Sunday, March 31, 2019

11,648. RUDIMENTS, pt. 641

RUDIMENTS, pt. 641
('arms first, people second')
My time-worn alliance with
all things is now quickly running
out. In order to compensate, I
bury myself with over-reaction
and by making undue claims
on all things. I'm still thinking
that washing a car is a ridiculous
endeavor. Walking through the
world of this current day, I'd
rather be pulling my teeth out
with pliers.
-
In late 1967, when we were
stealing whatever we could
from the usual and likely
sources, there was a ready-market
for the sorts of things we'd get.
One source was a record store.
Any of those dumb-ass LP's, as
they came out, could be dropped
onto a blanket at Astor Place
and there'd be for sure some idiot
within 20 minutes picking through
whatever there was. The same
with books  -  grubby, tattered,
dog-eared, used texts. (Same way
the two Riggio guys for their
start for Barnes & Noble. Selling
collected NYU textbooks right
back to the twits who's peers
sold them. You never wanted
to mess with hard-goods. Hitting
up a truckload, say, of hardware
store goods would bring trouble.
They could kill or at least badly
beat you, because at that point 
you were getting closer to the 
organized and union-bound 
craft workers and their livelihoods. 
That stuff was all locked up, and 
in-place. Not that they wouldn't
buy cheap, but rather they just 
didn't like someone else messing 
with their trade. You just learn 
this stuff. Uptown now, at the 
east 50's by DeWitt Clinton Park, 
there are still one or two industrial 
plumbing and sheetrock/building 
trades kind of places; they have 
the same deal they always did.
In the early morning hours, the
contractors and union-work guys
show up for tools and needed 
supplies, their tanks of propane
and all that,  etc., and you'd not 
want to be caught trying to 
undersell the same goods
at curbside. Woe betide!
-
The framework for everything, you
need to understand, already exists
when you arrive there. Newcomers
always make the same horrible
mistakes  -  like the guy who, in
a storm of thought, buys himself
a hot-dog cart and then just decides
to start selling, here, or there. Good
luck. That street corner or side of a
ark location is bought with blood,
guts, and money, (and connections
and memories too) and 'ain't no
outsider' moving in with a huge
hassle and a bagful of trouble.
Around me, all of a sudden (and
I already wanted out) had grown
a sort of network of 11th street
small-time crime. Right across
the street was a car-shop/body 
shop  -  repairs and bodywork
combined, which mostly also
meant stripping and dismantling
whatever would be 'dragged' in.
There were many times when total
value of a car as 'parts' was greater
than as a 'car' itself. So, such
dismantling was a bona-fide
walking money endeavor. Once
behind the closed garage-doors
at streetside, all real work ensued.
Law enforcement was at a complete
minimum at this level of things.
The mostly Spanish people all
around us didn't much have even
a clue as to what went on, or if they
did their better parts of valor were
to keep quiet about everything, since
one or more of the dismantlers, etc.,
probably had something to do with
their family or extended kinship.
It all worked out, and skilled 'body
men' for such work were easy
to find. They abounded, like
vocational-school kids.
-
In old New York, kids used to die
from drinking, or being given, what
was called 'swill milk.' It was called
swill milk because cows were fed 'swill'
which was the leftover mash and crud
from local distilleries; the mash still,
it was said, had nutrients. The pale
liquid was whitened with plaster of
Paris, thickened with starch and
eggs, and 'hued' with molasses.
Long about 1860 or so, same era
as the Civil War Draft Riots, the
breakouts of insurrection and
hangings citywide, and the great
fires and smallpox breakouts here
and there, finally forced the hands
of the 'Authorities' (there were none
really, nothing was yet regulated or
controlled), to do something. What
did they do? I'll let you think about
that for a few minutes while I write
on, and I'll get back to it  -  because
it's NOT what you think.
-
By the 1960's, from what I could tell
then, most all of that clean regulation
stuff was shot to hell. Things were
everywhere shoddy, stores were
filthy and hot, air-conditioning was
still a not-always used option. Some
of the places were viciously hot, and
I mean the Summertime interior 
temperatures that would melt a 
popsicle STICK! The couple of 
dumps I got to work in were awful. 
The Studio School was hot too; I
don't recall what they ever did 
about the AC deal; no memory of
that. The First and Second Avenues
4th to 12th street areas I was in
were rife with rundown, ancient
housing, decrepit from years of
immigrant overuse, sagging and 
weary. The interiors were usually
rank and falling apart; plumbing
was horrible, water service was
often deplorable. If there could 
have been a swill-milk distribution 
center somewhere there, believe
me the usual money-creeps would
have tried it. Oh, and what was the
response of authority back then to
the breakouts of insurrection,
riots, and swill-milk diseases and
death? Besides occasional health
inspections and the institution of
what were then called 'Sanitary
Commissions,' their organized
answers were to build a series of
armories, citywide, to protect and
muster their defensive forces and
armaments against any further
breakouts. Wonderful idea.
Arms first. People second.
-
The one guy who worked the deep
nights with me was a Mexican or
Aztec or Peruvian or something
I never got straight, and he was
hiding out, like so many others,
from what he said was a situation
in Colorado which had involved
killing his own wife. Oh boy. Most
Mexicans I'd ever before seen were
small people, but this guy was big.
Like six-two big, maybe, and hulking,
with long black hair. He more to me
resembled a held-in-check American
Indian, just off the reservation and
not sure yet if he wished to go mar
or just shape up. Whatever he'd 
done, it was done. Eventually I
 just disappeared, walking from 
the job and losing all touch with 
him or his story. And, lastly, if
he'd gotten caught, I didn't want 
to anywhere within five miles of
him, for fear of being suspected
of snitching or giving him up.
Some people just walk into 
trouble. Not me.

