fucking boring reactionary slick commerical not worth much cold clean moutain air pop would imply camp, the end of canadian land scape painting ugly taky kitschy badly painted not woth much at all.

notes on an essay about nicholson bakers paintings.

war news, us troops are shooting iraqi civillians, and pulling out of saudi arabia

i bought the new dennis lee today, and it amazes me.

he writes at the edges of langauge, using it as a way to move past the ego, into something muckier.
i have been reading too much gunn,olds,clifton,auden-poets who write narrative, who only love langauge to tell a story,
lee taught me how to love words as a child, and now in this collection he has taught me again.

their are only 61 poems here, most caught in the middle of a barren page,
clunks and anchors, rarely verses or stanzas.
but oh so tender.

listen:

in wreck, in death, in neck song
godnexus gone to the fat of the land

or

i want verbs of slagscape thrombosis

or

Scribblescripts portent unfurl...

or

starlight star-
bright star
kucked and cacked , riddled and racked...

or

That the names will end, that the
naming will end, that
the undis-
claimable forerducts of is will
resume their
eddies of post and pre

or

Tagalong snatches,
algorythymic
hums.

or the folktronic, and almost conventional

Clone pastoral
Data made Fleece

or the sacred and holy:

What hank, what hanker,
what heirloom?
what telltock prayer? what plea ?

or this use of common tongue

Innerly,underly: empty
outerly:party on.

of course these are not whole poems, but most of them are only a few words longer.
i am drunk on language and feel ashamed that my own vocab is so low and conventional.

fuck you, i love you
mr lee.

lucille clifton:
i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

sharon olds:
sex without love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

details
Lorna Crozier
canadian, nothing more then i like her writing.
Magaret Atwood
why would someone so rich and famous off her novels, continue to work so long and so hard on a dead or dying form, her second last book was a series of lectures about poetics.
Margaret Avison
she is in her early 90s and is still writing, same as stanley kunitz.
Tom Paulin
said some unfortunate things about palestine, was dropped from a harvard lecture tour, giant controversy, reinstated.
hugley influential as a poet in his native britian, actually listened to.
Lucille Clifton
just one of my favourites, chosen for the plainess and clarity of her langague, someone i wish everyone would read, and someone everyone can read.
Sharon Olds
deeply moving, a personal favourite.
Anne Carson
published in newspapers in canada with some frquency, sells realtivley well for having book length medations of the meaning of truth, hard hard reading.
Tom Pickard
mostly for writing this:
writing poems
(keeping rabbits)
each day
the shite to be cleared
fresh straw to be laid.
Charles Bukowski
just another la drunk
Semas Heany
the old ireland, of peat moss and smoke, is dying out, and in his own country he is viewed as a qauint old uncle.
Wanda Coleman
vicious debates over her review of maya angelou spilled over into most of the weeklys and some of the dailies including the vv and the nyt.
Michael Odjante
see atwood.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
jamacian performance, reads to audiences of thousands, like pickard uses the patois of home
Derek Walcott
nobel prize (look at how many poets win the damn thing)
Amiri Baraka
caused no end of trouble for nj with his poem about 9/11

i think what i tried to do with this list is indicate that people still fight over poetry, that poetry is read in everyday places.

the most i have written in the last little while are 100 word critical peices on art for bryans site, soon to be a book.
100 works 100 words.
reductionist in extreme.

thinking of the works i have chosen: martin, polke, warhol, chardin, velquez, the machine that shits, peyton, an ancient greek peice of sculpture, koons.

i dont know what they have in common and i have talked about formal elements more then i like, lapsed into raptures,crammed theory, added bios, its amazing what one can do in 100 words.

im proud of them.
not posting them until he finishes up.

He Thinks Poetry is Dead
I refute:
Lorna Crozier
Magaret Atwood
Margaret Avison
Tom Paulin
Lucille Clifton
Sharon Olds
Anne Carson
Tom Pickard
Charles Bukowski
Semas Heany
Wanda Coleman
Michael Odjante
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Derek Walcott
Amiri Baraka

that was also via jonno

minister fired
i am of two minds of this, one if you join an organaztion you should recognize the rules and try to work with in them, two fuck them-they dragged their tale on this, had a vote that was almost a tie, the rules are unfair and unworkable, good on him.

maybe three minds- i belive in celibacy for those who work for god, no double standard, no conflict.

the catholics may be right here.

this story went along with it, and it sort of bugs me that these perfect, white, middle class, proper faggots, get to represent us to the world.

its dishonest.

i avoid thinking about high school, but wjonno wrote about proms.
i didnt graduate, i hated it and i was treated v. badly, the students attacked me and the staff patronized me and no one knew who i was.

i had freinds though, and i went to prom with one of them, kendra looked wonderful, and i looked wonderful, we danced and ate and drank a little bit.

it was a good, low pressure time.

i still have the photo of her with her dress hiked up, pumping gas.

momus photoshopped himself so his cock is huge.
link:here

from the Associated Press:
About 200 people marched through Tikrit, chanting, "With our blood and souls we shall redeem you, O Saddam," a chant which was a fixture at state-sponsored events for years. Some carried pictures of him. "Down, down Bush!" they said in English.

