I appreciate the vehemence of street preachers. This morning I rolled down the window to listen to the woman who has trained her lungs to all seasons on the corner. It’s Springtime, so her voice sounds strong and fertile as a tree. She says:
What does it profit a man to gain the world if he should lose his soul?
Words for you, Napoleon. You said your own goodbyes to all that:
I die before my time and my body shall be given back to the earth and devoured by worms. What an abysmal gulf between my deep miseries and the eternal Kingdom of Christ. I marvel that whereas the ambitious dreams of myself and of Alexander and of Caesar should have vanished into thin air, a Judean peasant-Jesus-should be able to stretch his hands across the centuries, and control the destinies of men and nations.
Words on the street corner have a strange majesty.
Small Town Napoleon..
I used to listen tot the Waits album that had this line all the time, usually now I cant hear him withouth thinking of you. I remember when you told me you lived in your car and I thought that you must be artist. I had an idea of getting a new group together with Jeff which was going to be called the Obscene Bird of the Night doing soft cafe latin music because my band wont get hired cuz we are too loud. And I had met just the right bass player, I could hear it in my head.. Oh well, act fast the times are
changing.
abrazo, hugo
Hugo, I wonder what you are thinking these days about the world. I have drawn some of my own conclusions about how full of shit things are and I feel pretty certain that if you leave a little bait out, the people who matter will sniff it out. It only takes one person who will listen, and somehow it all will seem worthwhile.
I feel like the people I know are well chosen. Too well chosen and so I’ve found a place for everything. I lost a good deal of that edge of wildness. Then I realized that even the internet has its frontiers. There are whole realms of things that people are too chicken shit to talk about and I feel long over due to have crazy ranting conversations online with people like you.
So, I feel like I made somebody up and sent him out like an automaton to find you, Hugo Claudin, my long lost friend. And I wonder if you are real. If you still have the genuine thing. That it hasn’t been beat out of you yet, because I feel like there is a lot of art to make. I feel like a lot of amazing things are ready to happen here online. I think you feel it as well.
This is all untapped. These people out here don’t know the first thing about narrative. They need things easy to follow. So the slightest change will set them into a tailspin. Changes are all too easy for those of us raised by Lorca. I think of Mark Nickels, Hugo Claudin and I swear I thought Sheil had it. If he would only speak up and be his asshole self and take the fucking bait.
I think of Juliet Williams who surely had it in her prim self to throw down some vulnerable shit. I think of Sarah Mieres who never ceases to charm the hell out of me. I think she’s the best of us all. I think of Kurt Eiselar and some crazy nights when we were forced to trust each other by circumstance. I remember stories of Tom Poon, the mythic buffoon and his Keroac ways.
I remember Alan Ginsberg and what a strange, unprecedented man he was. I swear I didn’t know what to make of him. I thought he was the weirdest person I’d ever met and that he was also just gonzo batshit and didn’t care. He’d made a living out of being crazy as a way of life.
He and Burroughs who I wish I had met just once. What a thing that would have been. Or Paul Bowles. And further back, Clifford Odets and Soryan. However the fuck you spell his name. My shelves are full of names I can’t spell. Dostoeyvsky, Bonaparte, Tutankamun. I have been quietly sitting back learning alot about literature and I feel like this damn innernet is going to save us all by letting us talk to each other freely and at our leisure. A long open dialogue about everything we’ve figured out over the years. I invite all you fuckers out there. Shannon McMasters, you wiseman, come. I want to have all my old friends with me again. Jason Cunningham, tell me all about shamanism.
I want to propose this to you all, even the lurkers who don’t feel like coming out, but just want to recall the thrill of intellectual conversation.
I only want it a certain way though. I don’t want to talk about anything that’s happened in this century. John Smieska, This will be the debate of the last century. We will pass judgement on it. We will all weigh the pros and cons of what we’ve learned from that 100 years.
We will argue it, Christine Stephens, from all over the world. Curt Witteveen. And who else, fuck, who else. Chad Post. It could be so freakin cool to write it all down together. A vicious argument about politics in Chile, A survey of Surrealism. Oh Tom Ganzevoort. Come on and talk about art. Talk about it in emails, in forums, on MySpace, on your blog. in Exschulerites. To each other in person. Through the mail. However it is, just start talking about things that really matter. Nathan Filbert.
I’m forgetting too many names. I want to scream all their names into Google so they might find themselves some lonely night and come out. Linda Rosenthal, through poems and memories. We right it all down somewhere and we publish it. In memory of Jeff Boughner and what he saw in each of us. Whatever. Just for fun.
I offer this spot as a forum if you like. No one knows what the fuck severnspoon is, so it’s safe. A nice out of the way place, without distractions. John Winkelman, Von Franklin, Tom Henry, the boys night crew, as eager for something new from each other. Talk again about philosophy. Cry together and save each other over and over again. My friends, come out. I so miss talking to you all.
And new friends as well, just as concerned with the world as any of us. But we do it here, online. We share our art with each other. We let it all go on in the open so we can read it. Stories, Photos, Music, Poetry, Paintings, Sculptures. Dance. What ever matters enough.
And we just keep talking till we get sick of it or bored of it and we don’t pull up any boundaries. Anything from the 20th century. We don’t ever have to even see each other. We just talk online. If you get sick of one conversation, you start another one up somewhere else. You keep it moving.
Perhaps I’ve driven myself crazy with this shit, but I feel like it’s obvious we should all just cut out the bullshit and start talking. We gave each other so much momentum to launch into the world with. What did you do with it? Where did it take you? And I don’t mean, how was your vacation. I mean what did you get obsessed with. What did you learn about those things. Teach each other what we know about the world.
If we can all come to some agreement from our scattered corners on something, well then it must be true.
a painting i did.
the painting is here:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/167/473768644_44d37908df.jpg