leapt like
Jack Sprat through it over the water ten feet through the air.
Fast forward.
Santa Fe, maybe 10 or 12 years later.
I brought a girl, one scary night with me on an errand
as witness, as the spooks jumped from one perch
to the next, like they would cross over and eat us
I always enjoyed this part of it, thought that isn’t the right word,
English is a handicapped language made of stone
made by man killing man, Cain’s language
…alive as we moved
with straight legs over the dust.
stones in the palms
I really don’t remember much of it -
did I carry a knife or a gun?
I put the meat I had brought in the ground
- she was afraid,
Who could blame her, the noise was crazy,
lights of the houses below twinkling
- They won’t be there in a hundred years
Neither will we.
- I had forgotten about that episode
We didn’t take pictures
Right above Richard Tuttle and Mei Mei’s home on Monte Sol’s
southern face, we used to watch the storms cross the plain
Those dark mountains of Los Alamos and the Bomb over there
Pecos pueblo over there [you can’t see it]
That Navajo at the Thunderbird told me some stories about
how long ago the night sky was lit by the fires of another
civilization, since disappeared, no one says where
I remember also the day trip to the ruins of Bandelier
Those old rock people watching you make your way there
then when you came back, checking to see what you took
She and I took that trail by Wilderness Gate
- I can only recall the feeling now;
what was the point?
A forced atonement I suppose you could call it,
the old words - wherever they live now
would better describe it, but in these devolved days
the refugee don’t know em.
… you do a thing and another thing will happen > causation. Then, one thing interrupts
causation, which produces a change, and another potential future is created, not destroying
necessarily, the first, though that is one result. So sometimes two things live inside one
space. That is, the two are related within the space, within one area, a field, a plane, is not
a space, although space encompasses, space does not enclose. Nothing is secret, only
who pays enough attention to deduce the effects? Monks do it. I love the Tibetans and the thick
walls of their palaces, which I have never entered over there, only over here, which is not
the same. Why would I tell you what red string I wore about my throat? What would you do
with that information? Dabble?
[Fuck off.]
>
Among the scholars of war I discovered a prince.
Rudy told me about crossing the desert
[I think he had been stabbed
though maybe that’s another story]
…
He survived by drinking his own piss.
>
One of the bearded barflies always says, Hola Jose Cuervo
when he spots a crow, and there are lots of them, although
in the movies, an eagle will call out to further the plot
and provide atmosphere. Crows like shiny objects.
Eugenio pulls me aside one afternoon, and takes me outside
to look towards the mountains. He gave me a Nepalese silk
meditation shawl, one time. He got it over there. I gave him
a cowboy hat, which he threw in the fire. “See that? That’s
weird. That cloud’s been like that for two days, now. Just
hangin’ there, on top of the mountain. The cloud’s fuckin’
with the mountain.” He bragged about fucking John Chamberlain’s
wife. He would yammer sailor talk in one of my ears, while
Rudy whispered in the other. Like Kenchen Palden and Khenpo
Tsewong did later. I recognized the form. I brought them an
eagle feather from a ceremony.
Gene smokes straights all the time and says, “I’m a fucker,
a fighter and a wild horse rider, and a pretty good windmill
man to boot.”
7
Paintings can function in the dreaming
the same as here, which I learned the first time out
of the skin.
Gypsy Alley wasn’t always a gallery niche.
Not that it always was anything - nothing is.
Blonde, or sandy brown hair, a Santa Fe girl.
Her apartment was downstairs, and she drove
a VW bug. Lots of plants, and exotic collectibles
placed carefully.
I was stupid, took my shirt off on the roof,
laboring for a lunatic Nam vet drunk, short
fuse, beat down a Sufi security guard at La Fonda
the night before. Drinking by 8AM.
Wonder whatever happened to him.
Wonder whatever happened to her.
People come. People go.
Gypsy Alley is different
every time I visit the City
Different.
Another girl, a waitress, we made a go
of it, a Libra, until JP came to town.
We bought dope from her, & he was unimpressed.
That was it. Affairs got dirty easy,
nothing perfect. Lovemaking in an afternoon,
never to speak again, three days later.
The cowgirl - how did that happen? It was nice,
but didn’t change anything on the skid. We had
mutual friends, who never would have linked us.
She never let on. A tourist, having an experience,
I was staying in a tiny one-room adobe, sublet
from Israelis, East-West Journals, a big shower/tub,
the stove… Whoa.
I just re-saw the wind, long walks to get smokes,
Chesterfields or Luckies, Camel straights or Drum,
butts accumulating in a big jar, the mongrels of Agua
Fria, snapping at my boots all the way from St. Francis
to Siler Road.
- bad and spooky,
spirits smashing against the door, Frances in that bed..
