Friday, November 14, 2003

When you get enough to money to be able to look like you're respectable in America what you do is is you build youself a place of worship that looks like an Episcopal Church. That's the New York rule. Sir Thomas More where Jackie O. got sent off is my favorite of those. Anglo-Catholicism, Aestheticism, and Status are way tied up in each other. Fu Manchu, Mr. Sax Rohmer tells us, speaks English in the accent of Cardinal Newman. 4:56:50 PM  [Macro error: The file "E:\www\#itemTemplate.txt" wasn't found.]   comment []

I'm absolutely a Voodoo Economist. If you could construct a medicine bag that would make a rich person think better, why then it would beneficially trickle down on all society. That's the Dream. The promise of Democracy seeming not merely mythical but absolutely poisoness in the manner it mis-leads. I consider the life of William Morris and I figure the Dream is way unlikely. But I am unable to discern another course. What you gonna do? 4:39:05 PM  [Macro error: The file "" wasn't found.]   comment []

In Houston, in the Sixties, Real Estate Agents would 'break' neighborhoods. They'd move some colored people into a house and the whole street would run away to the suburbs as fast as they possibly could. In the Seventies and Eighties up here in towns like Southampton out on Long Island, and like Washington Connecticut, Real Estate Agents 'broke neighborhoods' by allowing Jews and 'Show People' (who, check it out you don't believe me, were often specifically excluded in the leases) into communities notable for their contempt of same with the result that prices went through the roof because then all the Jews and Show People wanted to live there. Somebody in my family who doesn't know better actually asked me if "the Hamptons wasn't mainly a Jewish neighborhood?" So around me I got silly Negroes with Fendi panty hose on their head dreaming of when they blow up and can drive their Boom Bouncing Hummers up and down the South Fork. If this silliness was not being paid for by War, why then it would be just stupid. 4:20:08 PM  [Macro error: The file "" wasn't found.]   comment []

All my life I listen to my Daddy bad-mouthing Washington Connecticut because he truly hated that town, and so when Bob Dylan's manager who had the Rolling Stones then bought himself a place there I was 'huh?'. That was before I had spent enough time around the well to do to realize that Washington Connecticut is one of those strange black holes that sirens money for reasons inexplicable to me. Rich folk are weird. If I was gonna go to Connecticut I'd probably go to Hartford. They have sidewalks there. It is my ghetto child nature to crave sidewalks. 3:51:15 PM  [Macro error: The file "" wasn't found.]   comment []

"You look like you believe." This is apparently my cross. I play up at Marcus Garvey Park where I do a set of my new John Donne songs which are truly sort of nifty. Afterwards this girl tells me my stuff is "sort of peaceful and relaxing". Me? Damn. Drunk, watching porn, a video entitled 'Power Blonde' as I remember (it wasn't any good, don't get it), one night in '93 in my apartment up on 94th street, I knock over a ceramic salad bowl and going down to pick up the pieces I fall on the thing slicing a two and a half inch sabre scar into the left cheek of my face. Looking into the mirror I remember thinking: "This is going to be such a fucking embarrassing nightmare. Then it's gonna be good." "Now I can skip the tattoo," I tell Beth. I would be motivated by anything but rabid egotism? Exactly why? I note that The Savior's humility in my reading is limited to the donning of vile man's flesh. And washing feet. But, hell, don't I know motherfuckers who get off on washing feet? In admiring his strange love I find myself mostly drawn to the ponderation of the nature of his silences before authority. === From 1969 to 1976 I am, as a satellite of my Mother, involved with the Church of the Redeemer and its Rector W. Graham Pulkingham and with his family. This is interestingly the only aspect of my life a literary agent has ever asked me to write about and that may be because in the Nineties, prior to his dying, Graham was outed for having had homosexual relationships with the (slightly) younger men who travelled around with him preaching. Except in your nastier States these were never crimes. The Church of the Redeemer seethed with faggotry, oh it is true, just like all the religious institutions I've had experiece of. But truly I have never been wired to much care about shit like that. Graham had been given the Parish in '63 and what he got was a High Church in a Low Neighborhood. I can't even remember what you call that part of Houston anymore but it's southeast of downtown and over where Telephone Road starts, a little north and east of the University on the other side of the Gulf Freeway. In the Sixties that neighborhood 'went Mexican'. Graham suffered a crisis of faith which sent him up to New York City where the "Gift of Tongues" was prayed upon him by David Wilkenson, Wilkerson, whoever that 'Cross and the Switchblade' preacher be. Sunday Mass would go long. Four hours. (I'm thinking like in '71 now.) The congregation would break into tongue-singing two or three times. (It wasn't quite written in but these were Episcopalians so their spontaneous raptures would tend mystically to emerge in the proper liturgical spaces. The 'Prayers of the People' was a good bet.) Those services were recorded on big reel to reels. Oh I do crave to sample up that tongue-singing into dance music. Belgians and Hollanders need some tongue-singing dance music templates because unless there's been a radical transformation just recently the stuff they are listening to is weak. ==== Strangelove. Chainsaw. Poltergeist. There ain't something essentially Modern about the Texas Experience? When you dig into the history Neo-Dadism in Cold War America it would seem to be venereal disease communicated by Robert Rauschenberg's dick. 3:31:10 PM  [Macro error: The file "" wasn't found.]   comment []