American Humvees, escorted by two Bradley fighting vehicles, came to the area with mounted machine guns and boomed through loudspeakers in Arabic. "Return to your homes. What you are doing is forbidden," the messages said. "Otherwise we will use force."

thnx to hstencil.

gaurdian story
there is also a silent john ford western found in a paris library
both found by scrubbles

They found previously assumed lost wpa murals in chicago, but i cannot find more info, since la times wants my name, adress, phone number and income to register.

the white farmers emplyoee blacks on sustiance wages, they are not even farmers but land owners, look at the english in ireland in the 19th century, it would not take a lot to get them riled up, and then watch everything go, i am not apologizing for mugabe, who i think is evil and crazy but one only listens to the evil and crazy when their options are expired.
MartinHSkidmore: I pretty much agree with this. I think expecting a model liberal after generations of that shit is idiotic. Mugabe is horrible, yes, but expected. The next one might be better Thank you. I know little about it, but we keep acting like this. We (the West) pillage an area for generations, then finally let it go after we've grabbed everything worth having, the act stunned when the people WHOSE FUCKING COUNTRY IT ALWAYS WAS don't behave like they're at a liberal democrat coffee morning

i thot that blogroll would show up on this site, cause i signed up for it and all that, but it hasnt.
help ?

arguing with bryan about politics is frustrating, because he has an ideology and a world view, and i am not sure of mine. he calls me naive, and he lords his few poli sci classes over me.

so i argue one way, and he argues the other, and tonights the same argument that we had last week.

to use language is to belive it, mugabe belives in the post colonial liberation rhetoric he spouts, and you cannot dismiss him as evil or mad.

Seydou Keita, Mali, active 1949-1970, mostly portarits, done in his own studio, problems with how he is presented as a gr8 unknown, a natural, an exotic, if these were not done where they were done would they get the press, that said, his work is human, and triumphant, meloncholy, painful and joyful.

Wolfgang Boese, photog, german, pre war, still lives of industrial presses-all assumed from art net auction results, any one know anything else.

i had a dream last night of bull dozers making mass graves smooth, i think it relates to the pacifism vs violence conversations i have been having w. bryan.
3 am, we talked until.

i am feeling isolated from him.

i think that i have yet to fully process last week.

click the button, and victorian era pornographic invective is given to you

i walked out of my SF exam with 1.5/3 done, and no questions done well. i just didnt know.
i am feeling so depressed right now.