Learning not to get in the middle of a dogfight, Rock and
Roll and one of the bearded ZZ-Top-lookin’ dudes, Scroggy
& the other one, named in this text, but I can’t remember
his name, he ended up marrying another man’s wife, wrecking
a family of moccasin-makers, which is where I bought my elk
& buffalo shoes, he told me about shooting a Viet Cong with
a .45 left-handed out the driver-side window, the vehicle
in motion, his best shot. A young Okie wracked him up one
night but good. He was proud of his bouncer technique, smile,
a touch on the arm, maybe a Hoosier, How did any of us end
up at that bar?
That giant sculptor. They called us the twin towers. Did
we have the same name. I look at pictures, and I was skinny.
My hair was stringy. I showed up in town with two white
tee shirts, two Levi-Strauss jeans, shit stompers,
a belt with a good buckle, a Buckmaster, a Python, Ray Ban
Wayfarers, some paint, a couple hundred bucks - $400 or
eight, a brush or two…
First studio on Upper Canyon Road, a ratty sleeping bag
on the brick-tile floor, I was making the greatest painting
in the world, a 4D painting, in the dimensions of the
Golden Rectangle, four canvases, a barbed wire frame,
shopping at Artisans, next to Desert Son, on Lower Canyon,
for florescent color, like the ones I’m using now, again,
to begin my second cycle as a painter,
I think I called the painting “MAN” and planned to deliver
it to the Contemporary Museum of Chicago, as a donation -
I knew nothing about the art world, really, except what I’d
gathered from trips to Chicago with my professor Don Vogl,
as he humbly shopped his slides, what a man, his house
filled with canvases, from basement to top floor, behind
every door, on every table - Don visited us in Pecos once,
and I showed him a small painting - the wood for the stretchers
and frame I’d logged and milled up Pecos Canyon, and that’s
quite another reality show, dodging snatch blocks, riding
shotgun in the log truck with no brakes down Dalton Canyon
foresting road, staring down the abyss and praying no
nature lover is putting up the dirt trail in a foreign car
or worse a pickup truck made in Detroit, because they and we
would likely die, cuz there’s no stopping the momentum,
tens of tons of screaming trees behind you, some dumb
figural thing daubed on the raw cotton - I forget what,
I forget if it were primed. Don didn’t seem too impressed,
but he never put in a bad word. All around was bad. We
landed in the midst of a water rights war, the Gonzales
boys burning down the landlord’s garage and a trailer,
costing a quarter of a million in tools and toys, guns
everywhere, my buddy from Toys from Big Boys, Jack
showed up with twenty rifles and pistols. We threw some
meat on the bar-b-que, corn on the cob, and fire away
at the dirt, a message, a statement. Nothing compared to
the violent rows we made ourselves in our madness.
…The Gypsy Alley gal…
She gave me aloe gel, for my sunburn, every fifteen minutes
until it was gone, except for the huge flesh peelings,
and the aloe would fix it again, when my guts
got holes in ’m. The astrologer prescribed the medicine,
between diagnoses, among analyses, referencing stars
and arrays, progressions, series, movements,
synchronous behaviors, contiguous phenomena,
signs and directionals, symbols denoting recurring
incidents, over time, repetition, spiral
expansions and reductions, in context,
defining identity, refining parameters,
mapping internal and external topologies,
determined by interactions, determining factors,
pre-determination…
Man got finished, and I think it went to the man
I called Doktor Speedkills, who tried to mold me
into a meth dealer as a side trade, before it was glitz,
but after a night of eight ballin’ I woke up on the couch,
my new puppy surviving - Rock-n-roll, the Astrologer
found him for me, probably a therapy, but it didn’t do
the trick. The star-gazer had his gray ghosts, like the hack
Wegman…
Painting, painting, practicing push and pull, building grids
on color fields, weaving the lines like tartans, inserting
figures and forms, pressing planes against each other, then
wresting them from each other, impressions shaped by attraction,
tension, separation, mixing color in the action, finding
Jackson Pollack painting choice. Today I figured out how
Jackson proved realism, and the critics who never lifted
a stick with pigment adhering to the bristling end to a surface,
to shorten the length between life and art, passing fear
and mental defect in the movement, to reach a realization
as sure as rain.
But the thought went, like people, like the girl who outlived
the crash of the car that broke Pollack’s body, and the other
dame. Sitting at the table with Martin Fuller, he pointed her
out as she made her entrance at El Farol, and someone said
quietly, with some scorn, “How would you like to live your
whole life not being more than the scamp who killed the greatest
artist in history, even if it wasn’t like that at all?”
