Jaguar
We huddled in the cave worshiping stalactites, listening to songs of the prehistoric bat. We had no language. Memories dissolved away like crystals of snow fallen into the rushing river. The approaching night sent herds of shadows roaming across our stone walls. I was a lumbering ape, a black mountain of fur covered in sheets of frost, watching the orb of light sink into the earth. I remembered one night.
I was hunched crushing berries with my fists and coloring the walls. The cat appeared noiselessly at the mouth of the cave, its silhouette outlined against the red dusk like an enemy flag. Its eyes sharpened into glowing slits. A noiseless predator, come to take one of our young while the tribe slept. It descended into the cavern, its spine catching the last sliver of muted light.
My brute hands found a massive boulder in the darkness and lifted it over my head. Breathlessly I trundled at the invader. Flank it and crush its side. Now. I sent the boulder down, wanting to break the beast in half. Its ears flickered and the cat leaped into the blackness. The boulder smashed against rock, thunderous.
Alert the tribe. I pulled in frozen air and roared. The echo washed into the depths of the cave, over their heaving hibernating mounds, evicting a cloud of bats, but the sleepers did not stir. They slept an impenetrable sleep, they slept like stones.
Her furious growl circled me. Her movements refined and focused. A sleek killer, hunting a hunkering homunculus. Erupting out of the darkness. Her claws raced up my back. I swung my hands behind me and clasped her jaws and held them moments away from my skull. Her breath boiled my ear. She clung to me, wanting to sink her teeth into my head and eat my mind.
We were like that for some time. The black beast on my back dug her claws through my fur, snarling, opening me. I held her jaws, twisting off her head. I felt a claw in my side and wet warmth escaping. No more ideas. I began a lumbering run toward the mouth of the cave. The ice wind smashed into us as we emerged. Her vicious breath warmed me.
“What are you doing?”
“Throwing us in the river.”
“Go ahead. I’d love a good swim.”
I leaped over a rock ledge and launched us off of the cliff. Down through frozen branches of trees, through a world of tangled vines and sharp spikes, through glowing spiderwebs and comatose insects. I lost my grip on the cat’s jaws, but she did not sink her teeth into me. The murmuring below grew into a cacophony and then I was eye to eye with a baffled fish. I looked for her through the murk as I was carried downstream. My hands clasped a thick root and dragged me up to the surface. I crawled out into the mud of the riverbank, stood at the edge of the churning river, and roared. Somewhere upstream the cat roared back. Since then I have not slept.
not so far away from here
while ladies who lunch
while away by
swimming pools
the northern hills are a bubbling inferno.
supplement your afternoon malaise
with skyscraper mushrooms of smoke.
D.E.
William S. Burroughs talks about D.E - Do Everything - it is the Zen mindset modulated for a paranoid junky audience, for the OCD dimension of home & garden domesticated human simulations. There is nothing without the hunt, and the hunt is being reduced to the swipe of a credit card, making us not humans, but SWIPERS!
D.E.
When you do not contemplate your motions,
you notice your experience in the arena
is not about contemplation,
but action
motion
physics
you are not separating thought from action -
they are simultaneous and intertwined like
jungle vines.
edit & refine
your motions
until they are a fantastical film,
until you are not a mass, but
a projection.
the height of refined action is
effortless photogenic magic,
though
a photo
is no longer proof of anything
but the photographer’s - the artist’s -
dependence
on a machine.
the artist’s addiction
and voyeurism.
you are either
participating
perusing
precipitating
or philandering
participation involves the jettison of ego
and the acknowledgment that intelligence
is cumbersome
that meaning lies
in the submergence of your subconscious
in the Jungian torrent of sub-ideas,
DREAMHUNT / RHYTHM / RESONANCE
with unpredictable musical forces ///
D.E. is improvisation of the most stylish kind
a spontaneity that shows awareness
of both past & future
as figments - distractions.