A man who shoots himself and later crucifies himself on a Volkswagen, there is someone you can see masturbating in a public place, but only by invitation and mirrors, a woman invites people to come up on the stage where she is sitting so they can cut all of her clothes off, someone yells and rolls around on glass in front of an audience, until he is bleeding, an accountant decides that he hates his life and replaces it with rituals including being hung from his nipples, instead of playing guitar a musician incites violence and spits on his audience, instead of playing guitar a musician incites violence and exposes his genitals, a bulimic arranges hundreds of very thin models into elaborate tableau, a man who is abused and isolated from his family has elaborate plastic surgery to eliminate who he is, a woman who comes from a safe and middle class life in the suburbs has elaborate plastic surgery to make herself resemble works of great art, a woman stuffs yams up her anus and then at a later date rolls around the stage in chocolate, a man is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and turns into a self identified supermasochist, making the pain work for him, five videos show a clown being beaten his screams amplified through the small room, three men spend years arranging orgies that include music they composed, sexual activity, ritual bloodletting and other madness, a man spends two days wrapped in a felt blanket next to a coyote, a man bleeds himself over the course of a year until he has 8 pints, which he makes into a bust of his head, a man gets onto MTV by being run over a car, driving down large hills in a shopping cart and mutilating his genitals, a man makes a film that gets wide distribution and raves from the New York Times with a scene of reliving an elephant's sexual tension, this same man made snow sculptures of fornicating women and put them on her parents lawn, a film maker gets handsome men and women to eat what looks like shit on screen, a man cans his own
shit, a man makes photographs of blood, milk and urine, a woman makes a print of her pulling out a bloody tampon, a man convinces 7 others to eat horse rectums in public, a musician eats the heads off bats and there are others. Who are they: Chris Burden was the man who crucified and shot himself in the mid 70s, Vito Acconci masturbated at the blue chip Illena Sonnabend 1969, Yoko Ono got people to strip her with scissors the mid 60s, Iggy Pop self injured on stage in Detroit ca 1969, Fakir Musafar stopped being an accountant in the late 50s, The punk audience madness is of course the Sex Pistols, but it was took over by all sorts of other punk from the 70s onward, Jim Morrison exposed his penis in Miami in 1972, Vanessa Beecroft starves her models for the last 10 years or so, Michael Jackson is plastic surgery victim one who started in the late 70s, Orlan is victim two who started in the early 80s, and to that list we can include Jocelyn Wildenstein who became famous for looking like a cat ca 1992 and is only getting worse and genderless diva/club superstar Amanda Lepore appeared at the same time as Karen Finley who was the yam loving chocoholic(ie mid 80s, to early 90s), Bob Flanagan is the su
permasochist and dates his feelings to childhood with the needles and the bloodletting, Bruce Nauman hates clowns and proved so in 1987, the orgies are hosted by Otto Muhl, Hermann Nitsch and Gunter Bru and have taken place every 5 years since 1965 in a field outside of Vienna where they have become a kind of pilgrimage, Mark Quinn bleed himself from 1990 to 1991, The Jackass crew, debuting on MTV to record ratings, and having a number one film, occurred in 2001 to the present day, Tom Green masturbates Elephants and the New York Times critic was AO Scott, Pasolini made the pretty terrorists eat shit in Salo made in 1975, Seranno made body fluids glam in the 80s, the bloody tampoon is Judy Chicago in 1972, the horse rectums are Joe Rogan in Fear Factor, last season, and Ozzy bit the bats sometime in the coke addled 80s.
What do these have in common, what do these lists mean, are I taking this out of context? If we take the earliest limit as the late 60s and the latest as last year, what happened in the last 40 years that made this kind of often permanent, often shocking spectacle common? What happened in those years were the most drastic changes in the way society were run since the enlightenment. Identities were being formed, politics were being structured around them, the ease of transatlantic communication including flight meant ideas, and complaints, structures, and revolution were being broadcast in every corner. Feminism, gay rights, isolation, anarachy all came into one place. What was taboo was being talked about, what was considered shameful was spoken out loud for the first time? But that ended, The revolutions in 1968 gave birth to Kent State, Stonewall caused police crack downs, women’s lib made the life of wife and mother so imposing that there was agitation to get more, and then when the
more came, their was collapse to what it mean. As well a larger social change mean that personal change was imminent, and with that social change came a kind of hedonism. The world was new, and with this New World they could change it, and that change must come with all sorts of pleasure.
This explains in many ways the essential masochism of the art from the late 60s and early 70s and with that masochism and obsession with the person. There was a belief that pain was a way to the inner soul, that releasing pain was healthy. Look at The Leathermans Handbook, with it discussing BDSM as a way towards personal fulfillment, or EST, where over heated rooms and verbal abuse was supposed to bring inner peace, or the rise or new religious movements or cults that came with this
This may explain some of this, obviously The Cut Piece was not only about rape, but what happened when women were made the custody of men, and this was about discussed as menstruation, which makes the Judy Chicago piece so shocking; punk and rock and roll were catharsis, the masturbating Barden becomes Barren the new messiah, who crucifies himself on the new mechanics and ties the hedonism to the new hard spiritualism, the spiritualism also ties into Beuys, who was trying to create a new America, making the Coyote the trickster God that was lost to Puritanism, the other extreme end of this, of course are the Actionists, their blood orgies, part pagan, part ancient Israel and large chunks of pre Vatican Two Catholicism, that dark, fucked up and deeply sexy mystery that was replaced with a touchy feely and necessary revisionism. That was the 60s and 70s though, and if it can be explained by liberation tendencies moving into something larger and weirder, this spirit may have ended in the 80s, the time of conservative politics, covert wars, increased facist tendencies, famine, AIDS, Cancer and all that other good times, but the art has not really changed. Flanagan became famous in the 80s, with his performances centering around his BDSM, Finley recorded an album about her rape, and wrote about it extensively, and called her pro fucking radical sex, chocolate and yams performances a feminist excessive in pleasure. Both of them was taboo shattering, both of them were so hermetic that it became very difficult to watch. Orlan and later Beecroft took this personal obsession with body, and turned it dangerous-physically destroying their bodies, through starvation and surgery.
The theory around these people is all the same, discussions of the body, of control and pressure to maintain the perfect figure. The hygiene of the surgical chamber, becomes the hygiene of the toilet. Burning fat can mean fire or medical incineration, and no one realize how the creation of identity can mean the obliteration of self. I am Woman Hear Me Roar, can mean I am nothing but women.
Which makes the case of Lepore, Wildenstein and Jackson so interesting in this case, they are the exceptions, unable to be shielded by Theory, unable to connect to a nexus of art history and identity politics, they are mocked or made into freaks. Lepore appears to not care, her strange and artificial body showing up at clubs with almost no clothing, she is naked but instead of this nakedness being honest or raw, it is another kind of disguise. She is the posthuman freak show, and she makes money selling it-sometime an actress, sometimes a whore, sometimes a work of art, sometimes geisha, so new that language has caught up.
If Orlan is theory approved and Amanda Lepore is enough of a freak to make a living then Wildenstein and Jackson are the exceptions that prove the rule. Michael Jackson, in the words of a common aphorism has made enough money to make a beautiful black boy an odd looking white women. Works by Chicago, Ono and even Orlan are essentialist, they maintain the gender standards, they are about being women and not only about being Women, but recognizing that they have a core identity, a personae that cannot be cut away, even through surgery. What Jackson wants is to be made nil. He no longer wants to be MJ, because of the emotional pain; he wants to be nothing, a ghost, and a cipher. He is not making himself white; he is making himself blank. His nose falling off, and a recent Popbitch story that discussed him being transparent, obsessions of wigs, all suggests that he cannot kill himself but he can eliminate himself. Like Lepore is neither man nor women, Jackson will eventually be