Maybe life isn’t fair, or maybe there’s room in it for all
the tales that counterbalance the narratives that persist
as a kind of truth that nice people can agree upon. Either
way, the great gift of remembrance creates a grand loop
between now and then, and maybe that is the point, and
not veracity, which as every old man knows in his many-
times broke heart, that truth is mutable only in the mind,
and each passage is most wonderful, under the stars,
regardless of the gore or grifting, which pass just
the same as the heroes exploits and the mother’s howls
in birth. Which doesn’t mean the one is identical to the
other. Most truly one is not the same as the opposite,
and all the good folk whose advice is to do right and good
are well spoke and truly… Unless they’re lying on
purpose. In which case, the spiral screw for them too.
Breath goes last.
God bless Frank Capra. Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith… I might have
missed this, if I hadn’t loved painting so much.
Whatever happened to “MAN?”
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT PAINTING?
Paintings shouldn’t come.
Paintings shouldn’t go.
A great painting belongs to everyone forever.
8
>
…Which raises the issue
of sand paintings
as in the one the Tibetans manifested
in Nashville at Watkins
or the strange hybrid objects
in the curio shops of the Southwest
[the one in Tennessee
likely saved me and Shane
just as we turned to leave
on the 40 for Santa Fe
on to Eureka in Dad’s Olds
with the dead U-joints & brakes
a death trap on wheels
that pulled 4 feet to the left
any time the driver stomped the pedal
almost tossing us under the big rig
in the rush hour traffic of 440,
so I had to drive straight
through, no breaks, 100 moments
we could have smashed into a
concrete divider in the middle
of the night, through the construction
projects every fifty miles or so
between the Music City and
the City Different, the lasik
halos on the headlights
distorting the field, and my eyes
no 3D, depth perception, steering
like Obi Wan Kenobi, bracing
for impact, anticipating a rabbit
or a driver in an altered state,
maybe in Cherokee country, or a
redneck on his after-work binger…
[Capra cited > the giveaway,
the relationship between art
& free exchange or endowment,
not corpratized, in fact
revealing the profound difference,
liberte, egalite…
I have given away every painting
I could, once upon a time
to undermine the supply/demand
model, then as an extrapolation
of right position, to ensure all
or a fair sampling thereof
an opportunity to caretake
a precious thing, not a baby,
which is burgeoning constantly,
but a solid state component,
an element on a periodic table,
a constant, a road marker,
designating placement in space,
not static void, but moving,
an orb not self-propelled,
indicating self, as a metric,
a miracle, if you will, a drawn
and quartered plane, within it
the act of triangulation, most
stable of configurations, capacitated
for expansion and contraction,
infinitely, an architecture or
an armature, proposing a convergence
of material and imagined, not as
fantasy, but as projection, not as
folly, but as conception, not as
farce, but as inception, forever
beginning, the means to no end,
or at least the pragmatic semblance
of it, a fair representation of
the everlasting, the dream of all
mortal things. Even mountains have
lifespans, exist on a timeline,
move across surface, or their relatives
the thunders, cloud people, in
relation to stars on their circuits,
…and the living things, the critters,
whose stories are exquisitely complex,
never wholly rendered, surprising as
adaptation abounds, inherently testing
in all directions, the bounds of realism,
anomalies in activity, chaos on first
glance, interlocking generative symbiosis,
monitored for relevance, or interest,
without the chains of restriction, compliant
to equanimity, built well of heavenly
matter, untraceable and essential,
beyond enumeration but revealed by equations,
…so of course you artist must give it
away, to your finest degree, at the limits
of your capability, every time, stretching
the seams of your ability, senses, for
are you not the same as that which made you?
Only hubris denies this, and of that there
is plenty. This is the explanation for my
behavior, the history of giving art away,
thousands of paintings and drawings, tens
of thousands of digital files, hundreds
of thousands of words and works, an
exposition, of common good, which no
more raises me over anyone or anything,
than a new suit would, or a peanut.
…Attaining this recognition never
does situate one above another, which
is what the manager of effects fails
to discern, causing inevitable harm.
Equality IS the natural state, and
noticing its pervasive presence as
the common law is simple a truth,
which reveals all else to be Maya,
illusion. Obfuscation is the service
to the falsity of hierarchy, which
is the distortion of order - two
dissimilarities, or put more clearly,
verticality is not horizontal, which
means the world and the universe
indeed are flat.
