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Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled
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| Warning! |
[27 Jun 2006|12:46pm] |
Dangerous times are ahead in the American nation. The government is working day & night to conceal all of its activities. They are criticizing the freedom of the press, as though they had that prerogative.
In headlines all government services are failing, all aid, all obligations. People will only suffer for putting that monkey in the Oval Office. It will be years before that land is productive & at peace. They will be years of suffering, of hardship, of labor, of poverty & hunger. They will be years of war. I doubt if the nation will recover. The world will emerge with a new face, that is for certain.
I don't know if there is anything that we can do. I only know that I have put my faith in nature, in our roots, in the earth, in our atavistic instinct, in our primeval urges. I have kept in mind the purest needs of the human race, they are water, air, food, clothing, shelter, fuel, they are all provided to us by the earth. At present our means for obtaining them rapes the earth. Presently, there will be nothing left. We must remember how sacred the earth is that is provides for all these needs. We must find means of production that are in harmony with the earth.
We have very few years left to change our ways before we are swimming in a bath of our own blood, filthy oil & more poluted water than we can manage, as the oceans swell with the dripping & melting of the poles.
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| el meyor bien |
[13 Jun 2006|02:58pm] |
| [ |
music |
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Fela Ransome-Kuti & The Africa 70:Confusion / Gentleman |
] |
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
~Calderon
Life is a dream & dreams are dreams.
I live in a house where everyone comes to party. I am breathing & dreaming. Out past the fields, north of the city. People stay for days, too exhausted at dawn to move, they crawl into sleep. They'll have tea or Turkish coffee in the morning when I light the first bowl.
I'm smoking & drinking. I've always been a wino. The party seems never to end. It begins again. I am reading & writing. When I can write, I am happy. It is nearly summer. The beach is beautiful. The ocean is delicious in the heat of the day. Late in the night, when dancing has pulled the sweat from our beer flooded bodies, the Mediterrenean is sweet beneath the white moon.
There are few seconds to spare in this single instant our lives span across; few moments in the instant during which all of eternity must occur. I've stopped now to breathe, to take each breath with the greatest of gratitude & the purest pleasure & passion. I am simply satisfied to know I had a chance to live this life.
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| Finer moments in the dream called life: |
[09 May 2006|03:57pm] |
| [ |
music |
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The Grateful Dead:Swing Auditorium 2.26.77 Set II |
] |
I think I broke my toe drunkenly wandering through the strip-club barefoot last night.
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| weddings are fun |
[06 Apr 2006|10:09am] |
| [ |
music |
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Phish:Round Room |
] |
*notes to self:
*wear short vail since ceremony requires drinking of wine at least twice
*wear comfortable shoes
*do not wear anything that will be complicated to go to the bathroom in
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| an Indian Princess |
[02 Apr 2006|11:08pm] |
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says – he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me.Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
She wears red moccasins and two braids down her back. Her house is in a walled garden, out in the fields. In the afternoons she wanders down the road where the pavement breaks up into gravel. She dances with the setting sun, as she always has. They call her Paccallattabol.
She knows where the road twists into the orange grove. She walks between the fruitless trees. They are blossoming now with the spring rains. The scent of the flowers is powerful and sweet. The fields go on past the trees, across the dirt roads muddy from the torrents of rain that poured all night. The cypress trees splash with the purple clouds in puddles of pink gold that sing from dips in the roads. The grass and flowers in the fields grow taller than her.
A bird catches her eye as it soars on the wind. She wanders between a row of cypress trees along the road into a field. The setting sun crowns her braided head with streams of light. Standing there among the golden rays upon the fields she is immortal. She wears at once the radiance of youth and the wrinkles of old age. She is tiny, shrivelled, with the wisdom and silence of her many years, ready to pass from this world into the next. She is a child in the passionate throws of her first love. The smell of the damp earth lingers with the scent of flowers. He first kissed her at this hour, sunset.
She finds her way through the fields before she becomes lost in the dark. She returns to her house behind the garden wall. Tonight the rooms are empty and silent. Her head remains crowned in golden rays, stuck in the clouds.