11,647. GENERALLY, GERTIE

GENERALLY, GERTIE
Generally, Gertie, you bust my chops,
but now I'll sing a new song for you. I
have the fever that brings down trees, 
that cuts the flowers, that brings you
home. But I've run out of ideas as well.
Is it OK, are you sure, if I stand here
idly by? There's a popsicle man at
Little 12th street, holding a carbine
in his frozen hands. Going deep, 
everyday, into the freezer-chest he
pushes about : looking for parks
and playgrounds and all those tired
kids screeching 'lemon and cherry' 
ice. He's already told me it gets
really tiresome; but evenso I 
never thought he'd crack, 
or I never thought he'd 
crack like this. And
generally, Gertie, I
can make a good
guess.

11,646. NEFERTITI'S GOT THE ROOM

NEFERTITI'S GOT THE ROOM
...And let her have it too; who else
needs all that space and things to
fill it with? I'm already tired of 
scarabs and asps. I was translating
the tomb, all those marks on the
walls, and it said : 'Benny the Barber
looked at me, passed out tickets,
cautiously, to see the burning of
the soup, down at Lucy's Chicken
Coop.' That was OK by me, and
I already liked the water. Here and
there, occasionally and by the by, I
think of going places, but I never
leave home. Without it. Or why? 
Knowing what I mean, every man 
is already a dulcimer hammer and 
I'm their erstwhile friend. But 
Nefertiti's got the room, so I'm 
probably going back there again.