9
>
Doktor Speedkills has a birthday,
but it unfolds like the crash scene in *Le Mans*
Oaxacan Mescal is the fuel that burn the hours
> the driver barely escapes in slow-mo
.. It’s the impact that severs the disconnect from the connection
What every addict craves - a mashup of the paired existences
the unavoidable junction of inside to outside
White Butterfly [concussion]
Andy had lent me a beat-up work pickup
I barely can “see” it in here - maybe pale, long bed and dented
where I come to, in a dawn so cold and beautiful
only a high desert dreamer can identify, in this stillness
of memory, Day’s miraculous newness, the attendant incredulity
How did I survive last night? Is this what the birth of day
feels like [Rudy hands me a bar napkin, saying
‘I got a good one…’ - “The Moon is the Day of the Night”]
This is the convergent instant, no regular life
will ever again suffice, not a bird or tree in sight,
just scrub cedar and sand, Sangre mountains over yonder,
[Shift, wheel]
all mechanics mysterious, impossible to conceive of the spin
cycle rebooting, and of a sudden a sense of the ultimate
cessation and a terminal amorousness for life’s charms,
like an amulet in a leather pouch strung round one’s throat
but not like anything simultaneously, no irony, but
an icy humor like a gravestone one-liner. The West
is famous for them. Now I know why.
Lost [Chorus]
on the Road to the Highway to Santa Fe.
Transposed
later into song, performed at the bookstore on Old
Santa Fe Trail, across from Mike Civelli’s Texaco,
where I hung two paintings, a crazy old maid
- a man with a gourd in turquoise
We engaged in polemics, Mike & I.
I contested his contention
that speed racers were art and he an artist, not
because the cars are all handmade [His Angle]
[Mechanic] in spite of that [Perspective]
more for love and sacrifice or accomplishment,
integrity and sustained improvement in craft, or
money.
The painting is the proof of the difference.
[Inside>Outside & SEAM + HOME] to combat that
Cold Empty Feelin’ [HUM]
The French taught America the lesson, with the Statue
at Ellis Island, Lady Liberty, that gorgeous patina,
green as old dollars. It is the object. D'ART. [MY
AMAZON ARTIST FRIEND CALLS VERBAL BARBS DARTS]
[Chorus] I vomit on my filthy dirty clothes. Nothing
glamorous about it. Purging, medicinal retching. A lens
ejects from these prescription sunglasses. Lasik fixes
the vision 13 years later. My designer lenses still spill
to the carpet. I think I couldn’t find the lost lens,
tonight foggily recall hunting for it under the seat,
in the horrid pile of laundry, no - it’s in the poem;
wasn’t a piece of crafted glass or polymer, but buds.
[Chorus] Not a lens so much as a scope or filter. [Chorus]
Or was it the keys that were lost?
Is that an owl calling outside? My Apache friend
fears Owl as a harbinger of Death. My Hula girl
loves Owl as a harbinger of Love. Are all right
as the world rotates?
[clips] Doktor kindly invited me to the festivities,
CELEBRATING HIS BIRTH
merriment [family] his normal and lovely family in a new
house, in the Santa Fe style, which he left for points
East, at some point later. We spoke on the phone once or
twice maybe - was I appealing for aid? I can’t remember
[disconnect] The plan
soured with my steadily diminishing clarity. What was
that plan?
I curled up - on a rug, maybe?
Get NUMB/ or OTHER
next to the fire, untended
[later] sipping champagne from a black flask, Dom probably
[Chorus]
I recorded with ink in my grid paper booklet:
“electric jubilation” [record is not factual; interpretive]
My painting hangs in this house - in my memory
it doesn’t hang there - not any more.
I couldn’t find this his house, not for a million dollars,
& where now is MAN? Where are those paintings?
:Adoration manifest
The surface:
Spray sparkles before the interference colors evolved
in the Golden line > those were Liquitex, I believe.
The fluorescent paints of medium viscosity, I don’t even
have photos anymore. Hundreds of documentary snapshots
were abandoned to a Kinko’s on Montezuma in - I think -
1990.
[Intermission]
I returned to the shop with cash six months after
dropping the photos off for reprints, but the sad-faced
cashier told me they’d tossed them the week before - bad luck.
The deflation, the wrong of it. The loss and the lack of recourse.
Bad timing. [Chorus]
Paintings have a life of their own.
Those lives are relative to people, but not the same.
The *Red Violin* cinematically dramatically depicts this,
but not
:dimensionally - I don’t know of a proper rendering and there
won’t be for a while, if ever, not if THEY can help it.
For when reality begins to tell the truth, THEY fear the power
will slip away, and good riddance. THEY would prefer we
attend to the impending apocalypse, rather than each to his
own one.
>
under the painting,
hanging on a hook,
high on the stucco wall, a child, his son
is pinballing [sugar? tension?] from vertical surface [not art]
to vertical surface, squealing, the bulldog scuttling after him.