Porque el campo es el edén
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| For My Sake the World Was Created |
[20 Mar 2006|03:31pm] |
| [ |
music |
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Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra:Who Is This America? |
] |
בשבילי נברא העולם
When I awoke Wednesday morning I knew there was something wrong. I had a feeling in my gut. I turned to Joey, who was beside me. "Something isn't right," I told her. We ate breakfast in bed. We went out into this fantastic country to attend to our lives.
I started making phone calls, even woke my brother up at the crack of dawn. "I just wanted to hear your voice," I told him. "Go back to sleep." When I spoke to him again, yesterday, he needed no explanation. He is flesh of my own and tears of my tears and the blood in my veins; we are as inseparable as the Ying and the Yang. He knew I had dreamt some vision of death.
My love knew too, that I was worried, he reached me as best he could. When we spoke later, he told me that someone we knew had passed Wednesday night. "He ODed, didn't he?" I asked, from the shouting echoing halls of the festive Friday afternoon mall. Our bar darkened eyes hidden behind sunglasses, Joey and I walked through the hall, along the tables of produce and food, tasting and testing as we went.
I spoke to my love again as he was driving along the New York Southern State Parkway last night. I could picture the road before my closed eyes as he drove, as though I were there in the car next to him, as though I myself were driving. "His sister couldn't read her speech," he told me of the funereal proceedings, "she had to have someone read it for her while she stood there." I could not imagine standing in her place, I could not imagine… I hope I die before they put my brother in the ground, I don't think I could bare it.
We spoke of happier things then, of rolling on the ground, biting & licking & kissing as we've done since childhood. It was after two in the morning here in the Promised Land. I turned over in my bed, in this house out past the fields where I live. "Call me when you get home," I said and he did. I sat up in my sleep and sang to him for a moment. A song of praise, of ascents, it meant, "Hallell'u-Ya! Praise be the Omnipresent Spirit!"
In the morning I thought of rock n' roll, of art & revolution. I went looking for other pieces of my soul & mind which I have planted in hidden hearts. I let him turn thoughts in my head about the craddle of life & civilization between the ancient gushing rivers that flow forth from God's great Paradise, the Tigris & the Euphrates. Have you noticed that that same craddle has become a black hole of death?
I could go on about death, but there is nothing more natural. It is, after all, the other face of the coin, the shining reflection of life in the mirror of truth. They are brothers, Ying inseparable from Yang. I opened up the news, but it tore at my heart & brought tears from the two black wells that I hide behind their Holly Golightly mask.
I should mention the wars that I found in the news. They seem to be tearing the world apart, when you read the news you get the sense that the end is quite near. I know for sure that this is no different than any other year of history. The world is forever on the brink of destruction. This is entirely of our own accord we must understand. We (i.e. Man) are always about to destroy what was given to us to complete.
We should say, as the Mishnah teaches us, "Bishvil'li nivrai ha'olam – For my sake [only] the world was created." We might respect it more if we thought of it that way. We might respect ourselves more. We might have fewer visions of violent & unnecessary death.
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| Six Ways to Save the World |
[14 Feb 2006|06:33pm] |
Dear faithful readers,
Six (6) easy ways to save the world. All you have to do is click: easy & free. Each time one of these six sites is visited the sponsors and advertisers of the site donate to the cause. All it takes is a two clicks: the link in this page & the brightly colored box in the middle of the page that loads.
The Hunger Site: feed the hungry.
The Literacy Site: the gift of reading by giving books.
The Rainforest Site: save the rainforest.
The Breast Cancer Site: save a woman's life, by giving a mammogram.
The Child Health Site: give sight, rehydrate, prevent AIDS.
The Animal Rescue Site: feed an animal.
The best way to help is to keep clicking and get others to click. Repost in your journals, send out a mass email, or bookmark one (or all) of the sites in your web browser and visit every day.
Thank you for caring, thank you for saving.
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| beat |
[13 Feb 2006|03:06am] |
Beat with exhaustion, knowing when the time comes to return to sleep this torturous withdrawal insomnia will beat me over the head again until it cannot be helped but to curse and damn any hallucination or conjecture that projects itself to play across the four walls of the bedroom, or anything that dares to enter them, from the omnipresent, magnetic force of omnipotence down to the buzzing, whizzing, haunting humming of a tiny, ineffectual, doomed mosquito.