11,645. RUDIMENTS, pt. 640

RUDIMENTS, pt. 640
(everything is a crock)
As the lion said to the tiger :
Let us prey! Based on that
previous chapter, my mostly
cumbersome interaction needs
some follow-up : Saints and
Saviors, and the conditions
of life on Earth. It's a strange
and long story. I'll try it.
-
'Genesis 22. Abraham, an old
man who was waiting all his
life for the birth of his son and
heir, is suddenly commanded
by God to take Isaac to a
mountaintop to kill him.
Abraham immediately follows
the instruction, making no
protest as he leads Isaac up
to the mountaintop. Only at
the last moment, when Isaac
is bound on the altar and
Abraham has his knife raised,
does an angel appear and call
off the sacrifice, saying 'For
now I know that thou fearest
God, seeing thou hast not
withheld they son, thine only
son, from me,' the angel tells
the patriarch. A ram appears
nearby and is offered in Isaac's
stead, and everything ends
happily.' (Except, I always
thought, for the ram. I could
never figure this animal-
sacrifice stuff out).
-
To what lengths does any of
this claptrap - (my opinion) -
perfect-strength idea go, in
'obedience' to God? And what
possible meaning could any of it
have for our present day states
of living? And  -  back to those
aborted babies at the driveway  -
what differences exist, to make
one a 'sacrifice' and another a
murder? All Life is the same long
line, a continuity, which draws
its strength from all the shared
definitions we dwell amidst.
Including this situation. If you
do this to lose everything so as
to show obedience to God, then,
as well, what was the big deal
about Job not just accepting all
his problems, giving it up to God,
and being done with it? There
are way too many finely split
hairs here, and I'm still glad
I'm not a ram, goat, or chicken;
talk about monstrous deaths
for no good reason at all except
that Man is a killer animal, long
out of control and worth only
extinction.
-
There's currently a guy name
Martin Hagglund who has written
of this scene and come up with an
'escape hatch' of sorts for what
Abraham had, apparently, been
willing to do  -  kill his own son,
albeit for God, yes. Hagglund's
escape hatch is that if Abraham
had perfect faith in God, then he
believed without a doubt that
that the killing of Isaac did not
mean the loss of Isaac. Rather,
a slain Isaac would be with God,
and so Abraham could hope to
find him again after death. For
all the difficulty and grief that
killing his son would cause him,
Abraham never actually puts
Isaac, or himself, at risk. Thus,
'Faith' cancels out true loss. As
long as you keep religious faith
you cannot be defeated by loss.
-
That sure is some convoluted and
convenient reasoning  -  I'd say.
It reeks of entrapment, in that
the systems that develop around
it first already KNOW where they
want to be and where they want
their arguments to end up, so they
build and construct their entire
framework around that conclusion,
and conveniently get there! That's
as immaterial as it is dishonest. It's
all, frankly, calculated crap, first
thought up, and then ended at.
As I said, I never understood,
nor did I have any interest in,
all this ancient sacrifice stuff :
completely nonsensical to me
and way outside the mainstream
of my personal thought structure.
Tribal stuff was never my kin.
-
Early on, I began coming to certain
conclusions. One being that the
art world sucked. I began noticing
the dollar signs on things getting
larger and larger  -  paintings that
previously would have been salable
at two thousand dollars  -  a price
that would have made artist and 
agent as well quite happy  -  were
slowly rolling upwards of a
hundred thousand dollars and still
more. Certainly a whole other
threshold of money. Reason was?
Business. Agents. Gallery Directors.
Collectors, and, of course, a new
tax law in effect by about 1950,
looking back, that had changed 
everything. By the purposing 
of that law, changing the tax 
code meant that art collectors 
could take a deduction on art
purchased with the intention
of one day, even posthumously,
donating the works to a museum. 
The bureaucratic change then
immediately invigorated a market:
buyers and wealthy individuals 
had an incentive, beyond just the
love of art or its acquisition as
status symbol, to buy art; now 
purchasing art on the advice of 
a small number of 'experts' who
directed them toward the art most
likely to be accepted by a museum.
The entire operation was thus
changed, into something as
hermetically sealed and closed
as insiders could keep it. Prices
began a slow, steady rise, right
up to today's absolutely bizarre
numbers at auction. Museums,
and galleries, thrived, but the 
life slowly began falling away
from the works themselves. It
all became a system. And I
hated systems.
-
Once I realized things, I knew
that  -  in my own rather low way  -
I had to, and would, keep at it, but
I was not in any way personable 
enough, public enough, polite
enough, or caring enough, to
take part in the social-circuit
and psycho-babble necessary
to get through show openings,
chatter, drinks and rambling.
Insider talk, phrases and code
words of extreme meaningless.
And that's how it went for me, so 
that now, at life's soggy end, I'm
cloistered with paintings, drawings,
lines, words, and doctrines, all of
my own doing, which have gone 
nowhere except the royal 'Here.'
And good riddance to all that;
they're all a bunch of shits.
-
Everything's been taken up now
anyway by the gold-wave of the
wandering tribe, much as it's always
been  -  those seeking and sucking
money from hype and air. They say
you can't get blood from a turnip; 
and they'd be the ones to know,
having even tried that.
-
Just today, in fact, as if to prove
my point, I was paging through an
old Look Magazine, of all things,
from Sept. 21, 1965. The cover said,
in bold letters with a horrific-looking
urban-dangerous photo, 'Our Sick
Cities'  -  and in smaller type, 'and
how they can be cured.' My immediate
thought (I'd picked up a number of
these at some junk sale for like 25 cents
each) was 'That's not a Conclusion!
That's an opinion!' Even in good
old 1965 they were well underway
with that bible-premised obfuscation
that has taken us from Abraham and
Isaac right to the present day at
the local abortion mill and its 
constant protesters. [And, by the
way, another obvious problem with
this is collusion between church and
state here  -  in that the real perfidy 
is the town hall assholes who allow
this stuff. Were I to appear each day,
with placards and stands, and signs,
at the roadway, outside of Town Hall
proclaiming them as agents of Evil,
crooks thieves, liars and fruitless
bums besides, I'd be hauled off by
the local constabulary immediately].
The guys at Look Magazine, back
in 1965, I can see them now, had
their CONCLUSIONS  ready first.
'Let's do a story on how rotten our
cities are. Make the facts and the
findings fit only that. We'll get some
photos of the usual crud to make the
point, and go at every angle we can 
make, to have this fit our lead line
and premise. Go at it, you have 
two months, for a cover-date of
late September.' Everything is
a crock, and everything is fixed.
Facts don't exist and this
life's a premise.
-
Those editors around the big table,
they take the place, in a way now, of
God in forming what we know of
as our universe. Everyone bows, 
 'the accepting of the acceptance as
the accepted acceptance.' Problem is, 
nothing is as it seems, and it's ALL
a ringed circle around a dead-man's
neck. Given the right incentive, I
could produce a story too, with photos,
of this as a wonderful, thriving and
positive world, refuting theirs  -  and 
against  their lowly premised, dated, 
stupidities of 1965, because it's all in 
the presentation of the continuities 
and what's selected to be exposed. I
drive the tractor. I make the corn rows.
I plant the seeds. I harvest the corn.



