I miss the small town parade with kids on tricycles with streamers of crepe paper and plyaing cards clothes pined to the the spokes to make noise- those have been 'expertised' away too - having been turned into floats sponsored by the recreational equipment manufactures and the local real estate industry (well maybe not those guys this summer).
I say it's time for a revolution - a man must take his life back and line the experts up against the wall - if a man is to be a man. Bang, bang, bang! For every new 'industry' there is a little less of a man left. Fool, it's not the government that is on your back, it's your neighbor, the businessman. Our most insidious institutions are the private institutions. What about the government! Forget the government - they are incompentent - nothing to worry about from them.
Yes, up against the wall all you motherfuckers!
Purveyors of bar-b-que sauce
Pyrotechnical technicians
And you too real estate lady
There is a difference between an event viewed statistically, as it transpired among people who are absorbed into a historical continuum, and the same event taken personally, as a unique and irreversible transformation in one’s singular life… Since history always posits ‘more’ time, backward and forward, in this respect it is ‘less’ serous than a single, non-extendable life – John Updike
WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT SARAH
We didn’t talk (Frank Costello and Lillian Hellman)
Much and only that once about Sarah
Lillian bought him a book
On Regency-Empire furniture at his request
Starting with ‘The Artichoke King’ and then Lucky Luciano
Louisana’s slot machines giving tithe to Huey
Religion and crime have somethings in common
Making it to the top of the Luciano/Genovese crime family
Organized crime was just another business
Didn’t need narcotics and prostitution
Lillian refused the five hundred dollar tip
“I guess I wouldn’t take it either, but then you and I
Are a lot alike, he said
Sarah had said she had been at Macpherson’s place. Said he Shot in self-defense. Her testimony she claimed saved him
She had lost her husband and custody of her son
Polo players don’t like that kind of scandal
A third-rate runner, Costelled said. “And I ain’t no authority
On what society girls think, but his face was all over
Slashed form years of prison fights”“But the Purple Penthouse?” Lillian asked
Dash and her had been trying to raise money
To bribe some Spanish Republicans off
Of the International Bridge
Costello peeled off Five-Thousand, “Friends of your
Friends are friends of mine” She sent it
To Marraux marked ‘anon.’
Lilian saw Sarah in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel
She said that she never saw her again
But it would have been a hard guess as to who and
Who had not died with a Teddy Bear
It was all junk, Lillian opined and said goodbye
Nothing of the past, nothing about Sarah was said
A woman very high in museum circles later said something
About Sarah having died in Italy
But only Proust was ever really really sure of it all
Two degrees of separation
Better than Kevin Bacon
More than ever, I’ve come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change – Kathleen Norris
Short change
Small change
Change of pace
Change lanes
Change places
At the exchange
Exchange value
Exchange vows
Gutenbergian societies already know: sex like eating, has a limit; a point of saturation can be reached and all the screwing in the world will not rattle bank foundations or bring down the walls of the Pentagon… Puritanism has overstated the gravity of the matter – John Updike
The whole art industry, even if carried to the extreme and exercised in every way for the sake of works themselves, extends only to the object-being of the works –Martin Heidegger
The statue of a god is only art so long as the stone actually retains its god
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future – Kathleen Norris
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From the Journals (#1 – 1/2/2004 – San Francisco, California)
Back to the coffee shop (the Royal Ground – Fillmore & California) this morning - Walter has made another New Year’s resolution – which he tells me is to tell a whopper a day. I say - How is that any different than last year. And he is already trying to wiggle out of even this little commitment - if I tell the same whopper on successive days to different people will I be sticking to my resolution. No problem, I tell him - Your problem is going to be keeping it to only one lie a day.
It was raining today as I caught the #1 California to the Embarcadero Center. The buses weaved between cars parking, unparking and waiting to park in China town. Headed downtown to see Monster I get to the theater at 11:45 – I gave the kid a twenty and got- two fives and three ones given back in change. I am engineering my departure from the working life –there’s no going back now – I have set the process in motion – but I still have my doubts about the wisdom of all of this. I still have not accepted the finality of what I have done. I am using up vacation time and next week will have to put in some face time.
The Latte Express has six flavored coffees
At Van Ness “Stinky” got on. Someone had scrubbed him clean and put him in fresh for the holidays – put still my nose could detect a reek – fermented shit and mingled sweat has a distinctly pungent smell – The Chinese lady in red sitting next to me was trying hard not to smell him either. She was no longer concerned about my sanity. It is very hard not too – when you try hard not to.
A lady got on to an omnibus on which Ben Johnson was riding. After a few minutes she says to him “Sir, you smell.” “No”, says Ben Johnson, “I reek you smell”. All duly recorded by Boswell.
The lady looked like she was meditating and I don’t know if “Stinky” really reeked but I could imagine that he did and that was the same thing. I got off at my stop and walked the block home, got my mail, put it next to the computer and sat down and wrote this. So I ask myself again, why is Arleen Wurnos the twenty first century’s first anti heroin? Is Sadam our first anti Hero?
Things that I decide I need to have - cell phone, lap top, internet connection and a digital camera (now I have them all – I need to make a new list, now)
Darkness is imminent, I’m still here at the Royal Ground. I just read this journal from the “Flaneur of Umbrellas up to this page. People enter and people leave - most of them are wearing sweaters (60%); the rest have on jackets (30% ), or like myself are in short sleeves (10%).
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