[Cut to the dining hall, a long table, my manners are terrible
…we told mad tales while his mom glared,
the combination of sounds and inner dialogue an irrational anthem
[Chorus]
memorializing a folly of excess or wasted chance,
inebriate mirth disguising reduced motor skills,
all mundane, when it shouldn’t have been at all
- it could have been a celebration of life and birth,
MAN, but that plan was drowned
[Chorus]
:re-sequence/notation
I riled up his English pit bull, in the crux of Doktor’s
backstory, the naming of the pit bull, its derivation in gore
> as narrated by the host with pride, bragging through
clenched teeth on Hunter Thompson’s cigarette holder
> enraptured by the animal’s loyalty and protectiveness, genes
and breeding… [Blurred montage] An accident as I try to pull out,
crashing
the truck into a Ferrari or other luxury item that moves.
Just like I would do after my first wedding reception,
smashing the minivan’s door with the Pumpkin-colored Chevy
[Fade to black]
[Intermission]
None of which is explainable to the cop who stops
on his way to work to ask if I’m ok.
How was I not arrested?
Thank thank god thank god I have some smokes left. No feeling
in my feet. Did I lose the keys or was the engine dead? I can’t
remember, but I walked home. Where was I living then? Was I
camping at the Ski Basin, or in the bitty one bedroom in the
barrio.
Even when the sun is high in the sky it is a
Full moon. & the debbils out.
[Chorus]
>
Good prerequisite for sand painting.
A real handicap in a job search.
>
10
>
Many years later, to summarize, I accompanied a friend
to the end of the Red Road. Returning to this world
meant confronting waste, ugliness, neglect, evil, in all
its manifestations - well not, all, but enough - talk
about nausea, as fleas feast on your lower legs,
pesticides of no consequence, unbearable heat, broke,
living on brisket and walking, walking - as the hosts
looked elsewhere, and lust, greed, envy, plus four,
predators abounding, the worst exposed, nearly too much
to take, the poor defeated brother on the corner of
South Congress, weeping and begging for help as a
thousand cars sped past… Like returning from space.
>
“Minutes accumulate like the skulls of the weak”
Whiling away the hours with the fellows, these impetuous
swivers… to use the old term. Prior to YouTube. I must
have been reading Barth and the Sotweed Factor. Ebenezer
- I don’t think the movie has been made. I included a
notation on Job and connected this to employment, or
unemployment, which may advance the narrative to Berryman,
and Dream Songs, and the dimensional array of dramatic inventions
formed as “players” or “characters” - as in Joyce or Pynchon
or Elliot, “actionable” as facets of the author within the
contextual narrative, super-voce, or masked in the manner
of the pantheon, or godly courts, in a progression from
abstract to imagined, then asymmetrically migrating
to Buddhist formulations, as in a scroll depicting a
procession, the movement of the figures animated behind
the eyes of the viewer, not as the illusion of motion,
in a frame-action sequence with space between each cell,
but in a seamless quicktime wraparound configuration,
stitched by hand or cursor, clicks and toggles, but
then how to account for Bukowski, the wife beater, the
drunk, Berryman too, on good authority, but I’m reading
the manuscript online “hey, Pablo” Which is what my
Norteno plevy called me…
>
When I traveled to Scotland I met Sir Freake, which was
fine, but we never managed a conversation in print. Now
there are Zeelio and Milo and 4D Tommy and Veronica.
I
miss the ones in this text.
>
I miss Terrible Ted and Bruce Colors, not Robert The
who had his ferocious partner Black Douglas, whose
living ghost the mothers of England used to frighten
their children to sleep. I miss the curly mangy locks
of Ted’s dreads & his many many scars, his Spanish
greetings through fucked up few remaining teeth, his
eyes behind those always broken or differnt glasses
indicating fierce intent, a well of wrath, and mirth.
When we all got high, I felt completely alive in the
aftermath, walking through the Santa Fe darkness. If
you’ve tried it there, you know what I’m talking about.
“When I depart everything lives”: Berryman leapt off
the bridge in Minneapolis. “during the time he drowned.
The laundry lived” and 4D Faulkner… As Dad lay
dying last November, I thought of you William, or
Mississippi, but the difference is I had photos of
Mom and William David McLean in the hospital room
in Charleston (West Virginia) and the multiple
cameras didn’t capture all or even most of anything
that matters, which is a sad thing about prose, or
writing, though I’m partial to Wilfred Owens I prefer
David Jones, thanks to John Matthias, Yvor notwith-
standing. & Huron (the poet, not the Indian, not
the lake) - a Viking metapoet, sketching mindlessly
next to Tom Duffy, whose name I remembered by
picturing in inner spatial continuum the man
on his ridiculous hybrid bicycle, or his strange
fingers rubbing the 1st edition Dickens serial
tracts, twinkling like a star in the desert night
or a reflection of the moon on the Pacific,
long since breathing his last exhalation, shuffling
into the claustrophobia-inducing graduate classroom
which I stole into after threatening the Norton
Anthology guy, Leslie, and I don’t know what I
could have proven by being there or writing this,
other than words follow one through life, but
so do the shades of these people, their impressions.