Saturday, March 30, 2019

11,644. FORMAT : FOAM MAT

FORMAT : FOAM MAT
All on the floor. Just like that.
Timbuktu or Alcatraz, ,much
the same occurs. Chinese lanterns.
Bring me a hat. You can't go out.
Looking. Like. That.

11,643. RUDIMENTS, pt. 639

RUDIMENTS, pt. 639
(save somebody, even if it's not yourself)
I was most often a crazy fool
about writing. I'd hunker down
and find a place to do it, just as
an exercise in thought management.
One time, to a friend in California,
I was writing a long piece that I
made up as I went along. I guess
it was in about 1974, or whenever
President Carter imposed 55mph
speed limits, in the name of energy
efficiency and all that crap. It was 
all a sham, as if it were to make any
difference. I'd written a long essay
sort of diatribe about the end of the
American expansionist dream; 
actually I had called it the true end
of Manifest Destiny. President
Madison's idea that the USA had
the sovereign right as a young
nation to expand from coast to 
coast, and no one should get in
the way of that progress, meaning 
mostly Spain and France, England
having already been spent. What
Carter and the 1970's had to face, 
and without causing riots, was 
telling the people that we were 
done, there was nowhere else to 
go, Alaska and Hawaii pretty much 
having exhausted our reach, and
Cuba and Puerto Rico being places
no one wanted anyway. So, to avoid
insurrection and unrest, Carter 
lowered the speed limits, under 
the foul pretense of conservation,
so that (put simply) it would take
longer for people to get anywhere,
thus presenting the illusion still
of space and room and growth. 
Those people setting out NY to 
California, or Pittsburgh or Akron
or Colorado, would simply have
a longer, by time only, trip ahead
of them. Sort of a particularized
conspiracy theory that no one
believed anyway. BUT, my friend
Ed, here, in this case, took this
paper and presented it before one
of his groups  -  some San Francisco
university setting or another, and,
after the paper was read out, he said
it proved wildly popular and was
copied and re-submitted and passed
around, causing quite a stir.
-
And then, another time, say 1975, I
was visiting a friend at work, for her
lunch break  -  she worked at some
big, downtown advertising agency, I
believe M. W. Ayres or something, as
their research librarian  -  yes, hard to
believe that dimwits at ad agencies
have research libraries  -  and during 
that time I got a 75 dollar parking
ticket for illegal parking in some
zone or other in the financial district.
At this time, New York City was broke
and going nowhere except foully
downward. They had had some sort
of Municipal Bonds, sold for years,
with Lebenthal Co., called 'First
Obligation Bonds'  -  often bought by
fixed-income retirees, elderly, who
relied on such reliable small dividends
and incomes. The idea was, no matter
how bad things got, NYC would first
and foremost honor their obligations
to these bondholders, and never default
on them. Well, lo and behold, with the
city being broke, what did they do? 
They, yes, defaulted on these First
Obligation Bonds. A no no. SO, in
light of my ticket, I wrote a long
screed to some agency I now forget,
saying that I myself would  -  since
NYC had turned its back like that
on its ow obligations  -  in turn also
not recognize my obligation to pay
them their fine, seeing an equivalency
in their abrupt dismissal of responsibility
and my resultant refusal to pay. I
expected nothing but a scolding. In
any case, and amazingly, months later
I received in the mail an official letter
from the City Of New York, dismissing
my ticket  -  and along with that was
a note from some Law student or 
something who had been clerk-interning
their, saw my letter, thought it was a
marvelous idea, and, as a project for
his law-study, taken up my argument
before a judge-in-session, argued for
it and won dismissal! So cool, that was.
Somewhere around here, long lost
and probably long buried and boxed
in something, I have the note. 
-
Just goes to show how a little bit of
crazy intensity and a show of effort
can sometimes bring remarkable results.
I've never stopped, since then, being
a writerly thorn in lots of sides, and
with some cool results. Still waiting
for my big breakthrough though.
Never expecting much anyway.
-
I've always figured my best way out
of here was in a simple, pine box, with
as few mourners as possible. I hate
all that other stuff  -  drained and
stinkless corpses, looking like tissue
