Fiction: THE END OF ALL FLESH

{photography: steven miller}

“flesh eating bitch,” he mumbled to himself.

“what the fuck? what the fuck did you say you ravenous piece-a-shit?” she yelled back at him, striking his woolly head as she did so.

“nothing, honey, i’m just talking to the baby…” his head was in her lap, lips kissing at her navel through the velour and random dog hairs that constituted her sweater, “i’m just asking it what kinda name it wants.”

“goddammit, you motherfucker. get out of there. i told you: there is no baby. there will be no baby. and if there was a baby it wouldn’t be your baby. i am in love with somebody and she left her sperm bag at home, too!”

hall shot 3

 

the bitterness in her tone tasted like menstrual blood in his mouth. he was thinking now, quicker than normal, which is how it always was when they fought. his mind would explode in ways that speed, acid and x could never have pushed it. not even one of those cocaine suppositories he occasionally enjoyed could get him so activated as a good fight with the woman biggie smalls had taught him to refer to affectionately as ‘my bitch.’ but only when she wasn’t listening, of course.

 

she was sweet, smart, and beautiful in a canned corn kind of way. a little backwoods girl from a meth-trailer free trade zone, the backbone economy of america’s working poor. she was willful, well educated, tight and a freak. what else could he have asked for from god except that maybe she hadn’t turned out to be gay?

hall shot

 

“what the fuck?” she yelled again and this time she threw his lazy, indigenous sperm-bag on the carpet and out of her lap. “you honestly think you can still say shit like that to me? where the fuck are you? i left, man, and i am not coming back. i left you, this town and shit; i don’t even talk to men anymore except for you, bus drivers, and my parole officer, that little bitch.”

 

he laughed at her joke; he was always amazed at the level of awareness she could maintain even in the most hectic, hellish, and high situations. no matter what, she could argue, insult, insinuate, lie, mind read, and seduce total strangers behind his back all at the same time.

 

sometimes he wished he could have gotten her to carry a gun. not because he was too freaked out by them himself (he was), but because he would have loved to have deep throated the barrel the next time she threatened to kill him.

 

the television was broadcasting some shit in the background about the terrorists having possibly used alien technology to stop all air traffic for the last few days, but he could barely make it out so intense was the sensation burning from the depths of his asshole to his nostrils with the stink of his own internal bodily processes and the abundance of lube still dribbling down his thighs.

 

“this is it, man; i am never doing this again,”she said quietly.

“bitch prolly crying,” he emoted on some deep level maybe right around his prostate gland. he was dreaming it now as nelson mandela and many girls from his highschool drug dealing phase licked his delicate, native-flavored weenie.

 

and she probably was crying, but it was also hot in the room with the tv on, him shaking and groaning, all these ghosts watching and her arm shoved further up his relaxed-as-only-a-negro-can-relax rectum. thanks to her anatomy classes she knew she couldn’t reach on through and crush his testicles, those vibrant factories of testosterone production, with a fuck-capitalism-and-screw-the-reds-too-post-literate-feminist grasp and once again she cursed her education and the institutions her parents had believed in that allowed her to even be able to string such concepts together in the skip rope chambers of her backlot mind while fisting her whatever-the-fuck-he-is-now at the same time.

hall shot 2

 

dirty bomb! the video!

my friend filastine has finally made a music video.

it’s pretty damn fabulous and feels just like our conversations on life and culture.

check it and then go grab his new record, ‘dirty bomb,’ at www.postworldindustries.com

for the record, i suggested multiple times that he call the new effort ‘dirty dirty bomb bomb,’ but that was all for (dread)naught…

the degenerate art ensemble's 'sonic tales'

hello, it’s been quite a while since i last posted. lately i’ve been working on the degenerate art ensemble‘s ‘sonic tales.’ this could be a tentative title or it could be the final. who knows…

last year, joshua and haruko, the main instigators/driving force of the dae, asked me if i’d like to collaborate on some song writing for the next album. i assented; working in a musical fashion with those two was something i’d been itching to do for years. unfortunately, my chops had never been proportionate to the task. luckily, all i was asked to do was contribute lyrics and some vocal lines. lyrics i can spit all day if given the impetus. melodies? much the same.

eventually the dae (which now includes composer jeff houston) asked if i’d consider coming on to their latest production as scripter, actor/dancer and to even perform some of those songs i’d helped to lyricise. i of course said yes and my life has been made much richer thereby.

DAE's Sonic Tales Flyer for NYC '09

sonic tales will debut in seattle in october over the 30th and 31st of october at the moore theater. in april we all fly out to manhattan where the new museum will be hosting us for a residency slash incubation. we’ll be doing some filming out there and probably play some public participation games (guerilla theater? does that still exist?); the new museum will be hosting a working production of whatever ideas we’ve generated and refined on the 16th and 17th of april. more details on that as they come.

that’s enough for now. if anyone has any ideas for promoting our work while in nyc please feel free to contact me at artofmulata ATsign gmailDOTcom. sorry for the dopey obfuscator. you can also go to the contact link at the top right of the page.

here are some far too dark photos of the dae recording some tracks at inphase productions here in seattle. i’m not in the pics as i was shooting them. make of them what you will.

pol is artofmulata


Degenerate Art Ensemble 2009 Recording Sonic Tales

while you were out…

hi.

i’d like to present to you a short letter i found from my past that i believe neatly sums up my feelings about most everything that has ever happened on the earth. perhaps even before that, too. and thus after. perhaps so far after that heat death is forgotten. don’t know about heat death? i refuse to provide a link to help with that one. but here is this little letter. it contains a philosophy and a telos and an ethics and even some fissionable yellow cake. please enjoy. and thank you for reading. soon i will post about my new queer-friendly film exploits. ciao!