nothing.
Which brings us to the socialite Wildenstein. She also does not want to be Human; she wants to be a jungle cat, a lion. Dozens of facial reconstruction’s have slowly made her look past human, not exactly like a cat, but more like a freak to be pitied, she wants to move away from something else, be totally artificial, and in such a way that suggests like makes like magic. If Jackson works hard enough, he can be nothing, and if Lepore works hard enough it is genderless, but Wildenstein will never be a cat. None of these have the politics that Serrano, Numan and Quinn does, and all of these so far are politics or personhood, they are not meant to be entertainments, like Fear Factor, Tom Green, Jackass, Punk or Osbourne. If we deal with the politics first it will be easier, feminist, queer and body art in the early 60s and 70s was hermetic, about personhood and not about community, and in many ways the series of video works that Nauman did in the mid 80s, and the large Cibrochromes that Serrano did about the same time were comments on that, much like Quinn's work commented on the self consciousness of the yBas, which he was part of.
The clowns yelling obscenities in a black room is uncomfortable to watch, difficult and unusual to process, and confusing all around. What I maintain is that it is a sort of inside joke, a way to discuss the extreme masochism of his predecessors and contemporaries. To look at the work, with its inherent absurdity, it becomes a way to tell us, all those other guys, who talk about their pain, who do violent acts on the stage and in galleries, they are clowns, all you have is a bunch of clowns beating each other up, and you know that beating each other up is really sublimated fucking anyway.
Serrano, of course, takes himself more seriously, but there are indications that he also doesn’t take himself too seriously. There is the painting Blood and Milk, painted a year before Clown Torture was made, it is slick and sexy, a post minimalist comment on nothing in particular, the colors resonant but not deep until one realizes what the medium is. By aesthicizing the art of the body, by refusing to make it ugly, he like Nauman makes it more complicated. It is no longer about personal therapeutics or victim hood, but something larger. It is about what we find beautiful, and therefore human.
This is also what happens with Quinn. It is all of the blood in his body, frozen into some kind of death head. Literally, this is all of Quinn, he has, the great Romantic that he is, bleed for you, put all of his effort into the work, made biography destiny. The movement that he has been lumped into, Young British Artists, is one that sold dirty beds and sharks in tanks, and the criticism has been one of spectacle and show, the solemnness of this piece, and the darkness of it betray the expectations of movements. The Autobiography becomes tragic in a very frightening way.
If Nauman, Serrano and Quinn are about fine art as a criticism of itself, or if not a criticism then a reconstruction, then what happens when MTV gets hold of the same tropes, is their a similarity between these three and Johnny Knoxville and Tom Green-or between any of the fine artists. Do the themes of spectacle, the use of violence, the rituals, grotesqueries, and the isolation of audience make this a kind of democratization of performance art? Tom Greens opus, Freddy Got Fingered, is no more obscene then Finley, no less obsessed with body fluids then Serrano, it confuses person and personae like Lepore, it is as masochist as Bourdin, like Nauman it tries to destroy a genre by impure mockery, It isolates the audience, in fact it is a pretty good art film, a bit like an absurdist Salo, a fact noted by AO Scott in his review for the New York Times, who discussed Green as having a “demented but unmistakable integrity.” also noting “Like it or not, he's an artist.” Jackass has a similar kind of concentration, with one skit, where he bathes in blood and tapes meat to himself, something that could have come from the lower east side in the mid 70s, only with much more pretension, and like Bob Flanagans, Steve O- a cast member does lovely tricks with his cock and some nails, sort of a phallic crucifixion. Even the most commercial of these enterprises, Fear Factor, has a certain spirit about it, though this is the most obvious of the gross out shows, every thing is done with a seriousness that imbues it with a high ritualism; although it is commercial, so is Nitsch, who sells his work to Major Museums and his music via Nonesuch, the label connected to Warner Brothers.
What is interesting is the difference between these three examples and the High Art discussed earlier, even though we can draw connections between them. Green was discovered via a cable access show, a place where eccentricity is if not rewarded, given a safe third place to move into. Knoxville made videos that were passed underground before slipping into the hands of an MTV aesthetic. These were not the only men doing this sort of mad acts, it was common with skate punks, who absorbed certain tastes from the original scenes in London and New York, however those were quick burn outs, dying or moving into something larger and more nebulous.
The punk as anarchist life style, that developed its own tastes and styles, came from people who were feeling a similar anger and oppression, they had no theory, and theory could not sustain them. Look at the places where they grew up-Salt Lake, which grow ever larger and more oppressive the more religion got its claws in, Orange County with its republicans and arms factories, Olympia, a dead factory town that nothing really to recommend it, Edmonton with its oil refines, the list can go on and on, and does world wide.
The fear of the body, of authority, of death, of change, of war, or fascism, of republicans and Tories, of control, moved through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, becoming more and more pronounced, and the belief that the only way to change it was direct action moved into a personal awareness, communities developed and the more media savvy got the attention. Tom Green got on MTV, cause kids watched MTV, Iggy Pop destroyed himself in Detroit cause that’s where he was from, Accoci wanked at Sonnabend because he wanted to be a real artist, the same reason the NEA five sued the government and Quinn’s head was destroyed when Saachi moved apartments.
All of that said, the emotions that gave birth to performance/body/conceptual art 30 years, and the punk ethic which constantly renews itself, and the televised spectacle designed to shock, are similar. However years of hype have loosened any larger effects, what the new TV does is combine the cult of the new that marks the 20th century, the fuck you punk aesthetics, the class warfare of metal, and the value of television. Whole generations of people have inadvertently followed Gore Vidal’s maxim of never giving up the chance of having sex or being on television, and with a universe that rewards constant exposure, this need has become almost a right, With 80 channels, there needs to be some content, and those who sell to youth are willing to give it up to those who are good at pushing themselves that it is all attention getting, the fifteen minutes of fame turning from an ironic and dry quip to a constitutional right, and the best way of getting attention has always been Freudian, i.e. shit and sex.
The impulse that connects all of these artists is complex, but theory is one way of legitimizing an already existent anger, desperation and nihilism. Why Torte of the Clowns makes it onto PBS and why Green and Knoxville are on is not that Numan is better, but a question of demographics, he skews older. Why Green is interesting is that he brings the ugliness of the above aesthetic and makes it look fun, since MTV is all about fun, they are a good mix.
After World War One, we had violent art movements, but Dada/Surrealism/expressionism believed it could change the world. World War Two gave us the belief that our pain was legitimate, that all of the expressionist angst was a way to move through the pain of violence and death. In many ways, this personal obsession and belief in angst, birthed by Greenberg, gave birth to the solipsism of what has been discussed her, even pop and camp did not really work as a way to change anything. What we have now is a refusal to believe our aesthetics affect anything. The romantic obsession of making artists, to paraphrase Shelly, the legislators of the world has been a failure. Even the Auden rejoinder, that arts survive “In the valley of its making where executives/ Would never want to tamper” is no longer true, it has been proven that the market absorbs all, makes use of what it can and avoids everything else.
What is left, then is working in the shadows of office towers, picking bottles and rags, trying to make something interesting, or moving into the executive suite. There can be no change from the outside, and from the inside everything is too comfortable.