paper versions of what they used to
be, being gawked at and slobbered
over by people who actually probably
couldn't care less. On the third day
He arose again from the dead. Yeah,
sure, that'll work. There's no two
ways around the fact that earthly
existence rots the brain and ain't
worth spittle. But I still can't figure
any of it out. With all the tremor and
activity that NYC used to bring, there
isn't that much time by the ordinary
rube for all that thought about the
different points of philosophy and
illogic. The slobbering mass of
Humankind just swarms the street
like a bunch of Dumkopfs and gets
their feeble work done. That was
the cool thing about the Studio
School and the people and position
I'd gotten myself into. It was an
assured level of anarchy, with
little interference. At about this
time, 1967 and on, there were new
groups of people, all of a sudden
like weeds, everywhere. I've always
respected the past, my past, the
literary and artistic past, the legacy
values and the precursors and
forerunners of all that we needed
to know to make our contemporary
art, writing and world references
have value, but these new weed-kids
had very little of that. It was more
just a general rebelliousness born 
from restlessness and an empty tub
of no real values at all. Not that I 
minded  -  the girls were oftentimes
quite beautiful and stunning. About
this time too there was a fabric
or whatever it's called, that girls
were wearing, hippie type girls
anyway  -  it was thin, pretty near to
a sheer fabric, colored lightly and
made with prints and patterns; a
real modern garb. Lots of girls 
wore it and they all wore it well  -  
very sexual, almost erotic, seeing
that stuff on the streets, walking 
along, it seemed there wasn't a
care in the world for these grand
creatures; nothing that NYC
could interfere with or stop. It 
was a sort of free-form assault
on all previous assumptions, and
it worked wonders. Guys had 
nothing really equal to that   -
what were they going to do,
sideburns and new hair? What
I'm saying is that it had become
totally easy to do nothing at all.
No one there was 'forced' to
think deeply, scour through the
world of philosophy, reason and
logic, pick through history, make
a worldview of their own. People
drooped instead of growing.
Too bad.
-
That new world a'borning allowed
a person, through ignorance or
laziness, to just waste away, do
nothing, and just 'keep on keeping
on', as the stupid saying went. I
felt that if a person was ready to
settle for that crap, they might as
well die. I never went passive. In
fact, I hated. My hate was good hate.
-
I passed a place today that I pass
often enough -  it was certainly
nothing new  -  and, as usual there
were the one or two people there
with their placards and  handouts.
It's a medical facility, and an
abortion mill as well, and these 
picketers are most often there, 
with placards and large photos
of fetuses and babies, and all that.
I guess a girl driving in for an
abortion is supposed to feel bad, 
turn around, change her mind, etc.
Today the placards read 'Adoption
Is a Loving Alternative.' It's all
Knights of Columbus stuff, and
the church and the Knights Hall
is right up the street two blocks 
or so. The whole thing, from all
sides is equally stupid and ridiculous,
and there's really no right or wrong.
Sorry. Adoption into a dastardly
situation, abuse, poverty, disrespect,
and further psychological abandonment
is always a possibility anyway, but 
these idiots don't possess the depth 
of thought to carry themselves that
far. Anyway, the Catholic Church
should talk! (Or at least outlaw
aborting boy babies. Ha!). I
never get their point  -  if this 
world is the den of decrepitude
they make it out to be, fallen and 
sinful, with everyone tainted at 
birth by original sign and in
desperate need of Salvation, which
of course (?) can only come through
them, as Holy, Apostolic Bullshit
Catholic Church, why in the heck
bring a poor, suckered kid into
this world? What exactly is so 
wrong about cutting them out of
this miserable loop at the last
moment anyway, especially as
they're obviously already seen
as excess and unwanted. It just
make no sense to me. Isn't that
the same, in essence, as saving
a soul, by not bringing it here
in the first place? I'd think that 
would be a good thing; and if
you're about saying 'Only God
can make that determination,' 
yeah, well, he or she ain't been
doing too good a job from what
I can tell.