July 26, 2009 - Broadway Cafe - Kansas City Missouri

And the political merry-go-round goes round and round. The ones that cause the problems control the solutions. And we call this justice? Remember it was the Robber Barons who were born of the “Long Depression” and the great corporations sprang out of the “Great Depression”. All real solutions arise from the bottom, when we don’t behave as we are expected to. They conducted surveys and they made projections, but they missed by a mile. The forecast was off but with hindsight they have made adjustments and everything is now on track. History is a continuity – sure there are disasters like the Black Death, and the Mongol invasions – but circumstances readjust. And if you are living through it (or not) it may appear to be a calamity but historically it’s just a burp. We have almost finished normalizing Hitler and are quickly forgetting Katrina. Hitler, who’s he? Oh yes, that was before your time!

I’ve been back here in KC too long now. I am finding thick thighs very appealing (so long as they aren’t wearing tight shorts). Now if only I could get interested in woman my own age. But time treats women differently than it does men and it’s not a physical thing but an attitude thing.

Alas, every dollar of what we call waste is what somebody in the [health] industry calls “income”. So anything that makes the system more efficient makes somebody unhappy, and that somebody has a team of lobbyists – Jonathan Chait

The failure of conservatism
         Meaning here – restorative
         Nostalgia not traditional
         Behavior


Is its intolerance of
        The other


It achieves its strength
        In a consensus
        To delimit
              Descent


But it become inflexible
        In its responses

Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician – Sean Wilentz

Bob is on the left telling me

About when a function
       Is truly intergratable
By the way the reason why
I buy Joe an occasional beer
       Is that he provides me
       Frequent rides home
(I know this because Joe
       Complains a lot about this)
It is posed to rain. In fact it has
       Been sprinkling for

       Sometime now

The man on my right nods

       His head as he drinks

       His beer

Jeff comes in and asks if I had

       Seen Joe. He promised
       Me a posthole digger, he said
Not yet, And he said, I’m going
Out on the deck for a smoke

Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not [be] impose[d] upon a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary – Abraham Lincoln

It’s horrid
         When you read
Something you don’t like
         And recognize something
         Of your own


Style in it – you disparage
         Of your creativity
         Can you be that bad too
Time to change don’t you know


It’s just too easy to emulate
          And make a train wreck
          (Too obvious of a metaphor
                  Don’t you think?)
          Of what had merit


But where do I go from here?
And here I am – going down
          This beaten path once more

I want to express my anguish in verses that tell / of my abolished youth of roses and daydreams, / and the bitter deflowering of my life / by a vast sorrow and petty concerns – Ruben Dario

Things happen
         And if it is good
               Take the credit!
And if not
        Pass the blame
        Not like ammunition
                More like a live
                Grenade


Hoard credit, shovel blame
The shit that it (he) is


God said – this is good
But gods create by mere thought
                 For us humans it is more
                       Complicated
                Than that

Percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months: 94 [Harper’s Index]

It is very hard work
Not to do it sequentially


John Cage – “read in whole
        Or in part; any section

        May be skipped
        What remains may be read
        In any order”


And though I generally follow
        Instructions rigorously
        (Being a product of public
                  Education)


I cannot do this – some rules
        Take precedence over other
        And sequenciallity is one of them
        Capitalizing the first word of every
                   Line is something
                   My computer does automatically

Robert Raushenberg - “To whom it may concern
         The White Paintings
         Came first, my silent
         Piece came later”


And rigorously I proceed
         From the beginning until the end
                  Alpha to Omega

Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt – John Cage

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing – Raushenberg


I wept in truth only once. The sun when it disappeared cut off your face. Your head rolled into the grave of the sky and I no longer believed in tomorrow – Rene Char

From The Journal [Volume #1 – 1/09/2004]

Walter wants to make sixty-second spots on why people give their pets the names that they do. He turns to Linda and asks, “How did Bumper got her name?” This got us off onto dumb dog stories. And Linda goes on to tell how she took Bumper with her on her visit to her trailer trash family - all of who were “big” dog owners. They are concerned about Bumper - they worry that she might step on her and smash her - it’s a big joke, this teasing of her little dog. Linda’s brother waves his hand in front of Bumper’s face, “Look” he announces “there’s nothing there (and Linda does admit that Bumper is pretty damn dump).” Her father says, “I think you got the green weenie.” Walter is proud of his interview and says, “If I had been filming this, you would have been my first.”

Giamerette Paresasis’ Rome morphed from a quarter of a millennium into the present, almost intact except for the Tiber Levees. It was amazing given that 85% of ancient Rome had disappeared in the Millennium prior

I went to the Limelight Bookstore for a celebration in honor of the renaming of Theatre Bay Area’s Backstage to the TBA Bulletin. I discussed the concept of a “delicious project” and Irving Goffman with Brad, TBA’s executive director. Then I talked to Becky who was off to the New Langston for the opening of Harrell Fletcher’s “Happiness Follows Her Like a Shadow”. Or was that Shawni who I had talked with – yes, I think it was Shawni . This is my third wine this evening, in addition to the Grippman’s porter that I had earlier at the San Francisco Brewery. I did not make the film at SFMOMA which had been my original destination when I left home.

I am sitting here watching the cattle cars loading up the suits. They are all headed towards the financial district with blank stares on their faces – off to the meat packing plants and then the meat markets.

