Poetry and prison have always been neighbors
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
" Bright Light City Gonna set my Soul on Fire"
Last time I was in vegas I did acid and played roulette... Subsoquently I am always a little apprehensive when people I love travel there. I think of wallace (1) and his remark of it being an empire of self, a monument to solipsism(2) I cant say I worry a whole lot about how these loved ones actions will effect me as I can say I genuinely worry about what happens to those loved ones.Today, I look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. I try to be careful about this bussiness of entertainment because I feel as though I have lost so very much by not doing so, Theres nothing in that city for me anymore this saddens me in one way and makes me happy in another. on one hand I feel as though it is the last honest place in America, The best thing about Las Vegas is that no one pretends to be responsible for your behavior like they do in the rest of the country. There's no meddling self-righteous liberals or right-wing Christian demagogues telling you that you can't do something fun with your own time and money. If you can afford it, it's yours. On the other hand I can remember the utter despair, the sadness that my quest for entertainment has brought me, On the edge of the desert looking back at the oasis of the city crying by myself because of the toll that all my actions had taken on my psyche, the cost they exacted on my sole. Im a firm believer that I am either moving towards something or Away from it and that thing, that whole hole inside of me that one we all feel, the one thats there with all of us is always a little bit wider apon my departure from that city and as the desert wind blows through my hair I realize I have missed another opportunity to be the person I want to be and another day has gone by and I have missed another perfectly good opportunity to change my clothes... I am kept up at night recently by vegas and reminded by those still willing to tangle with that city that she will take all that we will give."Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self."
1)
As you know if you’ve seen Casino, Showgirls, Bugsy, etc., there are really three Las Vegases. Binion’s, where the World Series of Poker is always played, exemplifies the “Old Vegas,” centered around Fremont Street. Las Vegas’s future is even now under late-stage construction at the very end of the Strip, on the outskirts of town (where US malls always go up); it’s to be a bunch of theme-parkish, more “family-oriented” venues of the kind that De Niro describes so plangently at the end of Casino.
But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. Vegas Populi: the opulent, intricate, garish, ecstatically decadent hotels, cathedra to gambling, partying, and live entertainment of the most microphone- swinging sort. The Sands. The Sahara. The Stardust. MGM Grand, Maxim. All within a small radius. Yearly utility expenditures on neon well into seven figures. Harrah’s, Casino Royale (with its big 24-hour Denny’s attached), Flamingo Hilton, Imperial Palace. The Mirage, with its huge laddered waterfall always lit up. Circus Circus. Treasure Island, with its intricate facade of decks and rigging and mizzens and vang. The Luxor, shaped like a ziggurat from Babylon of yore. Barbary Coast, whose sign out front says CASH YOUR PAYCHECK-WIN UP TO $25,000. These hotels are the Vegas we know. The land of Lola and Wayne. Of Siegfried and Roy, Copperfield. Showgirls in towering headdress. Sinatra’s sandbox. Most of them built in the ’50s and ’60s, the era of mob chic and entertainment-cum-industry. Half-hour lines for taxis. Smoking not just allowed but encouraged. Toupees and convention nametags and women in furs of all hue. A museum that features the World’s Biggest Coke Bottle. The Harley-Davidson Cafe, with its tympanum of huge protruding hawg; Bally’s H&C, with its row of phallic pillars all electrified and blinking in grand mal sync. A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange — of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.
Nor let us forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kittycorner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self.
As you know if you’ve seen Casino, Showgirls, Bugsy, etc., there are really three Las Vegases. Binion’s, where the World Series of Poker is always played, exemplifies the “Old Vegas,” centered around Fremont Street. Las Vegas’s future is even now under late-stage construction at the very end of the Strip, on the outskirts of town (where US malls always go up); it’s to be a bunch of theme-parkish, more “family-oriented” venues of the kind that De Niro describes so plangently at the end of Casino.
