Monday, May 19, 2003

Because up to Wagner, art's about addition and that gets us to Wagner which seems to me clear evidence that addition ain't gonna work out because who wants to live in Wagner? After that subtraction becomes the interesting tool. Doing without. Cage does without harmony. Vonnegut does without suspense. Duchamp plays with doing without art altogether. Rauschenberg plays without making it to the art store because he keeps getting distracted by the poetry lying abandoned in the gutters. Rauschenberg studies with Albers at Black Mountain but they don't get along. Cage studies with Schoenberg at UCLA but they don't get along. I studied Composition with Betty Jane Pulkingham and with her husband Graham. Betty Jane was important to me - Graham was passable cute I suppose, but I always heard his stuff as sort of lite - and the thing Betty Jane was so good at that so grabbed me was the composing for tongue singing. After you heard Betty Jane's stuff, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono come off sorta lame. There are some Scriptures suggest that it would be better for Betty Jane if my studying with her wasn't on her permanent record. And there's lots of reasons why Betty Jane wouldn't like me or approve of me. Momma, bless her soul, was Dr. Frankenstein and I'm the Monster and Jesus would tell me I suppose that my monstrosity is my fault - certainly that was the gist of one of Graham's songs - but whereas I copied some of my shuffle after Jesus I don't hang in his neighborhood no more. I'm guessing the artistic paradigm Betty Jane employs ain't wired so that she can be a Composer of Tongue Singing. I don't know, I'm just guessing. She can pray for me, or not like me, or both. Whatever. In constructing my Hypernovel Horse Opera Fiction I have found it impossible to exclude the shards and detritus of my life so I'm just gonna build them in. I can imagine that lots of folks found it distressing when they showed up in Frank Harris' life. I gotta get Frank Harris and Ben Reitman on that damn Zeppelin. 2:48:49 PM    comment []