i think i will jettison this essay, i just cant concentrate.
i dont care bout it anymore.

peter, who i know via the gateway, invited me to the first bbq of the season, compelte with fashion code. i am shocked, and in awe.
he is going back to scotland, and well we need to send him off in style.

(why am i surprised that people like me ?)

nina simone carried me, her voice, that rough shod instrument haunted me, her belief that jazz was as good as bach, her anger at those who were racist, or evil, her calling them vultures and theives, losing millions on her first single and never forgiving.

nina simone, when you meet billie in heaven, sing a chorus of summertime for me.
ase

its about pleasure, about food and sex and booze and fun.

i have always been large, my family is large, i dont mean fat, though at 243 and 6' 1" i qualify, but big, broad shoulders, long back, bushy beard, big hands,size thirteen feet, i am fleshy, my haunches curve and i have a belly, my hips could birth babies.
looking at porn, at out and advocate, at the free fag rags, in the bars, etc, they are into 6 packs and thumb sized boymen. The above link suggests thing may have changed.

they got me off the lrt, and it started at the colisuem.
two of them, smaller then me, and they put on me like hyneas to a wildebest.

told them to be quiet,
verbal harrassment larger, longer, louder.
then following me, yelling, harrassing, me.

i tried to call for help,
getting closer, panic.
they mocked me, me 6 foot one,
they 5 foot 7, or there abouts, but two of them, and one of me.

on the concourse towards outside, i whirled arround and pushed them-hard.
and they attacked me, pushed me down, kicked kidneys and back and everything else.

i was about to meet brian, so two men caught them, and i scurried upstairs,
getting in the car.

cop shop, dennys, shock.
pain increased to uncomfort, settled to watch film at pats, pain increased to unbearable,

ER ca midnite, then 1, then 2, then 3,
3:30 taken into the back, see a nurse, it hurts.
4, 4:30- no one has seen me, i get dressed, go to pharmacy, buy the codeine, take two.
sleep till 2.
take two more.

im going to campus.
i still hurt.

i got assulted today in the lrt.

woods, s about pound, who was returned to freedom today, after a long stay at St Elizabeths.

He wrote well , had access to the LoC, had vistors that ranged from Auden to Ginsberg to Frost to Yvor Winters to Plath, and those were the poets, didnt have to worry about food or clothing or anything but verse.

look at how clear the poem is on mr woods page, how lovely it is.
thats what a monks life can do.

arts funding gutted
imagine it as looting from the future.

as well the Kornic and National Libaries in Baghdad were burnt on purpose with petrol.

good friday.
four years into my catholic journey.
he died for me, all of my sins and evil.

thats the basics.
He died and in three days rose again.

off to services

laura owens, david reed, rosenquists new stuff, jenny saville, orbach etc.
they are al so fucking huge, tonnes of new art 10 or 20 feet long.

ase

also the baptists were playing football, shirts and skins, bbq, christian rock playing, couldn't stay in and research, went out side and read the complete gospels.

rereading entries, noticing how badly spelled, badly constructed, reptetive, in error.
off the top of my head, random they are.

which makes chris from uffish's linking of me flummoxing (she of the pro look, the doodads, bells and whistles, the good design, the brilliant prose)

i need to do research at the local baptist college but every time i go i end up staring at the luscious farm fed body of some mamas boy whos come to the big city to learn all about the good lord, and that boy will go back to his small town, with his fancy learning, and tell us them all about the lord.
all of them, their painful earnestness, their belief in the authority of the kjv, their fear of all the gnostic secerts, the way they intone lord, their hymns about blood and tears, which make my mind wander into other fluids.