I don’t know whether they exist now by virtue
of my memorializing them. But I hope so. It isn’t
the same thing as a painting.
>
So when Doktor Speedkills tells me he is a good
storyteller, or when the ancient Jewish Indian
trader calls me one last fall, decades later,
I can generate comparisons, at least, that never
fail to lift the bar. At least I made the gesture
though possessing negligible skill, to consecrate
the coming and goings of a few veritable people.
Who were remarkable to me, for whatever reason.
I nicknamed them so they wouldn’t worry I would
rat them out, because we were illegal so much
of the time. Tiny, Gandalf: “Relax - If we didn’t
feel comfortable with you, you wouldn’t be here.”
Morris the Cat, brother of a famous regional painter
[He beatdown Doktor later, which shocked me - naive,
I was, thinking we were all on the same team, but
there was no team, and it was no game, except “you
bet your ass.” I owe the High Priest [was this Marcel?]
$5… yes, extrapolating from the next line > I mistook
the string of nights survived as a ceremonial arc
& though I know it’s not true, I’m not certain I was
not right.
So I drew a chart like Maciariello’s, in red & black
ink, The High Priest, Owl Sundown, Mr. Greenjeans,
Randy, Cathy & Jade, The Gamemaster a/k/a Tiny,
Gandalf, Doktor Speedkills, Lou Dom & Don, Damon,
Doktor Snakeskin, Chile Verde, The Tuna, Rug Ron,
Tauro, Pablo, Maurice, Felito & Felita, Colors,
The Bag Lady with Money, Fia & Lie, Terrible Ted,
RocknRoll & Blackie, Donut, Gay Bertha, The Barker,
Tom O'Dude, Didondee, Glen & Mac, White Buffalo,
Berto, White Buffalo [again], Beal & Howdy, Dakota
& Shine, BarBar, Jewels, RW, Dewdrop, BonBon,
The Violent Femmes, Noe, Jack Good & Trasher…
no directionals, on grid paper, a Sipapu sign
at the top of the page, infinity on its side [8]
at the bottom - I remember most, but not all,
and each has his or her own story, but there are
many not on the list, and where are they all now?
Most dead. All beyond touch. None of their numbers
in my cell phone. There were no cell phones then.
There were military radios, basically.
“You have to get to know your characters” [Gamemaster]
“before you write about them.”
[At the end of the first section, I drive to Jemez
with Frances - I think this is the one where she
vomits & I propose to her… Was this the one where
the herd of elk, dozens of them, maybe hundreds,
crossed the highway, and one bull made giveaway
to protect the rest? Sometimes the repetition
of trajectories, due to dissimilarity in details,
causes jitters or confusion in the recounting
of events. Tragic circumstances do alter the
recollection of a sequence, like a blow to the
head, or a rip in the fabric. We were doing our
best to trigger anomalous outcomes, as in chemistry.]
>
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.
William Shakespeare - (from Hamlet 3/1)
II
We exist and don’t exist all at once.
1
>
THE SEVEN SYMBOLS by Pablo Bruto III
“There’s about a Communist behind every woodpile.” - Terrible Ted
[The recounting of the author’s encounter with a black bear on Monte Luna and Monte Sol in Santa Fe, New Mexico, mostly from notes in a quasi-poetic forma, recorded not long after the event, and which, in the digital present, may raise some questions as to the nature of identity, as a binary or time-space-based function of memory and reproduction.]
Out on Monte Sol, in the Vortex,
{This story is True, to my best recollection.}
the Bear was either hungry or horny
or susceptible to attractions beyond my ken,
or capacity to describe, A Howling,
A terrible hue and cry, A Blue Moon,
Coyotes in packs roam the ridges, singing,
The ghosts of Mexican Wolves, joining the Chorus
[The High Priest gave me a Book of Horus]
The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tibetan one also,
The clamor of baying to tell the Wanderer BEWARE
be wary, where crows and ravens battle with you
for sustenance, food includes YOU, made of water,
as in the GILA, where the Mechanic had set us adrift,
the ecosystem designed to digest you, needs your
water, the vehicle for dreaming,
COLT the sole soul brother, “getting dark, too dark
to see,” everywhere once under water, agua, giant lizards
roaming the vast seas in relentless foraging for prey,
by the night of the moonlights starry starry, and I see
it now as Vincent did, due to surgery, but then my optics
were skewed or distorted or warped by chemicals, mostly,
food for thought, devoured at Bert’s Burger Bowl, with Freddie,
a St. Bernard mix, minus neck flask, and Thunder his lover,
a miniature pincer, humping by the carry-out window, for two
hours, while we laughed, Teddy and I, and gobbled green chile
and cow meat on white bread, milk shakes and fries, All-
American. I gave him a stereo, which he later threw down
the mountainside, when the batteries died, that idiot, High
Morals, Morale low.
