Thursday, October 30, 2003

i will apply myself with diligence to my labor, raise myself a stake, and i'm gonna run my butt from this country the first chance i get and whore myself in kerchief and cowboy hat the price tag affixed allusively singing this song harmonized by two major seven chords the historical legitamacy of which i shall defend with the example of mr. henry 'ragtime texas' thomas. death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so, for those whom thou thinks thou dost overthrow, die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me... from rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be much pleasure then from thee, much more must flow, and soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones, and soul's delivery... thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, and dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, and poppy and charms can make us sleep as well or better than thy stroke, why swell'st thou then? one short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more. death, thou shalt die. Clyde told Koo not to kill anybody but Mrs. Montoya wanted Owen Bright dead and so Koo killed him. Giving up he thought his shot at Ukulele Heaven (his best bet - the other kind not being interested). But when Koo died Clyde said: "Close enough for jazz. Fuck it." 2:52:09 PM    comment []

1987-90. reagan transfers power to bush. beth and i are in tempe where she studies for a doctorate in vocal performance. we live in a cannery row environment adjacent the university and the railroad tracks. next door is a woman who has a homeless camp in her backyard around the dried up swimming pool. i never see the interior of her house though i gather it is rather like that of francis bacon the twentieth century painter. not the pirate or the guy who wrote shakespeare or whoever the other one was. (i shall know soon for i plan now to work like a monk and study the sixteenth and seventeenth century.) she doesn't paint but is sweet. she cares for her comatose diabetic father. i give her my beer cans. i go through lots of beer cans. beth decides that she wants to do her thesis on the integration of the metropolitan opera. when she finds a dearth of source material i suggest she search in terms of sport. in a book by i think art rust i read of the year satchell paige, and cool poppa bell, and josh gibson ran off to the dominican republic to play for trujillo and for a long time i push that story around in my head. remember in those days you still had to write a white character into a commercial plot and i had already done the sums and figured only from the movies might a scribe make any money. more realistically i imagined maybe having a hot dog stand like long wong's where i saw the gin blossoms play as their alter egos the del montes a version of kung fu fighting i still take out to smile over. i go some to the hot club i think it was that was the punk club in a falling down adobe structure of legitimate frontier history. a copy of spalding gray's 'sex and death to the age of fourteen' lives in the back window of the pinto which dies and beth holds onto tenaciously and sentimentally until it finally it becomes sculptural and then vandalised and then finally i forced her to have the poor thing towed to the boneyard. they open a performance space in phoenix called crash and karen finley comes through with her yam in the bottom act. i have never been to a karen finley show - how i blush to admit it, for i am clearly irresponsible in my reimbursements - and yet the documentation of that show has stood more strongly in my memory of 'performance' than anything else i saw those years. in those years we had a not very good typewriter i was hopeless on. they were beginning to open computer labs in the university. there was a program called 'wordstar'. dinosaur stuff. it was always hot. we would walk sarah along the railroad tracks to the downtown where there was a park with trees and an art center. we would get coffee at the new coffee place when it opened an outpost of seattle. i imagined... what? an environment with a little more going on. i walked around and i drank a lot. i drank until my pancreas exploded that acute sensation of misery and loathing which is its contribution to the general misery and loathing which is why you drink in the first place. it is funny because i realize that then i really thought very little about music in movies which is now mostly all i hear. x. what was the empire of dr. bienke? q. another colossally fucked up quin project? um... the methodological process whereby i considered what donne might sound like if donne were sung by a possum descended singing cowboy in the electric ether radiating barbed wire...tch... a too fearful attempt to jump from one merry-go-round to another... an eventual entrant in some 'mammoth book of attempted e fiction'... experimental fiction holds the possibility of maybe being a bullet point in an academic resume but i'm not ever gonna grade anyone, i think that a worthless fucking paradigm, and so am unlikely to make any money teaching. fuck it. i had thought maybe to jump after that money i could glimmer in the hands of suits or their women interested in art investment riding along in the tradition of texas dada (mostly rauschenberg) because i had reason to keep texas written into my life and certainly saw reason to warn the world of texas... i was looking maybe for the plot of a burlesque review. 'tricksterism' in girls involves flashing your pussy. check the literature, see if i lie. 1988. work in indian restaurant punjabi run. work with a white kid just out of dartmouth (? maybe). he stays in the house of another young man who is writing a novel. i ask the boy how he handles the problems of plot and characters. "i just put in whatever i write," he says. that seems to me unlikely to work out. obviously i am reversible. 2:03:56 PM    comment []