Beat with exhaustion seeking out the furtive, underworld etymology of this word, the forgotten, subterranean histories of the beat generation that is obsessing, possessing these contemplative, cognitive cerebrations.
Beat by the agitated fists of addiction, sweating the fetid sweat of bong water, the last extended binge. Excessive consumption of the drug we would rather pretend is not a drug after all but a natural ancient remedy for anxious, fretful, strenuous wakefulness and dull, dingy, disappointing realities. Crystal covered flowers burning dank, skank, skunk smoke that relaxes the nerves & tongue, disolves the fetters of soul & spirit and rots or expands the mind.
If this were some other era, a different time, it might have been possible to do something radical like shave my head in the middle of the night, sick with a combination of opiates and whisky, to be delivered peacefully to an asylum of white walls and white coats. With a little more scheming a typewriter might arrive to liberate the madness trapped inside shaven skull and peacefully tap tap tap novels of the imagined insanity and other romances or fantasies dreamt in the sterile rooms, between bleached hospital sheets.
Beat, in this first century, by my own fiending nature; by my own binges & excesses; by my own tender, precious addictions; by my periodic & temporary abstentions; by my desperate, destructive desire to achieve, in the end, some fantastic psychedelic and redemptive delirious vision; by my irrational ardour to realize the top of the mountain; by my own delusion that in the cleft of rock, surrounded like Moses by thunder and lightening, the divine hand will cover my eyes until its invisible form passes, and reveal its back as proof of its existence; by my own disbelief. Beat.
They were a generation beat by the accute awareness that there's only a fine, delicate, hairsbreadth between life and death. Beat with the idea that some button somewhere might destroy all & everything. Beat with hopelessness and nihilism. They shrugged off these chains of tradition and sought for the spiritual, the intangible, the meaning and value. They drove back and forth across America, hitchhiking, jumping boxcars & freight trains, always searching. They went to Mexico and Tibet and Tangier looking for the mystical, the holy. Vomiting until peyote gave them visions of the vibrant, radiant cherubs, seraphim & heavenly edens. Bennies, coffee and dipsomania in worlds of swimming bebop, until the angelic, celestial, supreme, sanctified, sacred illuminated the teahead delirium.
Beat from sleepiness & sleeplessness. Shivering cold damp night air, sweating all the while through. Beat from addiction & withdrawal, late night insomnia searching through links of cyberspace to discover the meaning of all these words. Until the hour turns over again, reminding how close the dawn is. On the pillow the same words turn cartwheels & somersaults & other acrobatic, gypsy clown, circus, carnival feats that scare sleep from sliding in through the shutters on the early breeze that blows its heralding trumpet for the dawn.
They landed in California where with burly, bearded, branded motorcyclists, lysergic acid diethylamide & astronaut tang or kool aid, colored waving, quivering light shows, tea (again appears that belovéd bud) and the abrassive, explosive, eruptions of rock n' roll, converged with be-in, sit-in, hipsters of the coast. Burning draft cards, flags and undergarments in fantastic luminary bonfires of rebellion. Only to later return to New York to close the thruway & camp out as a city of half a million naked hobos & outlaws in a "sea of mud."
Beat by the thought that the freedom they sought was all for naught. For finally all were assimilated again into the massive, monolith, mediocrity of comfortable, consuming, capitalism. Finally was found the god they had been seeking in the singing sounds of cash registers ringing and the golden, glittering, glorious, respectablity of money in the bank.
Beat because the cherished, redemption of earth was reviled to embrace the constructs of climate controlled cubicles with decaf-mocha-frappo-green tea-lactaid-lattes on the side. Beat because the promise of rock n' roll in the orange groves of peaceful paradise was whitewashed, brainwashed away, only to be replaced by ideals of impossible, doomed, dark, disgusting wars of violence, foundationally flawed fundamentalism and a cold, cringing, corrosive obsession with death.
Beat.
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| …redeemed by money? |
[12 Feb 2006|02:35am] |
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music |
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Miles Davis: Birth of The Cool; Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane |
] |
In my recent studies and research (what exactly it is I am researching I cannot say), I stumbled across an Op-Ed in the New York Times that was written by Michael Blumenthal. I believe he still writes Op-Eds for the Times, but this one was written back in October of 1994 (when I was nine years old). He discusses the transfer of Allen Ginsberg's papers from his alma mater, Columbia University to Stanford University. Apparently the deal with Stanford sang a million smacking bucks to Ginsberg, the last pillar of bohemian beatnik poverty. None of that concerns me. It was Blumenthal's last sentence that soured the marrow of my bones and stirred all the fuzz to stand up on the nape of my neck. "It was he, after all, who saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness – and redeemed by money." Does that effect your stomach the way it turns mine?
