Long Time No Write

What can I say? Life is an expanding universe that is so hard to keep up with sometimes you just give up. Not give up literally, just figuratively and then
one breath of fresh air, two, three, thirteen. Why is that number so magical?
Do you remember? I do. Everything about that age was transforming. New AWARENESS,
new BODY, new PRESENCE in the WORLD. I sat at a cafe in Nice and ordered
my first drink, a Cinzano. When the waiter returned and saw that I had not diluted the drink with water, he looked disgusted and I finally figured out why it had tasted so bad. The reason I was there was because Bea, the sister of
my foreign exchange sister Suzanne, tried in her very liberated yet respectful way, to say I have to fuck my boyfriend so scram. She was stuck with me in her apartment that summer. So I took to the streets, talking
to hookers. The pressure to wear a bikini was formidable and I painfully marveled over the rocky beaches with their amazing boulders that were so flat, all these sexy French women laid their nearly naked bodies across them to pray to the sun. I wondered why I couldn't be like them. Have their bodies. Know the love. Hunched over, I made my way across the boulevard, thankful to get to the other side, while trying hard not to expose myself too much. I was 13, after all.

what constitutes the end?

this is the question. one we ask ourselves over and over throughout our lives. always seems to come up no matter the circumstance. in this case, i'm thinking about the end of my novel which just doesn't seem to want to end, as if it has a life of its own and i have nothing to do with it. and then there's the issue of the end, what it means, death. so much death all around me. always the prospect. so i have come to adopt it as something i encounter in my every day life, part of what to expect and in the case of my novel SEPTEMBER 10TH, death keeps knocking on the door. it's where it started and it's where it all ends (eventually) but that's past the place i intended.

Using Our Groovy Minds

What a moving experience it was watching the election unfold and
seeing Jesse Jackson brought to tears, knowing how the years he toiled
to keep civil rights in the spotlight finally paid off. My faith has
been restored.

YES WE DID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

above and beyond

do you get the feeling that the universe is in retrograde?
have people lost their ever lovin' groovy minds?
can we not reason or relate or contemplate any more?

these are the questions.

NIRVANA

we fail to succeed, succeed to fail

gross national product?
measure not a value that is immeasurable.
a point
that is infinite.
a cause
that is just.

no ratio
can adequately explain
human behavior.

we try
we fail
we try again.
we fail
we succeed
to fail
again.

can we possibly understand what this is about?

ask all you want
the answer is an illusion
because there is none.

how can we tolerate the ignorance?
how? or more accurately, why?

SAFE HOUSE

A masquerade
a charade
a ball.
You have to have two
Who do you trust?
Not.
To whom do you owe your livelihood?
Paltry, so miniscule, you don’t even count
in the census.
And without a consensus
there is chaos.
I move a few dollars around to iambic pentameter,
in rhythm, to the change, in search of the logic when there is none.
Panic in disguise.
0-0=0, my lover says. Her computations are always right.
And for the first time in our lives, we’re happy to be artists.
If only we could make art during this tumultuous time
when fear Is no longer of death but of the mighty dollar.
Profit, interest, prinicipal, cash, chump change.
Hey baby...happens to the best of us.


Happy New Year!


9/29/08

AMERICAN DREAMER

survival of the arts

the current state of the economy puts a new spin on starving artists.
while it's hard enough to stay motivated in an environment
that condones profit over substance, the very survival of the creative
community is at stake here. one false move and a whole slew of artists
and writers will be out on the street. i'm not suggesting that anyone
should be subjected to this or being elitist about artists. i'm simply
addressing the state of the arts, where i live and breathe and on which i
rely to maintain a healthy respect for the passion and spirit of the arts,
art as sustenance as critical as oxygen, food or life support.
how many of you out there have been so distracted by this
threat?

Trust Me

Not

The End?

In his eighty years Martin Mercier had never experienced anything like this. In his eighty years he had never acquiesced. No matter what came his way he always expected it. “Le jeu, c’est fini,” he muttered to himself but when he looked at his failing wife Narcisse, he thought, les jeux…her life and his. With their fiftieth anniversary imminent he envisioned the waltz, the pirouette dizzying, her body so close it was indistinguishable from his. Unable to imagine life without her he felt the futile quest of the human spirit an absurd necessity he could now relinquish. As he peered into those chestnut eyes through the dark, endless tunnels that turned back on themselves, his fear returned, one he could not subdue through any amount of logic or discourse. The brain, he decided, was a painful organ, thoughts slicing through it like the jagged edge of a knife. Better to get past all this, better to move beyond it. He sipped from the fluted glass, the effervescence a deceptive reminder of what he would leave behind. The tightness in his chest made his breathing labored and the sweat of his palms made the pills soggy. His wife, on the other hand, was feeling no pain. On the morphine drip she’d been hallucinating a hot, white light surrounding her, evaporating like fog, through which swallows arced and banked off cliffs while the sea below crashed against the rocks with a virulence.
Martin twisted the empty packet of Gaulois, threw it on the floor and opened another. Chain smoking was a luxury he could now afford. “Just think, Narcisse…” He was grinning when he said this. “They will have to clean up this mess.” The ashes, the butts, the spilled champagne, the broken glass from the vial he emptied… By they he wasn’t sure who he meant. Who would be the first to find them? He didn’t want to think about it but he hoped it wouldn’t be the kids. He couldn’t imagine; it was too perverse.

Yes, his children would have to forgive but in time they would come to understand what happened. Especially Dylan, the costume designer. He envisioned the folds of Edwardian dress gathered and stitched for the adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”--a painter so obsessed with the portrait of his wife he literally steals the life from her. Remembering the nature of the work made him shy away from gazing upon his dying wife’s face for fear he would hasten the end. At this point he simply couldn’t bear it.

More Radical Trust

time honored

i look around and my life is a strange place. not something i didn't inhabit but something i did. when all around me is death and destruction and reconstructionist attitudes and i think, how did we get here? and realize the collective "we" is a construct. that the "we" i thought existed never did. so let me go back to the beginning and wonder how we can connect in a meaningful way. this is a formidable aspect of writing, the collective "we." not about attitudes or adjustments or positions or possessions but about consciousness of a generation or two.

Tight Fit

He looks around at the flagrant display of Dior, Armani, Jacobs and Blahnik marching past like a fashion show and wonders why conspicuous consumers don’t wear money, stock quotes, bank statements and economic forecasts instead of designer clothes. At least it would be more honest and hell, they’d be recycling all that paper. That way no one would have to guess their net worth.