i read thru texts and wander thru corridors, and go to church there every so often, just cause i am taking some theology courses at the u, but mostly i go and see people from bashaw, rimbey, blackfaelds, high level, red earth, grand prarie, balzac.

discuss.

erica jong has a new novel out, this time about sappho.
vf interview, she qoutes Nuala O'Faolain, who says this:
"If you are lucky enough to love, why quibble about who the sex of your lover is"

SeanCarruthers: What you need then is a good old fashioned heating pad and gentle stretching exercises and the love of a good wombat!
on my tummy ache

when magadelenes tomb was open in 1269, somwhere near provence, a green sprout grew on her tounge.

peter pears loved benjamin britten.
thats what i told bryan last night at dennys.

im not sure what it means, we talked about other things as well.
god, sex, terror, love, art, krazy kat, calvin&hobbes, me against the world, redemption, 18th century liberals, the state, colonies, how when i think of soilders i think of my lai and liberating dachau at the same time,
we drove, from bearspaw to dennys, from dennys to whyte, from whye to royal gelnora, parked, walked up thru the park, looked fog&moon/electric light make the river glow, thru to the legisature with its sodium lighting turning everything yellow, arround the back to the universal flame, hung a right to see the lawn bowling club and totem pole, learnt he was a hansard page, got home, and went downstairs, we talked, endlessly, all we do is talk, and what we say is imbued with this second meaning, its self discovery.

Brian(note spelling) took me to bible study again; and he drove me to bryans, and i immediatly walked in, got a glass of milk, took my socks off and settled in,
good.

i just spent an hour reading eton stuff instead of stuff for the paper.

Had the queer talk with Jerry, dealing with stress and fear about which I am. He thinks its wrong and sinful and asked how I could be a catholic,

How do I explain it to him, that I'm queer, and spurn the Homo/hereto binary, that its about performance, that I see the recent talk about sex and language as focculdian progress, that really the priest is a eunuch and therefore they are promised the kingdom of heaven, that Christ loved the whores and adulteresses and all the sexual others, that Paul didn’t know what he talking about, that Leviticus was about temple prostitutes, and the epistles were about roman decadence, that all of my acts are queer, that I love my body and celebrate its gifts, that I was kicked out of one church, that I have prayed and begged god to make me love women and it didn’t work, that Christ ordains love, that Christ didn’t set down a sexual ethic, that I want to fall in love with a boy and be happy ever after, that I don’t really think about it, that I think of Theresa de Avila and remember how much pleasure the holy spirit gave her, that the sensual nature of the church connects to sex, that I think Christ had a most beloved disciple that may or may not have been a boy, that I think that Boswell was correct about how queer the early church was, that I think that Augustine and Jerome repression was, how I imagine Christ’s penis, what happened with the LDS and elder Kevin Guy Luke, that I am still adding to the puzzle, that I saw Jacob and the angel as erotic, that I saw BDSM in the stations of the cross, that sebastion, with all of those lovely phallic arrows, that I see our people in the strange lives of monks and nuns.

I started by asking him if he masturbated, and whether he confessed.
He said yes and yes,
How can you talk to a boy who feels so shameful that he cannot touch his genitals without confessing the joy of sexuality?
I wanted to reach over and hug him, hard, not for sex, but for touch, I wanted to tell him that it was ok.

I stopped talking.

as twenty something cynic
i've has given up on love.
with boy meets girl I¡¯m a tourist looking in,
and all I see sentiment and expectations;
property, pair bonding and other disasters.

boy meets boy isn't much better,
here we are lions at the gates
not showing our teeth
rewarded by cake and a ceremony with tuxes

you say to yourself, this isn't love,
this is code for something else.
besides you still want someone
to play all the domestic games with.

queer theory one oh one,by someone who knows better

Lollies were going to be Rock Stars, Poly Styrene fronts the Shangri Las, Lyrics bitter, funny, sexy, and life affirming. Had Kate there, who played with the best of them, and media savvy to boot (american in london, had dinner with her last year, and she had this way of mad striding, this lovely way to conquering)

I wanted them to be NME crosses the pond famous.
here are photos of the last show

1861 dictionary of chinook jargon

Salomón Huerta
Not sure how I feel, the colour and line suggest a rigid and formal variation of owen, who i mentioned earlier.
The problem is that she has made the whitney, she works thru new york, her first work is of the back of shaved heads, and are intense in their realism, none of the ambiguousness in owens, these new ones though, she claims that she has gotten decorative, admits to caging from Elle and Vouge, the pastels, the colour choices, spring fashion, would look good in a boutique.
also, these new ones are of houses, but houses with out any content, no one lives in them , the triangle on top of the square, the kindergarten iconography of "home"
turquoise, rose, butter, cerulean, sapphire, fuschia, hot pink, crimson.
richer, in terms of intensity in terms of wealth,
the colours of these paintings are the lurid ones of tropical north america,
the flouteinbleu in Miami, in and out burgers, Manns chinese theatre, mexican catholicism, swimming pools, the oceans.
(is this Ruscha, no its much less commercial- i talked about Fashion magazines, but really Ruscha dealt with the nuts and bolts of commericals, every building on the sun set strip, 66 gas stations)
(is this Hockney- no he liked humans, he had the boys coming in and out of the tub)
(is this Dieborken-no he is abstract, and the mark making is much more messy)
(is this Thiebaulds new work-no that is much messier, more chaotic)
flat, no surface, superflat ?
is american superflat coming thru la ?

spam

06 March 2003

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,

Did you hear of all these tunnels full of war materials and rockets and
other explosive devices in Lebanon, but more so around Damascus? There is
so much, a person told me, that if you were meaning to do so, Israel could
hit the right targets and it could make Damascus to fulfill what is written
in Isaiah 17:1-3, a rubble heap.