Blumenthal is referring to Ginsberg's (in)famous poem Howl of course. A poem I met some time ago, though I've no recollection of that first encounter, only the vague watery memory of holding the book above my face as I lay on my back. We have become good friends, the poem and I. I've found it useful to have such companions during my research. I don't doubt that Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. He was a lunatic himself, his mother too suffered from mental illness and both were hospitalized. Ginsberg can rest easy now, I believe him.
It's that last part that disturbs me "redeemed by money." Do you believe it? I cannot. I am not capable of believing that money redeemed anyone.
I saw the best souls of my generation consumed by money, greedy, grubbing materialism blaring through the streets…
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| 228th Chorus Mexico City Blues, by Jack Kerouac |
[21 Jan 2006|08:07pm] |
I have recently been spellcast by the words of this famous Beatnik and I wanted to share them with all of you. Praised be man, he is existing in milk
and living in lillies –
And his violin music takes place in milk
and creamy emptiness –
Praised be the unfolded inside petal
flesh of tend'rest thought –
(petrels on the follying
wave-valleys idly
sing themselves asleep) –
Praised be delusion, the ripple –
Praised the Holy Ocean of Eternity –
Praised be I, writing, dead already &
dead again –
Dipped in ancid inkl
the flamd
of T i m
the Anglo Oglo Saxon Maneuvers
Of Old Poet-O's –
Praised be wood, it is milk –
Praised be Honey at the Source –
Praised be the embrace of soft sleep
– the valor of angels in valleys
of hell on earth below –
Praised be the Non ending –
Praised be the lights of earth-man –
Praised be the watchers –
Praised be my fellow man
For dwelling in milk
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| We Might Have Been Beats |
[18 Jan 2006|09:31am] |
I was telling you about Kaddish, by the way,
Probably explaining about the prayer, and his mom, and
Death, god perhaps. Where did he take the train from I wonder.
There's no train from the Lower East Side you gotta walk across town, I know.
We've done it, in the bitter cold with snow blowing
In our faces, squeezed up close to you
As we walked.
In my madness there was nothing to keep me awake
But the rhythm of my feet on the pavement
Next to yours.
How many broken bloody Brooklyn streets we walked that way,
Wandering west where water weathers worn docks
in the mouth of Hudson,
Beneath that bold, brave bridge
Drunk, descending from Water Street.
We'd walk through the twisted tunnels back at Fulton, head north
I'm sorry we never went to Coney Island.
I could rant rosy red romantic on the
Many lights of a long lost history
We could have taken photographs and footage barefoot on the beach
I was waiting for spring, you couldn't wait that long.
We might have gone at dawn, looking for
Circus tents, or inspiration, desolation or parachuttes
future & past in the same moment.
I have visions of Woody Allen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all at once,
A Ferris Wheel ride we never took, but that was uptown.
The Gaslight's not there anymore, you know.
I never noticed it anyway,
Not in my wanderings on that street in search of flavored
Hookah tobacco or a gold ring for my nose.
Not on my trips to Porto Rico on Bleeker
To pick up coffee for my roommate.
Only the jazz bars are left
Now, in this late century, this afterthought
They are cold graves.
Lost is the Emerson
That feeling of Thoreau and nature
The divinity of the land, I felt that once
At Harvard
When I nearly fainted away
From the drugs and the heat of the crowded basement rooms
Lost is the poetry, the efforts of the mind
Its tender curiosity that drags young men from their homes
The sense in youth that there remains something to be conquered
Something to be gained by valiant effort.
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| Well, you must tell me, baby how your head feels under something like that. |
[17 Jan 2006|06:49pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
Beat (…Poetry) |
] |
I am submerging myself in Rock n Roll.
Rock n Roll to me
is the ultimate, it's the final peak of America, it is the complete orgasm
of civil rights and intergration. In retrospect.
At the time folk music thought it was a sell out.
