Friday, December 05, 2003

bob dylan wrote 'positively fourth street' in 1965. i was seven. that's the copyright date. on album it was not released until 'bob dylan's greatest hits' in 1967, but i think it was a single or a b side in england prior to that and maybe in america too. 'positively fourth street' was notable as sort of an anti-pop offering and non-love song. it is a protest song but you are not sure against whom dylan is protesting. baez maybe? i read the lyrics today and i think it might be that he's protesting against me... but i was seven in 1965 so i didn't grin when he was down and out and it seems to me that bobby is the one that stays on the side that's winning. i suppose it would be the conventional thing to feel grateful for bobby for the profound impact he has had on my life. i can remember my music teacher in coventry in 1972 telling me that 'no one will know who bob dylan is in ten years'. i was skeptical, but then i was 14 so i wasn't sure he didn't have a better grasp of history than me. over thanksgiving we go to the cedar tavern and they play bob dylan's greatest hits. damn. i didn't look to live with the motherfucker my whole life. 3:40:33 PM    comment []

somehow duchamp's green box became s.r.a. i would read all the s.r.a.s but then i hated doing the written work at the end and so nominally remained in low colors. purply colors. we could download pieces of blog and laminate them and fill up old lunch boxes painted green. there'd be a plastic fold out 'board' like twister on which you might lay your pieces of blog. we could offer the lunch boxes in a twofer commodity package with a plastic ukelele with a wind up music box inside you could jam along with. we could make a movie of pretty teenagers playing with their blog filled lunch boxes and their jam-along ukeleles and then they'd get eaten by monsters if they'd ever done it. actually i'm tired of that movie. when koo dies he goes to "the radio ranch in the ether". it will be from the Radio Ranch in the Ether that we shall revisit the 1596 battle of cadiz (after the style of cy twombley) where we shall see essex and raleigh and mr. john donne.   2:42:11 PM    comment []

"Posters, photos large and small, and other mementos from his music career were tacked up on the walls of every room, along with a calendar portrait of Jesus. The living room walls were painted bright red, and after a half hour or so I noticed that the wallpaper was made of old newspapers. This last detail shocked me. How was it that a famous musician was living in a place like this? I suddenly found myself sitting in Mance Lipscomb's reality, not my own, and I realized that if I was going to write about his life, I would have to do it by leaving my prejudgements back in Austin and living in his world for however long it took me to come to know it." Glen Alyn. "I Say Me For A Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman." as told to and compiled by Glen Alyn. Da Capo Press. New York. this is a great book and da capo has been a great imprint.... so much more is available than when i was a kid and the blues and jazz literature sucked and was hard to come by.... not that the increase in the availability of knowlege seems in any way to positively help.... of the above quote however i will note that alyn is speaking of the summer of seventy three. bright red walls are sort of trendy in seventy three and what you want to bet i can put lipscomb in a room with a rauschenberg before then and likely in a room with rauschenberg himself? scholars can be awful condescending towards old negros pretending they cannot glimmer conceptions of modernity and minimalism. 2:02:55 PM    comment []

april 1937. mexico. trotsky testifies before dewey in some kind of crazy show anti-show show trial the aim of which i have trouble imagining.   when i have some money i'm gonna get me some paint and i'm gonna paint this blog. i have a little balsa wood buddhist shrine like a doll's stage and the backdrop is already trotsky in profile in ballpoint on peeling acrylic. it's on top of the wardrobe and contains very important artifacts like my daddy's tupperware sandwich box and my dog sarah's ashes.   poverty reigns. some kind neighbor leaves a sack of boss pants and polo jeans for me to wear. another has a sweater she knitted she wants delia to have. people are sweet and tired of watching us fall apart.   when i was at art students league i can remember my instructor saying that he felt the vogue in kahlo sleighted rivera's work... it's a question of scale... kahlo is more post-modernly humanistic in that her stuff ain't so whoppingly big and thussly alienating.   1:27:21 PM    comment []

1937: satchell paige and cool poppa bell and josh gibson and more from the negro baseball leagues desert their teams to go to the dominican republic to play for trujillo. i first run across this story in a book by art rust. why, i swear that's his real name. trujillo is standing for re-election and has not yet so consolidated his political machine that he feels safe. baseball is his bread and circuses. roosevelt says of trujillo about this time: "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." trujillo is currying favor in the roosevelt administration by promising to accept refugees from germany where things are getting nastier and nastier. a nastiness which trujillo will increasingly pattern himself upon. in the autumn of thirty seven genocidal raids upon haitians living on the mountainous border 'twixt the dominican republic and haiti will be launched. i forget what the death count is... fifty thousand maybe? keeping up with twentieth century death counts is hard.   the bitter irony is that paige and bell and gibson are momentarilly escaping a racist united states where they are unable to pursue big league careers because of their skin color and playing for a political figure looking actively in those years to 'whiten' his country. when paige's team loses a game they are encouraged to do better by being fired upon by machine guns on trujillo's order.   trujillo gets his start in the united states army. as i remember the story. you could look it up. be all you can be.   sugar is what is paying for all this.   paige promises to return to the dominican republic to play for trujillo again when the season is over. (about june maybe? they played a spring season in the dominican republic that year.) he never does.   in my fictional version i had this experiece be the genesis of the paige wisdom: "don't look back. something might be gaining on you."  12:52:44 PM    comment []