instead /
pulling and creating timeless action,
action with an ulterior motive
like a highjacked locomotive
a sub-quantum source,
its only behavior
is pure resonance,
its structure not
crystalline
liquid
or vapor
but improvised
human
Writhecore
Your back swims down
the back alley
its proportions portioned out
in the slimelight
you duck like a
boxer who had his
lights knocked out
in a cave by
batman.
enough death.
we’ve had it up to
——–> here.
you are composed
of the same ancient
molecules as your
enemy.
primordial dust that
clings together
by sheer force of will.
you are a blind
contour drawing
done by a musician
in a frenzy.
breathed onto a page
in time where words
don’t stay in order.
low-flying birds
they stand still
in mid air
and though they
have beaks
not a single one would ever
call the other
a bad kisser.
good morning.
the pizza joint woman
drags chairs out on the patio
in a hairnet,
huge horn-rim glasses.
she chews gum with her
underbite.
a shirtless sheikh
in a turban &
camo pants
waddles into view
after a hairy white huskie.
New Rooms / Sweeping Generalizations
Los Angeles swallows you like a carnival ride. Revivals, rituals, silhouettes under the overpasses. An anthill of skyscrapers under the rippling sun. There are underground movements and tribes coalescing on rooftops, sand dunes, bridges and street corners. The cops are turning into meter maids, collection officers - part of a moneymaking harassment and fear apparatus designed to nullify cogent thinking and convert the human being into a knot of trivial pursuits and phobias. The media is sprawling and subjectless - an eye with no focus on beginnings, middles, or conclusions. An avalanche of death reports, hit singles, explosions, celebrity drug babies, wedged in between pureed commercial heavens. A helpless dynamo. It’s hard to say whether there is fault in any of it, whether meaning lies in something other than the reality of what’s happening, just like it’s hard to boil a kettle when you can hear the tsunami is coming your way. We are so awash that we can’t even tell what we’re washing in anymore. This gives meaning to refuge, to silence, to nothing at all happening.
Subjects that revert us to simplicity, to careless yet focused states of mind, to selflessness and righteous performance:
violin
When you take the chin rest off of a violin, you can press your ear to the sound chamber as you play the notes. You discover that a single tone has infinite textures. The sound chamber breathes, gains and loses humidity, expands and contracts like a lung. On the beach certain tones become harmonics that were not harmonics before. The marine layer coats your fingers. Slides become waterslides. The violin is hypnotizing. On Abbot Kinney there are people who walk by on the street when I play that are disguised cobras. They are swallowing the world whole with their wealth. But even they appreciate a soul as it pours into the street. Their interiors light up like pinball machines, racking up points while the quarter rolls in my case.
dance
What word makes you dance?
Dance is a confession and a surrender. Bananas in the blender. When you dance you show how you get your partner cookin’. And I’m not talkin skillets.
breakfast
There’s nothing better than eating breakfast with a beautiful girl in a busy diner. The girl is foreign, Guatemalan. She drinks four cups of coffee and tells you stories only a beautiful girl can tell you. Like a cat, she never ruins a good scene. You realize the people at the tables around you are eavesdropping on your conversation instead of having their own.
old spy films
You can always learn a thing or two from these.
Bama!
Illustration by Patrick Moberg
Vampire in Pittsburgh
Halloween time spooky spooky! Checked out George A. Romero’s Martin at the Silent Movie Theater. Shot on a budget of toothpicks and twine, it has one of the most disturbing opening scenes I’ve ever seen. Vampire, sleeper car, syringe, damsel, tussling, and then ah!! Also, probably the most abrupt movie ending ever. Go find it.
The photography of Brent Stirton
Brent Stirton’s documentary photographs feel as though they come from some other dimension. The man shows us alien cultures with a surreal candidness that comes from a fearless closeness to the subject. Stirton’s images speak volumes about unfamiliar histories, places, psychologies.
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