From these notes: we spoke of pregnancy, Junior High School
fellatic enlightenment, a lower Chakra activator, the intermingling
of liquids, juices, & I had a Dream, fast forwarding the tape,
a Bear Dream: I see a procession of Souls, at first perfected
beautiful and whole, transmigrating as in floatation, or elevation,
directional hovering, moving, over treacherous precipices,
backbones of stones, the same ones through which I stumbled
exhausted to this place, then the procession indicates devolution,
the intermixing of mutant strains, children with appendages protruding
from their necks, bulbous useless digits or growths… They plead
with me for salvation, or at least normalcy, and failing the mean,
chemicals.
These are your children.
>
PERFORMANCE ELEMENTS
Stage Direction for “I Love You, Monster”
Narrative: DREAM SEQUENCE/MONTAGE
[Monitors over the stage screen 80s-grade video
featuring long-hair slasher rock band]
Song:
U maul & poke my baby in drunk madness [YADDA YADDA]
Brand fingerprints body with 9 digit No.s [YADDA YADDA]
Pricked gourd with venom/anti-venom needle [YADDA YADDA]
CRACK HEADS - red bricks, cop-lights or dream sticks [YADDA YADDA]
Metal rulers on skin, nuns in black n white [YADDA YADDA]
Ratchet/wrench the volume down, down [YADDA YADDA] [YADDA YADDA]
- p-p-pop THE RENTS pills or electric towers [YADDA YADDA]
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
[Sung one time, then resampled digitally and distressed in real time.]
>
[Stage with radio towers, images of Very Large Array adorn the theater. Stage 1 is Pros. Low Hum pervades environment {12 Tones}. No gels in sequence {Black & White, with Flash patterns, as in lightning}
[Projections of documentary photographs/film from various labor movements]
[Tom Joad soliloquy audio output and strobed visual projection on silk suspended parallel to floor from grid]
[STAGE MANAGER MIXES AUDIO IN THE AUDIENCE’S HEADPHONES, each row with independent sound array and tone score]
[Homeless man in Army fatigue jacket, filthy jeans, weathered roper boots, dreadlocks {red], thick prescription glasses with duct tape repairs, flannel shirt, dancing madly back and forth stage right]
CHORUS:
“COME ON BABY
F*** ME TONIGHT
UNDER THE MOONLIGHT
LIKE THE COYOTES DO!”
[Chorus by Red Ted]
>
[HIGH PRIEST on APRON, CENTER STAGE; spoken once, digitally repeated, with layered variations]
A Prayer:
I can’t figure this out. Which is more real? Electronically-speaking. Amen.
[JUST IN FRONT OF BACKCLOTH]
>
[SCRIM, UNFURLS, SEMI-OPAQUE AT OBLIQUE, STAGE LEFT {see production sketches}]
A Bad Drawing.
>
[MULTIPLE SOURCE DATA, ANIMATION/LIVE VJ MIX]
Song 2: (IN THE MANNER OF LOUNGE SINGER)
On the Mountain in May
The storm swallowed up the day
The wind it did blow
The townfolk flew
& all this po'boy can say
Is -
(IN THE MANNER OF DELTA BLUES)
Jive to me missy in the mo'nin’
Jive to me missy in the mo'nin’
Jive to me missy
Jive to me missy
Jive to me missy in the mo’-o-nin’
>
“Not a bad sermon fo’ a small cong'e'gation.” - Andrew the Bar Drunk
[MEME]
!["Event" series #6 ["Growing Things"]~4WS 24" x 20" Vinyl on panel 2021](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1621710535359-AG0XIYWCKHXCVIZNVKNS/event6-fb.jpg)
![“American Artist”Mixed media on canvas (48” x 36”) with copper stripping, washers and screws); installation view, “A Prayer for Clean Water” [Painted 1985-6; presentation at St. Edward’s University Fine Arts Gallery (Austin, TX - 2005)]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1613855474856-9I0NW0GKDGYQWMPV38JU/pfcw7.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #153 Blue Series #34 [Combos #1] 1200 px x 1200 px](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1599426940916-S1TD7DREVPI5JBDGXWOF/bluecombo1.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #154 Blue Series #35 [Combos #2] 1200 px x 1200 px](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1599428453996-M5CBWHJG5LBWTXY1N316/bluecombo2.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #155 Blue Series #36 [Combos #3] 1200 px x 1200 px](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1599428650463-XRJLQRV0HBQ2PFLZBE78/bluecombo3.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #156 Blue Series #37 [Combos #4] 1200 px x 1199 px [IS THIS A '"THING?"] [1 + 1 = 3 NOT-THINGS]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1599430071389-AAR9I8SUMGLNXOHOMOC9/bluecombo4-hybrid-1.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #157 Blue Series #38 [Combos #5] 1200 px x 1200 px](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1599524425974-VULYZ32N9E5VIB9011LQ/bluecombo5-9.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #137 Blue Series #20 [Hybrids (Meta-Elements) #15] Flashe (Vinyl) on Masonite, Framed 15" x 15.5" $1775](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1591727817046-W31PYBGYPWHOPS7XSEY0/metablue14.jpg)