Yesterday a black taxi driver sauntered into the café wearing high waisted bright yellow pants, a wine red shirt and white tie. Most people would have looked like dorks in such a costume. He looked cool. It was the way he carried himself. A geek would have scuttled like a crab, someone trying to look inconspicuous so as not to draw attention to the fact that they had just pissed in their pants (that would be me). This guy, this cool dude, could never be inconspicuous - he just ambled along like he owned the world. I give him a thumbs up

“Happiness fallows you like a shadow” Walter says. “I can push my shadow ahead of me in a wheelbarrow,” I tell him. Water says the guy in yellow pants was faux cool, not cool. “Cool would have been having that outfit in your closet and wearing blue jeans instead. Cool would have been having bright red suspenders”. I say “Cool is being on the edge of the fashion envelope. Wearing red suspenders with that outfit would have pushed him over the edge. He would have been just another doork”. Walter says “having red suspenders in his closet would have made him cool”. I say “How do you know that he doesn’t.” “We don’t”, Walter replies”. “My point” I tell him “we have to allow that he may have red suspenders in his closet and allow that he is cool.” “No” Walter insists, “Faux cool - because you can never be sure - Only he knows if he really is cool”. “Well”, I say “he appears to know it.” So, I conclude, it’s just a matter of attitude and how you carry it off.

Bad Bad Leona Brown - slinks onto the bus - tired, worn down but not unattractive in a rough hard sort of way. Down coat draped over her shoulders, she slumps down into the seat and is immediately motionless except for an occasional twitch of her foot. She has headphones around her neck and backpack style leather purse in her lap. Is she just tired? Is she ill? She has a straight unbroken nose line and she is wearing dark sunglasses. Can I assign a story to each stranger I encounter?. Why not! At Van Ness and Market she is up and off with a spring ready for the quickly fading dusk of the city.

Then I arrive in the Mission and go to the Cha-Cha-Cha while I await for Joe Landini’s fundraiser to begin at the Shotwell Studio. Change a habit a day I tell myself. New fried potatoes and an Anderson Boont Amber. No change there. Then another Boont. I was following the New England Tennessee game on the overhead monitor. It’s a point of focus. What’s the temperature there? Walter had promised that it would be below zero. “Fahrenheit or Centigrade”, I had asked. “Kelvin” he replied. Well the receiver’s hands do not shatter upon his grabbing that pass, so, so much for Walter’s creditability. NE is ahead 14 to 7.

It will be another fifteen minutes before I need to head to Shotwell. Whatever happened to Mary the little Japanese bartender, that feisty little painter of transvestites and fire. Did she return to Italy. No, her name was not Mary. now was it - that was just a convenient place holder because… because, I couldn’t recall her real name at the moment. No, it is Linda. I can do that when writing – reserve a name that I can not remember with another – but not when conducting a conversation.

“So, Rosalie, are you pregnant “, I asked? “No, just getting portly…Would you have felt bad if you asked a woman if she were pregnant and she said no?” she asked. This is one of those trick questions like “Do I look fat?,” I thought. I contemplated an answer for what seemed like thirty second but was probable only three. I wanted to say “No” but didn’t. And before I made a stupid reply, she said, “Yes, I am”. “Congratulations”, I told her. “This will be your second, right? And by the way, just for the record, I didn’t ask the first time that I noticed” “Due in April” she replied.

There’s two fifty nine left into the second quarter. At half time I shall head towards Shotwell, which is only three blocks away

Ah, a coffee colored white woman with yards of blond dreads. I was just then imagining this little lady in her final term with swollen breasts and belly. It was about as fecund (like a prehistoric figurine) an image as I was possible of conceiving on only two beers. She was just slightly pregnant (is this today’s secret word – will Groucho’s duck descend upon me here and now?). She was bearing four pitchers of Sangria towards the back room. And Bad Bad Leona Brown with her soiled light green bra with spaghetti straps, her olive skin and her extended belly was not even in the same league with my new goddess.

“We need more masculine names” says Walter. “Then Walter and Fred?” asks Linda. “Yeah - like oh say, Vin Diesel” he says. “And I have chosen ‘Mack Torque’ because it sound like a truck” he announced. Walter always spends his late nights when he can’t sleep thinking out these types of concerns and comes into the coffee shop the next morning with his script in hand “And I’ll take Freightliner” I pronounce. “Uh, that’s it, ‘Steve Freightliner’ that your new name” Mack Torque proclaims.

‘Gauchisme’: the collective beliefs of the French Left that formed after May 1968 - Maoists, anarchist tendencies, and sometimes incorporating the Trotskyist groups. “I participate, you participate, we participate, he profits” - Ecole des Beaux Arts Poster - 1968

With a pocket full of quarters I venture forth to do my laundry. With a stripped bare bed and a dwindling stack of underwear, I announce, “this is Sunday morning at last!”.

Dave asks “Will that become a book?, pointing to this notebook. “I have no idea”, I reply. “That’s like planning your child’s career before it has been conceived. If it takes a life of its own then I will nurture it. If it is not a book that results, it will be something. It is something now, is it not?” The ground seems fertile enough, and hence this blog. And when people ask, “Are you published”, I can now reply, “In a manner of speaking, yes!” But it isn’t a book is it? No, thank God! And I haven’t killed any trees today. See I’m just as green as Al Gore is, only my trees are not virtual trees.