“so how are things out there? it’s been pretty quiet around here. lars is painting all the time and i’m just asleep about 18 to 27 hours a day.

i went to fallujah last week and blew some shit up, took out some allied forces. it was cool, but i think i caught a cold out there. it gets pretty cold at night in the desert. i also hurt my ankle again changing a light bulb for the imam. he is old and doesn’t like to stand on chairs. obviously you see where this is going. some acolytes rushed into the room wanting a clarification on some minor point of shiira and knocked me off the chair.

bombs gone wild

in spite of my limp i think i might go to israel next week. they really want some help over there taking out that wall. i might just go scope it out instead of doing the old boom boom. my ankle, you know? it’s hard to escape the scene when you are on meds.

did you hear that my sister’s old college debate team boyfriend, Assad, is being implicated in the UN’s inquiry into the death of some guy from like Lebanon? i mean i remember that he wasn’t always the nicest guy and that’s why my sister dumped him, but an assassin? these german prosecutors really like to make everything ought to be so much worse than it ever actually turns out to be. remember that hostage crisis in 72 at the munich olympics? “hostage crisis.” hardly anybody killed and they got to keep the airplane and the games continued. they act as if it’s some big deal when some kids get pissed and then go do some crazy stuff. kids are kids all over the world. i don’t see them hiring steven spielberg to make a movie about their baader-meinhoff gang or that woody allen. he’s a disgusting old perv.

lars and i cleaned your room. i accidentally spilled a lot of powdered plastique in it the other day when these federal agents showed up looking for your brother. i told them he was at the track or maybe in new orleans or florida doing refugee assistance work. i had just enough time to kick the fertilizer barrels thru your door as that traitor cortez walked them into our house. he claimed he met them at the cha cha lounge. i don’t know. those women appeared to be nice girls at first and one of them was a very good kisser. but as soon she got my pants down out came the badge.

conflict market

i thought it was some kind of game at first. you know how canny those white women can be! but she was the real thing and now she has pictures of me and lars and jeff and cortez all doing the pyramid with uwajimaya bags on our heads. i think lars liked it as he dribbled a milky white substance for about an hour after they left with their insurance policy. well, they did apply a car battery’s worth of electricity to his penis. but i really do think that he liked it.

okay. i have to go now. a shower and a small trim to my beard so that i can be presentable at work. we might be hiring some more former mujaheddin for the barrista positions. the french and italian secret service really do a great job of teaching those guys how to pull a really tight shot.

pol akbar-rosenthal”

hard lady

Best (to) Face Forward

I’m trying to hold a formidable countenance in the face of a blow from a completely unexpected corner.

earlier today my studio was broken into.
the thieves were bold; they absconded in broad daylight with my last half year of work.
on a crowded street and no one saw them.

i was at work at my new job in the pike place market.
it was kind of sad to be at work while pride was happening in the streets above me,
but i saw it as an opportunity to continue strategising my further entry into the art world.

the phone rang a little after 1 and it was my old cohort, ___.

pol, j just got to the studio and  he’s freaking out.
someone’s broken into the space and all his art supplies are gone.
the violated space

oh no. oh no. this can’t be real.
i was convinced that it had to be a mistake.
but it wasn’t. it isn’t.
on the phone with my fellow studio dwellers i had someone survey my space for my laptop.
gone.

i didn’t feel sick. i felt relieved.
i had backed up everything only days ago to an external harddrive.
i could lose one box secure in the knowledge that another would save me.

the computer is just a palette knife.
i didn’t want to lose the painting.
i consoled myself thinking of how smart i was to have backed up all my new photo essays and videos, my latest writings.
i’d lost a lot of digital media in the past and i had bought the drive to specifically avoid that scenario ever again. i even kept the drive in an obscure location away from the laptop to prevent someone from grabbing them both.

i couldn’t guess that my own personal thieves would be so meticulous as to destroy my rooms in their search for valuable cargo.

arriving at the space, i went straight to recover the drive.
i’d take it to a friend’s to leave for safe keeping until we could further secure the place.
but i opened the door to my rooms and realized that wasn’t going to happen.
the motherfuckers had tossed my things every which way.
my violated space 2

my books were dumped on the floor. except for my noboyushi araki volumes; they were gone.
favorite sweat shirt: gone.
two laptops: gone.
new audio inbox for making digital noise: gone.

but the only thing that mattered was that the back up drive should be there.
and you can already see the arc of this tale so you know where this this is going.

today i lost something i can never replace.
two different photo essays on strange objects of everydayness from korea, japan and the states.
4 different sets of nudes i had planned to publish over the next year as a series of handmade books.
my first forays into video art. about 7 near completed pieces.
and a lot of writing. a lot of writing.

i just felt sort of null.
as if a part of me was gone forever.

i got dumped earlier this year by the person who might have been the culmination of every desire i have.
and that nauseous sensation of despair i felt that night is approximately similar to what i am feeling now.
and it makes sense: all my approaches to my own work come from my confrontations with love and sex.
so now i am impotent and heartworn.
and some one has breeched my area.

well, thank god for booze.
i am drinking the first of what might be many beers and soon i will go to a secret convocation of seattle poets to gaze through a telescope at heavenly wonders.
and apparently we will be requested to read a lot of verse of a cosmologically significant nature.

sounds good.
my whole life just dropped into the sky.
i could use a fluid tongue.

perhaps the only way that this can be viewed without risking personal destruction is as a meditation on moving on. not that that is an easy choice. i could just as happily drink myself into oblivion over it. but i think i’ll have to find a more positive approach to survival.

you know, i wish i could i drop some crazy photos into this post that have next to nothing to do with the text, but the lousy creeps also took my camera cable.

ah, pathos. and i am not even angry at the thieves. just hurt. really quite hurt.