And the remainder of Syria would turn to make a peace agreement with Israel
and Aleppo would be the new capital of Syria.

And Jordan and Lebanon would follow their example to make a peace agreement
too.

BUT IT IS TO I THE GOD OF ISRAEL THAT THEY WILL DO THIS IN FEAR.
ECCLESIASTES 12:13-14. THEN EGYPT WILL SEE WHAT GOD OF ABRAHAM SERVANT
MOSES WILL DO TO FULFILL ISAIAH 19:20. TO START WITH, THROUGH HIM I WILL
TURN THE NILE RIVER TO BLOOD. AND OTHER SIGNS ARE TO HAPPEN UNTIL THEY TO
FEAR I THE GOD OF ABRAHAM AND MAKE PEACE TOO WITH ISRAEL.

AND SO THE BEGINNING OF THE LAND OF I THE GOD OF ABRAHAM SHALL COME TO BE
TO FULFILL GENESIS 15:18. FROM THE RIVER EUPHRATES UNTO THE GREAT RIVER
NILE OF EGYPT SHALL YOU BE WELCOMED AS TO RETURN AND BUILD YOUR SYNAGOGUES
AGAIN, OR REPAIR THE ONES LEFT STANDING FOR A LONG TIME.

ARIEL SHARON, IT IS GOING TO BE THE GREATEST NATION OF FIVE STATES, WITH
ITS CAPITAL IN JERUSALEM, THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN.

AND THE TEMPLE OF I THE GOD OF ABRAHAM SHALL BE REBUILT WHEN ALL THIS
ABOMINATION OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK, A SHRINE TO THEIR iSLAMIC FALSE
PROPHET mOHAMED, WHOSE gOD IS A MOON gOD ICON AT mECCA, THEIR UNHOLY CITY
AND TEMPLE, IS REMOVED.

SO BE READY TO SEE ALL THIS TO HAPPEN AFTER APRIL 17, 2003 OR ON PASSOVER
2003.

His Servant,

Eliyahu the Tishbite


PO Box 53702, Main Post Office - Gladstone Street, Limassol CYPRUS

Messages of God servant prophet Elijah are on internet at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TwoOliveTrees/
(Main site and subscription by Email for Messages)

http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/lesterrj/twoolivetrees.html
(Archive site. Messages grouped in downloadable
format and hyperlinked to authorized KJV Scriptures)

The looting appeared to have its heaviest impact on a security guard at the museum, Abdul Rahman, 57, who said he had tried to stop the first band of looters breaking through to steel gates at the rear of the compound on Thursday morning. He said he gave up when the looters started firing in the air with pistols and rifles. "They were shouting, `There's no government, there's no state, and we will do what we like. We will take anything we want.' They said `Open up, open up, there's no more Saddam so we can do what we like.' "
from the nyt story on the looting

In the history of reading alberto manguel talks about the two stones, one with a petroglyph of a goat, and one of a sheep, that may have been the first written words, he notes that he saw them before the first gulf war and hopes that they were saved from the bombing.

The national musuem in Bagdahd has the largest collection of art and antquities from the Near East, from the sumerians to early 1900, illumnatied mansuscipts, huge assyrian portal guards, small tablets, gold, silver and copper religous objects, one of the first potraits of a human as opposed to a god (found in Uruk, made ca 2000), huge carvings of the bull gods, cermaics from the dawn of civilisation, persian minitures, glass and enamel work from the 16th century.

or did between the bombs, the looters, and people who just seek to destroy, most of these objects were lost, by rifle, sledgehammer, gas soaked rag, crowbar, bludgioning tools, etc.

not lost destroyed.

28 articles in the gateway this year.
i have a bound edition.

well josh misread me and blocked me.
dislike passive agressive, so ill post here.

naacp is fairly conserative means that if you look at the whole thing, from the republican black caucus to marcus garveys back to africa or the black panthers or angela davis, the naacp runs about half way thru the middle.

also, i didnt insult his mother, what i said was that perhaps african americans might not appreciate being told what to do by a white woman. not that his mother is not noble for helping the poor, etc, but there is context there.

amptoons posted this via mickela, nasty but good

first fight with bryan, who is stuck in the 19th cent, he makes me more of a post modernist then i am, but thats what every postmodernist says (useless word, i compared it to 20 bunnies in a hatch, and everyone talking about the hatch rather then the bunnies) bryan thinks i should say more, but right now i am really raw and am not sure why i care so much.