Bob Dylan is the ultimate
rock star you know.
I'm drowning myself in his music.
I'm trying to understand the peak
of American civilization. There isn't enough empathy
for a folk movement someone told me yesterday while he rolled a joint on my desk.
I made him coffee. The rain stopped and he went home.
I'm trying to write stories. I want to make movies.
I don't know how.
I want to make silent movies; I have so much to say.
They say sometimes lightening just strikes
and no one knows why. Hunter S said that about San Francisco,
California in the mid to late sixties.
Allen Ginsberg said he took the train down to Greenwich Village
in nineteen forty eight with a bandana around his neck.
He was looking for poets. But there had been poets.
MacDougal Street was the center
of the art world. There was theatre & music, vaudville, poetry & art
in each corner
& on the sidewalks.
I lived on University Place two blocks over and I never felt that.
Not even in Brooklyn
where the scene is now – supposedly. I doubt I could feel it in La Honda or San Francisco either. Rock n Roll is dead. Long live Rock n Roll.
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| Holy Land</em |
[15 Jan 2006|04:45am] |
| [ |
music |
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John Butler Trio:JBT |
] |
The wonders of this land
I understand, not
but how they have
released me
to be
free.
How they have
inspired
me.
With the wet winter winds
that blow east
sweet sea scents.
To learn
to explore
my past
my future
history
the stars to discover at once
the present
Because the present
is part of a river
which I cannot
measure.
This land has opened
my eyes
to everything hidden
within & without.
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| Happy XMas (War Is Over) |
[25 Dec 2005|09:01pm] |
|
•I'm standing on 46th Street with Times Square just beyond me and I can see, as I light my cigarette, a big white billboard among a million other billboards. It says in simple, big, black letters, "WAR IS OVER" and then underneath in smaller letters "IF YOU WANT IT." That was a long time ago, before the beginning of the War in Iraq. It was when Afghanistan was still a concern of the United States Army and psyche. Even then I considered us a nation at war. Daniel took my hand, put it in his pocket, pulling me closer to him and we rushed off to Grand Central Station. We kissed goodbye on the platform and I went off to smoke cigarettes in the crowded New York streets. It was a bitter cold night, our breaths were as thick as smoke. War is over,
If you want it I am sitting alone in my apartment. My feet are cold. I turn on the heater. I am eating rice and drinking tea. I am researching the American Dream, as usual. I have taken over for Hunter S. The American Dream will be my life thesis, if such a thing could exist. Outside it has been raining for days, the wind blows something awful. The palm trees are battered by the wind and the rain. It is cold here. I pour another cup of tea and smoke. War is over,
If you want it †•I ran into the room, on little feet, "Can I? Can I? Can I?" I stand on tip toes and put the baby Jesus in the creche. My brother and I are ready to open the gifts from Santa. My father makes cappuccinos and Irish oatmeal.War is over,
If you want it •I was a senior in high school when the war in Iraq began. It seems to me like a long time ago. I remember watching footage almost every night. I mentioned it often in my notebooks at the time. It's waged on, as wars do, becoming more and more pathetic, more complicated, the enemies hidden, the purpose more twisted daily, the money going out, people dying and you can be sure that the truth was, as always, the first victim. Heavy thoughts. War is over,
If you want it I'll see my brother tomorrow, for the first time in over three months. It'll be even better than Christmas. War is over,
If you want it †•"So this is Christmas," he says. I imagine snow, and a fire in the fire place, and chocolate and liquor and champagne. Christmas. Cookies. And gingerbread. And lights. And sweaters. And reindeer. And love. And peace? "A very merry Christmas," they sing. "And a happy New Year, Let's hope it's a good one, Without any fear."War is over,
If you want it December is a quiet month in the Holy Land. We do not celebrate now, we hibernate. We shut the doors and windows and put on a sweater. Not really. We go out anyway, running from building to awning, dodging raindrops. We put on hats and boots and brave the cold. We smoke a joint, pop in Doggystyle, get on the freeway and cruise a couple miles down the coast to Tel Aviv. I had no idea it was Christmas until yesterday when I wrote the date in my notebook. I should be doing homework for tomorrow. I frequently forget that I live in a country torn by war. War is over,
If you want it
(Happy Christmas from GF)
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