But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. Vegas Populi: the opulent, intricate, garish, ecstatically decadent hotels, cathedra to gambling, partying, and live entertainment of the most microphone- swinging sort. The Sands. The Sahara. The Stardust. MGM Grand, Maxim. All within a small radius. Yearly utility expenditures on neon well into seven figures. Harrah’s, Casino Royale (with its big 24-hour Denny’s attached), Flamingo Hilton, Imperial Palace. The Mirage, with its huge laddered waterfall always lit up. Circus Circus. Treasure Island, with its intricate facade of decks and rigging and mizzens and vang. The Luxor, shaped like a ziggurat from Babylon of yore. Barbary Coast, whose sign out front says CASH YOUR PAYCHECK-WIN UP TO $25,000. These hotels are the Vegas we know. The land of Lola and Wayne. Of Siegfried and Roy, Copperfield. Showgirls in towering headdress. Sinatra’s sandbox. Most of them built in the ’50s and ’60s, the era of mob chic and entertainment-cum-ind
As you know if you’ve seen Casino, Showgirls, Bugsy, etc., there are really three Las Vegases. Binion’s, where the World Series of Poker is always played, exemplifies the “Old Vegas,” centered around Fremont Street. Las Vegas’s future is even now under late-stage construction at the very end of the Strip, on the outskirts of town (where US malls always go up); it’s to be a bunch of theme-parkish, more “family-oriented” venues of the kind that De Niro describes so plangently at the end of Casino.
But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. Vegas Populi: the opulent, intricate, garish, ecstatically decadent hotels, cathedra to gambling, partying, and live entertainment of the most microphone- swinging sort. The Sands. The Sahara. The Stardust. MGM Grand, Maxim. All within a small radius. Yearly utility expenditures on neon well into seven figures. Harrah’s, Casino Royale (with its big 24-hour Denny’s attached), Flamingo Hilton, Imperial Palace. The Mirage, with its huge laddered waterfall always lit up. Circus Circus. Treasure Island, with its intricate facade of decks and rigging and mizzens and vang. The Luxor, shaped like a ziggurat from Babylon of yore. Barbary Coast, whose sign out front says CASH YOUR PAYCHECK-WIN UP TO $25,000. These hotels are the Vegas we know. The land of Lola and Wayne. Of Siegfried and Roy, Copperfield. Showgirls in towering headdress. Sinatra’s sandbox. Most of them built in the ’50s and ’60s, the era of mob chic and entertainment-cum-industry. Half-hour lines for taxis. Smoking not just allowed but encouraged. Toupees and convention nametags and women in furs of all hue. A museum that features the World’s Biggest Coke Bottle. The Harley-Davidson Cafe, with its tympanum of huge protruding hawg; Bally’s H&C, with its row of phallic pillars all electrified and blinking in grand mal sync. A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange — of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.
Nor let us forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kittycorner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self.ustry. Half-hour lines for taxis. Smoking not just allowed but encouraged. Toupees and convention nametags and women in furs of all hue. A museum that features the World’s Biggest Coke Bottle. The Harley-Davidson Cafe, with its tympanum of huge protruding hawg; Bally’s H&C, with its row of phallic pillars all electrified and blinking in grand mal sync. A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange — of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.
Nor let us forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kittycorner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self.
2)
noun
1.
Philosophy . the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.
2.
extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.
what fire stops burning when you feed it
Mike;
It was good to hear what you had to say concerning art and fame and the vapid and often times contridictory nature of the two and the way they inter relate, and what Kind of toll this can exact on the thinking artist. Really it reminded me of the conversation between Lyle and Lamont chu1)through a flux of circumstances too tortuous to even take notes on I have been realizing similar thingss about my own quest out here. They say crabbers are chasers but more and more I have come to see us as runners, I came up to, among other things , get some relief from Irony, from hip cynical irony and I thought I had found it because never have my witty observations about the ironic fallen on such deaf ears, they dont understand Irony. BUt more on that later
What you have touched on is something central I have been dealing with ( with some help from a woman ...smiley face), the illusion of acomplishment and this has brought up a very important question a vital question that is rarely asked. Does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant to most people, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I wouldnt sleep better at night selling one than the other.Many games use well-designed rewards to convince players that they’ve accomplished something important, even when they’ve only completed a trivial task... Art is no different most artists with their lists of approvals are little more than cunts, they got no heart and if they did they would be to far out to ever get recognition, im sure some people will look at my words and say they are filled with hate and jealousey for others but I assure you they are born out of love for real Art.Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent.