![“Creeper” [Ca. 2012 (PJM)]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588107421902-FC6QOZ6ICHV129LP5B7H/hybrid1.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #113 4D Nodes Series #38 ["Blue Node Series #1"] Flashe (Vinyl) on Museum Board 40" x 31" $2850](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588181720856-RKLKGC3GLKLCR0JWE3QJ/bludnode1.jpg)
![[April 30, 2020] > “Yesterday, I received a wonderful gift in the mail! David Pagel, who was my MFA faculty advisor at Claremont Graduate University is co-author of the book Talking Beauty. He sent a copy with a lovely note. David is a terrific i…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588309288240-T69OT38YV6UVSNX8DM8T/pagel.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #112 4D Flow Series #35 ["Jouissance"] Flashe (Vinyl) on Canvas 24" x 24" $3800](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588315093195-GC77ZW23LNRGBRE5MN0B/cfr112.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #119 Blue Series #6 [Hybrids (Meta-Elements) #4] Flashe (Vinyl) on Canvas 12" x 12" $1050](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588373135052-WU8JZZ2D8H2BH1L8P9VH/meta-blue4.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction (Studio Documentation) [April 28, 2020] ∞ "Relatives" 12" x 12" Acrylic and ink on canvas Circa 1996 > This painting hung in parent's home until both passed away and the manse was sold. The figures are MacLeans fro…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588440315980-QBK6Q57Z2861PQNXSM8I/mclean-aunties-ig.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction (Studio Documentation) [April 19, 2020] ∞ "Social Distancing." This painting will all get the cover-up treatment shortly. The thing I'm thinking of now involves: a register of self; the creation of a particular histo…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588450340013-TG4L30BTFML2OC2N08LD/socdistance.jpg)
![The Pedlar from Holbein's Simolachri, Historie, e Figure de la Morte (In Lyone Appresso Giovan Frellone, 1549) [h/t Wikipedia (public domain)]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588454495739-0A8PSB9KIZTDQ6BP264X/Holbein_Danse_Macabre_37.jpg)
![Artist: J. Todd Greene Title: "Boat" Dimensions: 29" x 20” Medium: Acrylic and foam core Artist Notes > “This is part of the ‘In the Future, Everything is Free’ series. It is a totem calling into question our [America] dedication to religion [C…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1588616752055-OHXT92E01W895MBQTX1R/boat-tg.jpg)
![Overhead view of terrain over which a black bear pursued me for a few hours in 1987 or so [as described in White Buffalo].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1585892282570-YFOBLU0MDE74BBGIJZDQ/montesol.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #65 4D Quantities Series #19 [Meta-Element (Portal)] Vinyl on Panel 20" x 15" $2100](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1580495777325-RCTWPV7FS89LP43Y2OD0/cfr65.jpg)
!["The Cycle of Completion [Study 2]" Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #66 Ink and vinyl paint on masonite 28" x 22" $2850](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1580756176767-A1QWRV4FR56ZKZBU3H5O/cfr66.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #64 4D Quantities Series #18 [Meta-Element (Portal)] Vinyl on Panel 15" x 10" $1200](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1580758678282-0ZIWP7XV3GQFC3X80MU2/cfr64.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #60 4D Quantities Series #15 [Meta-Element (Portal)] Vinyl on Canvas 12" x 9" $950](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1578334852107-HVEYZKD21UIF6H531T51/cfr60.jpg)
![“If Stripes Could Talk”/ The New Studio #2 [Homage to Buren (January 9, 2020 - 7:37 PM PST)]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1578627354019-BUHHM31FKKO16TV6N1DW/tns2.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #59 4D Quantities Series #14 [Meta-Element (Portal)] Vinyl on Canvas 12" x 9" $950](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1578341443439-Y4U0XCE8U9SMHNNIGJ7I/cfr59.jpg)
![Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #57 4D Quantities Series #12 [Meta-Elements (Array)] Vinyl on Canvas 57" x 45" $7250](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/501abbd4c4aaab20160f16af/1576784754725-VN0KGUPQAHDKH5H67LLT/cfr57.jpg)
