forgive me children, i am heir to dark sadness, as well as to the blood of all those gone beasties once scampered this sod, or rather because of it. i propose: money is the drug that allows us to look into the past, for when the money dries up i find can get no consolation even from the consideration of the violent butcheries of history, a consideration that allows me to keep some kind of ironically humorous perspective on the madnesses of the present, but then when i consider the instances of poverty i have known (poverty much worse than mine - oh i know i'm a crybaby even to speak of my own poorness - i physically have lacked little in my life i ever wanted - enjoy on my worst day more voluptuations of flesh, and food, and things, than great emperors once commanded)
when i think of poverty is it not the ever 'present' nature of its thinking that distinguishes it? once 'culture' was having any kind of sense of history at all. then culture lived scratched on the hides of dead animals and you carried it from place to place in a box. culture is surely the ability to remember, isn't it?
if we speak of 'high' or 'folk' or 'oral' or 'low' culture, are these not subdivisions of memory? 'pop' culture was going to be different. it was going to spead the forgetfulness of poverty throughout the layers of society so that we might all sing coke harmony in our pounded denim together one people again. all of us celebrities. all of us famous. everyone having a c.d. and a book and a movie. andy warhol was just like karl marx, prophetic, mostly right, and ultimately pointless for the world moved much as they said but then somehow didn't move at all. eek.
i talk to peter at amy hills' open mic last night. i wish i could remember peter's last name because i would send you towards his stuff though i suspect it's ill represented webwise or he would not speak so dismissively of the internet. peter is a poet who turned to poetry about 1989 and enjoyed "the years when poetry was really burning, and it was real then. people wanted the sound of the street. now it's all about academics again. the intenet killed it."
peter is a fuzzy bear of a guy maybe my age. he speaks of writing seven plays performed off-broadway in his pre-poetry days and somewhere in there is a novel. in the novel he remembers a time in houston in a hippy crash pad in 1969 when he was talking to a guy who was a member of the nomads, a motorcycle gang, and this guy was painting some sort of design on the inside of his girlfriend's thigh. "i kept trying not to look because i was afraid the guy would get mad at me if i looked. he was the first guy to ever give me the black power hand shake, you know.."
peter reaches out his hand. of course i know. we grip each other's thumbs. "but this wasn't a black guy?" i query. i vaguely remember the nomads. i remember 1969. you didn't see black guys riding then.
"no," peter says, "he was white. the next day we all went to this big park in the middle of town."
i tell peter i know the park.
peter tells me he has lived twenty-three years on the upper east side. ten more than me. "i couldn't work in the village. too distracting. up here is better. down there everybody is in costume and you can't tell who they are. but up here you can tell who the serious artists are." peter gestures at me. i apparently have been successful in composing the raggedy garb of serious artistry. peter speaks in a hipster patois that i have known him long enough to know is absolutely genuine though it initially might sound anachronistically fake. like he was a big fibreglass old hippy in the land of old hippies in the theme park of twentieth century america. i play an 'ax'. girls are 'chicks (women)' he generally adds 'woman'/ 'women' to 'chick'/ 'chicks'. this always makes me think of the time some mean girl must have yelled at him: "we are women! women! not chicks!" he used to perform with a band with a saxophone player. "but that always money out of your pocket, you know?" when he goes out to smoke he says, "i'm going out for some 'leaf'. 'leaf' is tobacco and 'twine' is marijuana." understand that i like peter but we're having this converstion for the benefit of the room. this is an improvisationally staged conversation, for this is a new york room and we're all club kids - if awfully aged ones- and every single moment is on camera. farther down the sofa from me is an attractive blond girl in her twenties from germany or holland. peter is talking through me to her. our conversations are constructed for eavesdropping.
peter tells me of hitchhiking up the california coast highway in the sixties. he tells he gave up on popular culture in 1984. he tells me joni mitchell is his muse and that steve forbert was the last promising folk musician. "now, they just recycle it. one folk musician a year. this year edie bricknell. the next year suzanne vega. the next year michelle shocked." he shrugs. "the thing is you have to be passionate, quin. you have to be committed. not to the money, but to the excellence. have you ever read pete hammil's 'the gift'?" i admit i haven't. "look for it," peter suggests cheerfully. "hammil was from the street. it's a book about the brooklyn waterfront. about how you have to stay true to the gift inside you." peter is kindly implying that i too am from the street and have something inside me.
the house copy of time out promises that 'sleaze' has returned in a big way to new york city but when i delve into the pages i find nothing i didn't already know. some girl is quoted as saying something like: "i know it sounds like some old hippy thing but there's really something terribly exciting about everybody being naked and charged with erotic energy. you feel like you could change the world." which takes me immediately back to peter's houston tale. "why especially if you're not a young jewish man afraid to look for fear some cracker biker is gonna whup on you," i suggest to the air, but then wonder if the fear is the heart of the attraction.
when i run into peter again i'll ask, "forgive me peter, but it has been troubling me. the first black power handshake you ever got was from a white biker in houston?"
the park that peter went to the next day is called Hermann Park. (i think there's two 'n's.. aren't there two 'n's?) i can remember granny telling me that the reason hermann gave the land to the city of houston was to embarrass houston society because hermann was a rich man who lived publicly with a black woman. that's the story my granny told me. cornel west has told me i should listen to my granny.
lots of rich houston guys sent their black children to live abroad. especially when their black children were effiminate homosexuals.
j. evardd herman was an effeminate high yellow houstonian homosexual sent by his rich white daddy to hide in the parisian demi-monde (ain't that right? half world? the dark errogenous parts of the nightlife society?). he wrote a book called ROADHOSE TRAMP.
1:51:13 PM 
|