a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful---what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?---and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it, what a bunch of shit, whether its artist lawyers bartenders or crabbers.We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd. we all suffer from this idea that we are unique somehow... im not, im not unique...im just some fucking guy
This bussiness of wanting and achieving and getting it kills me. The brass ring that we all chase, the brass rings biggest lie is that it can sade the infant part of me that indescriminently and constantly wants. Mike how else do u explain the midlife crisis, this word is so unequivically American, its like an american right of passage that no one talks about and no one is excited about. It happens because once people get the career, the wife the kids the house, once they have paid off the mortgage, bought the car they always wanted, made employee of the month they feel that that feeling of wanting, of aloneness should go away and it doesnt and they call that the midlife crisis, We had ours in our twenties ( which does not augre well for our longevity) but that term points to a very american kind of lonelieness.There is a natural order. The way things are meant to be. An order that says that the good guys always win. That you die when it's your time, or you have it coming. That the ending is always happy, if only for someone else. Now at some point it became clear to us that our path had been chosen and we had nothing to offer the world. Our options narrowing down to petty crime or minimum wage. So, we stepped off the path, and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us. Once off the path you do what you can to eat and to keep moving. You don't blow your ghost of a chance with nickel and dime. No possessions, no comforts. Need is the ultimate monkey. A pint of your blood can fetch you fifty bucks. A shot of cum, three grand. You keep your life simple and you can literally self sustain... are you immesnsly impressed?
Mike-What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
your one in two million and sorely missed-Harvey
1)‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ … ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they?’ … ‘Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’
It was good to hear what you had to say concerning art and fame and the vapid and often times contridictory nature of the two and the way they inter relate, and what Kind of toll this can exact on the thinking artist. Really it reminded me of the conversation between Lyle and Lamont chu1)through a flux of circumstances too tortuous to even take notes on I have been realizing similar thingss about my own quest out here. They say crabbers are chasers but more and more I have come to see us as runners, I came up to, among other things , get some relief from Irony, from hip cynical irony and I thought I had found it because never have my witty observations about the ironic fallen on such deaf ears, they dont understand Irony. BUt more on that later
What you have touched on is something central I have been dealing with ( with some help from a woman ...smiley face), the illusion of acomplishment and this has brought up a very important question a vital question that is rarely asked. Does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant to most people, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I wouldnt sleep better at night selling one than the other.Many games use well-designed rewards to convince players that they’ve accomplished something important, even when they’ve only completed a trivial task... Art is no different most artists with their lists of approvals are little more than cunts, they got no heart and if they did they would be to far out to ever get recognition, im sure some people will look at my words and say they are filled with hate and jealousey for others but I assure you they are born out of love for real Art.Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent.
a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful---what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?---and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it, what a bunch of shit, whether its artist lawyers bartenders or crabbers.We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd. we all suffer from this idea that we are unique somehow... im not, im not unique...im just some fucking guy
This bussiness of wanting and achieving and getting it kills me. The brass ring that we all chase, the brass rings biggest lie is that it can sade the infant part of me that indescriminently and constantly wants. Mike how else do u explain the midlife crisis, this word is so unequivically American, its like an american right of passage that no one talks about and no one is excited about. It happens because once people get the career, the wife the kids the house, once they have paid off the mortgage, bought the car they always wanted, made employee of the month they feel that that feeling of wanting, of aloneness should go away and it doesnt and they call that the midlife crisis, We had ours in our twenties ( which does not augre well for our longevity) but that term points to a very american kind of lonelieness.There is a natural order. The way things are meant to be. An order that says that the good guys always win. That you die when it's your time, or you have it coming. That the ending is always happy, if only for someone else. Now at some point it became clear to us that our path had been chosen and we had nothing to offer the world. Our options narrowing down to petty crime or minimum wage. So, we stepped off the path, and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us. Once off the path you do what you can to eat and to keep moving. You don't blow your ghost of a chance with nickel and dime. No possessions, no comforts. Need is the ultimate monkey. A pint of your blood can fetch you fifty bucks. A shot of cum, three grand. You keep your life simple and you can literally self sustain... are you immesnsly impressed?
Mike-What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
your one in two million and sorely missed-Harvey
1)‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ … ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they?’ … ‘Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’
Monday, June 18, 2012
My view from the office
It was one of those fine little love stories that can make you smile in your sleep at night
THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. God bless those pots those shots those 30,000 dollar checks
“It never got weird enough for me.”
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. Hence the crabbing I mean All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name. I mean freedom is something that dies unless it's used or maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy alcoholic hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll. The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase. …Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten …On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.” I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me
Strange memories on this nervous night in Dutch Harbor. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. Seattle in early 2000’s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Hill half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 64 impala across the fremont bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing 10 deep shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the alaskan way viaduct at the lights of seattle, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the lake, then up the Hill or down madison to 23rd and cherry. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in dutch Harbor and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Opilios over
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