he refuses to get duchamp, and thats the beggining, if you dont accept the fountain (its not really art, its anti art, and the craft is in the theory, bryan fetishizes object making, which i have moved far past. )

josh has been really good lately at the theology kick, and he and i agree on many of the issues facing the church, reading his work or talking to him, i wonder why i am still in catholicism. will talk to bitter today about con vs trans, among other things. (which reminds me fthr dave is an expert on chomskian lingustics)

speaking of the glory of christendom:

Moy Sand and Gravel" by Paul Muldoon won the Pulitzer for poetry
Middle Sex by Euginedes won the Fiction
On The Transmigaration of Souls by Adams won the Music.

i am excited about ficition and music, do not know muldoon @ all.
sad that who is slyvia or the goat by albee didnt win for drama.

found society of the specatcle on the web last nite, tried to get brian to read it, he was lost.
i have a mind, the webbed brain, the connections shit, i got it immediatly, and bryan didnt, trying to explain the connections was almost futile.

yeah, im over here again and the domesticity is becoming closer, will be here tomorrow, anime with pat and bry.
home.

But you are also fooling yourself if you think that is yr only connection, i
am on a computer and talking to a journalist from new york about manga.

i can go to london and have a couch, or paris or berlin, my family comes
from missouri and england and ontario, we are a nation of immigrants, and a
nation of those who seek the best life.

im also catholic (small c, ie universal) and queer and a writer, any of
those things bigger then a mere accident of birth.

nationalism leads to partortism (which johnson called the last refuge of the
scoundral) and patrotism leads to jingoism war and destruction.

i have loyalty, to god and to myself, and to what ever the next gig is,
wherever the next adventure.

fuck nation.

i see no problem with this, i look forward to the rolling arround my father
did and fear the settling that he did as well, do you know what settling
means-entropy, death.

a bottle of champers and a line of coke and all the glamour of the jet set
life for me. you can have your home and kids and few feet in the suburbs.

funny, not hip, pathetic

meeting was grandma telling me whats going on. i dont like it (ie splitting in 1/2, which means chloe livvie and jack get boned)

i just bought a black t shirt with the word libertine written in big pink letters embalzoned on it.

josh gives me an A+ but calls me weird, and says proceed with caution.
i was wondering why, and then i realized i used the f word more often then anyone i know, that i talk with a certain ease about sex, that their is way too much art talk, and its not the life that a lutheran from the wilds of indiana would encounter.
im not going to change, but i am thinking that perhaps it is weird.

aside from the no fucking, the morning afters at bryan's are how i imagine married life.
A calm domesticity, him doing dishes and me writing, punk on the stereo.

i didnt understand marriage, the whole spending the rest of yr life with someone, but if it is like this, then
yeah.

i also bought melinda and thomas's wedding gift today, ikea-that grand socialist paradise, with pink wardrobes and not nearly enough ligonberries.
valerie, bryan and i got the whos fucking who look at least 6 times.

i need to blog soon about how i feel re:proddie weddings.
not now.

he has, and its basically- i'm a monk, and i need to work, and i dont have a gay bone in my body, and well-nothing ventured nothing gained.
saw far from heaven w. brian. the movie punched me in the gut- theater no, tv yes.
no happiness, no ease, and all that pain gliding down thru layers of artifice.

also krister has not emailed me back.
concern.

its spring, even with the snow and biting cold wind, and my hormones are raging, something about the changing of the earths cycles moves me from being the hermetic monk to the fuck them all libertine- (o hara wrote a poem about this, i will find it soon)-
i confessed today with father stephen vis a vis the strippers and the make out session with katherine and david, and the driinking and the doping,but not about an email sent to krister where i admitted my desire to both fuck him and make eggs in the morning.

stephen asked about slippery slopes, and if i was lonely, and about self love, and about roots and origens and actions, i am thinking really about spring-this need to fuck everyone and anyone is most deft. springy.

the machine that shits

today I saw all these people with great clothes and I had a fashion crisis at my plainness, but then I put on my cool scarf and I felt good. seriously, my scarf is awesome. I shall wear it all summer. you can look as plain as can be and then just one accessory can make you intensely cool

dan irons

funk is queer.

naive motherfucker doesnt want to kill

chris piuma

why is it still fucked

my blogs been colonized by a dr from sao paulo.
content there but the look and links are different.

frustrated that my carefully chosen
consumer choices are lost

frustated that links are gone-
electronic not flesh

frustrated that the paitings i carefully chose from google only look good on white backgrounds
and this nimrod chose blue

and thinking, post human trans human cyber love
all of it doesnt matter

cause near midnite on a tues. night
the pr doesnt work

and im not me, im some stranger
in the tropics

and its cold here, besides.

I
who saw christs penis ?
his mother , his father, the rabbi who circumcised him,
the jeering crowd, the women who buried him, the soilders who saw him raised
maybe the disciple he loved
maybe magadelene.

II
i slip his body under my tounge
once a week
does that body have a penis, testicles ?
arms, hands, eyes ?

the foreskin is found as relic
but the body renews,
and so we have Him all.

III
every time he enters my tounge
it is through the hands of a eunuch,
to whom christ promised the kingdom heaven

IV
As notice at adoration,
a red candle is lit
like a ships signal.
like that penis becoming
the light to the world

V
Every moan of Theresa refutes
every word of Jerome.

VI
To take the robe off,
as he hangs in torture
from every church in christendom.
means praying to christ's penis
is this heresey ?