Monday, April 28, 2003

This is a blog of the empire of dr. bienke which I am experimenting with because it has been a rotten bush-league Spring and I am desperate to jack something up with Frankenstein life and send it out into the world and I'm gonna say I'm sending it out into the world for my Momma because while "my boy wrote me a blog" may not satisfy the chiefest desires of my Mater's heart even so there is the possibility that she might be able to use to some effect in some conversation: "you know my eldest Proustian smurf up wrote me a blog", whereas any more paintings just eat on her closet space. It has been some time since I threw my cockroach body up against a keyboard for the purposes of expression and truly I would just as soon not for I have never found typeface conducive to thinking. I know mostly people don't see typeface when they read but for me that's like not seeing the blackface on the minstrels cavorting. I find the artifice of communication so distracting that I have trouble keeping in mind what it is I'm trying to communicate because I'm a small insignificant roach and words are so big. But I'm gonna try to squint my eyes up and keep some kind of perspective so I can relate some of the features of my hypernovel junkyard garden the empire of dr. bienke where fu manchu is God. The empire of dr. bienke is sort of loosely built on the near mythylogical ashes history of one John Brinkley who for a time sold priapic voodoo goat sacrifice quack surgical procedures over the airwaves with a hillbilly soundtrack. That's a matter of cultural and historical fact, folks, and when I first was twigging the rumbles of the story I was aghast for I could not believe such a tale could disappear. You might say that the empire of dr. bienke was a meditation on the disappearance of tales and on how those tales might be reconstructed from such dust as they leave behind. Tales that hang around hang around because rich people own them somehow and are still making money off them but tales that have disappeared are fair game to poor junkyard creatures like me. Anyway so I reasoned about six years ago when I started wondering what it would be like if I built a mythos of my own for the purposes of tin can decoration. When my brother Carter and I were boys and sister Anna an arm baby one afternoon in Austin Daddy took us swimming and Momma stayed home and watched Goldwater get nominated and she splash painted these tin cracker cans and they were in my mind ever after her 'Goldwater Cans'. They hung around a long time in my boyish rememberance and I guess I took them more seriously than Momma did, or maybe I take painting less seriously, but when the words abstract expressionism come along I always pop first to Momma's Goldwater Cans and then to DeKooning, which is why I'm always a little surprised when Momma tells me she don't care for abstract expressionism. "What about them damn Goldwater Cans?" I whortle. "That was just a joke," she says. "So?" As far as I can see everything's a joke. 8:23:44 PM    comment []