stumbled across this photo recently.

it’s from the smoke farm show that the implied violence kids were kind enough to have me in.
looks a real winning kind of guy up there on the old green, no?

this is just a distraction from what’s posted below.
seems like a good idea to keep a low profile on the normal madness that i litter this thing with now that grant gifting orgs may well be climbing all over me soon. i’m not going to take anything down; i’m not ashamed of my work. it’s too far into the game for artists to be distracted by petty notions like shame and embarrassment.

if you’re going to do it you might as well enjoy it and be proud.
it’s not as if we can take anything back.
and why would anyone want to.

if anything the persecutor should learn to forgive, embrace and relax.
it’s probably of the finest causes for the rampaging amount of boredom that swathes this city.
hell, i just spent my friday night curled up with a good history book reading about how jesus was probably a mystery school initiate and john the baptist was the true hero of the gospels. modern day gnostics. i love ’em.

yesterday, in lieu of sleeping, i practiced my patanajali exercises. you know the ones. you start off listening to your heartbeat, but inside your chest cavity with with a practiced ear. slowly you allow your senses to expand and take in the sound of blood moving through veins and lungs rising and collapsing. eventually, you’re at the threshold of the skin listening to static magnetic hairs sway. then you do the big thing and move out. listen further and further from the body. probably the most fun meditation for a musician out there.

yeah, i skipped a friday to hang out with jesus. but then it did seem like the appropriate thing to do. it was leap day remember? and everyone was trying to come up with cool things to do as commemorative genuflection. at the bank of america where i gathered some pennies from the vault, the very cute teller explained to me that all the ladies there were wearing ties and matching blue sweaters. not my idea of a lot of fun, but who am i to argue with a lack of progress? i wanted them to just give away free money, of course. i asked, too. you never know. it’s the end of the 4 year span; anything can happen. as it was i left a little richer, but only because i’d earned it. where’s that free lunch i ordered a while back?

but what is a person supposed to do? my friends josh and ginger looked at the last thing i slipped in here, ‘sense of being,‘ and proclaimed it boring, beneath me, and chided me further by proclaiming the entire concept of blogs “retarded.” that is a fine and admirable take form a couple of very smart hipsters out in brooklyn. and i listened to them, too. not that i paid any attention. i love the post; i want to do more just like it. and it is hard to take criticism on the deployment of mass media from a guy who used to do pirate radio. god josh, how seventies. how off the london shore. how Voice Of America.

someone else accused me of rampant narcissism. wow. i wasn’t sure what to make of that. i’m still not. i’m an aries though: we don’t respond well to criticism.

look, i’m writing this to put space between the two articles. if you want to see it and that’s why you’re here then by all means scroll down. but i hope you’re of age and not someplace where looking at those photographs will get you terminated. that’s right… you have been warned. and if it does offend you then please go talk to a spiritual advisor. no more strange and viscerally peculiar letters of retribution. i’m saving them. i’m going to make posters of them for the exhibition.

p.s. i don’t know who took this glamor shot, but i would love to give somebody credit.

picture, if you can, a large crowd.
all moving. all talking.
all commerce and combustion.

hands touch. mouths move.
colors everywhere all flying.

the policeman wears a gun. he has a purpose. you don’t know what it is in the moment, but you can feel it in its abstraction.

at night. outside the city.
when the lights are gone.
and we face the rim of the galaxy. or so it would seem.
in the sky. at night.
the great crack, the rift.
proof that we have a location, a place.

crowds speak. quietly sometimes.
but murmurs don’t last.
and if one voice rises, even a little bit, another will do the same.
eventually, the murmur will become a hubub and the hubub deafening.
then it will all fall away again.

tonight at the menares airport of marrakech i will be playing chess. american pop music will be playing over the loudspeakers. being american, every song will be known, every melody recognized. eventually a very strange song will emerge. it will be plaintive and also sad. its melody will be elusive. almost recognizable. tracing just out past me. its rhythms dare me to reveal them. it will be decided that this song, barely audible, is unknowable. its melody and rhythm unbreached. i will stop playing chess long enough to pay my respects to its signatures. in awe i will realize that i have been listening to a female newscaster speaking in arabic.

november 22, 2007 marrakech